Douglas Trumbull, VFX Pioneer on ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘Close Encounters’ and ‘Star Trek,’ Dies at 79
thewrap.comFacebook post. He died Monday night following a two-year battle with cancer, a brain tumor and a stroke. “He was an absolute genius and a wizard and his contributions to the film and special effects industry will live on for decades and beyond,” Amy Trumble wrote. “My sister Andromed and I got to see him on Saturday and tell him that he love him and we got to tell him to enjoy and embrace his journey into the Great Beyond.
I love you Daddy, I sure will miss you!”Trumbull is often considered one of the early wizards of movie visual effects, pioneering the look of futuristic computer screens through animation in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” and helping to create the gloomy, dystopian cityscape of Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner.” Some of his other credits include “The Andromeda Strain,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and more recently “The Tree of Life” and “The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot.” He also directed several features that were championed for their VFX, including “Silent Running” (1972) and “Brainstorm” (1983).
The son of Donald Trumbull, who worked on the visual effects on the masterpiece “The Wizard of Oz,” Douglas Trumbull started his career at Graphic Works Films in Los Angeles and produced an animated short film called “To the Moon and Beyond” that caught the attention of Kubrick.
The film was produced for the 1964/1965 World’s Fair in New York City and was designed to show the Earth and the full universe zoomed all the way out and then all the way back in on an atomic scale.
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