The special effects director Douglas Trumbull, famous for his participation in 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick (1968), Dating of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg (1978) or blade runner by Ridley Scott (1982), died Tuesday at the age of 79, his daughter announced.
Douglas Trumbull is a child of the ball: born in 1947 he is the son of a visual effects operator who took part in the Wizard of Oz by Victor Fleming in 1939. Working for NASA in the design of films on the agency’s space programs, he was noticed by Stanley Kubrick who called on him to produce the special effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hired for six months, he will remain four years on this achievement. His piece of bravery for the film is the “slit-scan“, a technique for scrolling in an infinite perspective of psychedelic forms, which made it possible to visualize the passage of the “stargate” in the last part of Kubrick’s masterpiece.
The success of the film, and his immediate recognition as a master of special effects, allowed him to release his first feature film in 1971, an ecological “space opera”, SilentRunning with Bruce Dern, whose theme song is performed by Joan Baez.
At the end of the 1970s, science fiction experienced an unprecedented vogue under the impetus of Star Wars in 1977. If he does not participate in the film, he is alongside Steven Spielberg for Encounters of the third kind in 1978 for which he designs the most beautiful extraterrestrial spaceship ever shown in cinema, whose final appearance constitutes the highlight of the film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNOwfa65gjU
He then continues on star trek the movie by Robert Wise (1979), the first adaptation to the cinema of the famous American TV series born in 1966. His collaboration with designer Syd Mead resulted in the creation of a gigantic spatial nave with architectural, floral and organic reminiscences of unprecedented beauty . His collaboration with Syd Mead continued in 1982 on blade runner by Ridley Scott, one of his greatest deeds.
He is finally at the origin of the magnificent special effects of tree of life by Terence Malick, notably in his spatial and cellular views on the origin of life on Earth which constitute the first part of the film.
Douglas Trumbull directed a second film after SilentRunning, Brainstorm (1983) with Christopher Walken, Nathalie Wood and Louise Fletcher. The screenplay is based on the invention by two scientists of a kind of video recorder allowing the emotions and sensations of the five senses to be recorded on magnetic tape. The shooting was bereaved by the death of Nathalie Wood in circumstances still unclear today.
Passionate about new image technologies, Douglas Trumbull has worked all his life in this direction. He has thus directed several short films for amusement parks in unpublished formats for Universal Studio (Back to the future) Where Star Tours for Disneyland. A technical as well as an aesthetic genius, Douglas Trumbull leaves behind him an incomparable body of work in his field, as the father of modern special effects.