Douglas Trumbull
From Open Encyclopedia
Douglas Trumbull (born April 8, 1942) is a film director and special effects supervisor.
Trumbull's early work with NASA and the science film maker Con Pederson caught the attention of Stanley Kubrick who employed him to work on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull's outstanding contribution to the film was the stargate sequence which used a revolutionary camera design (see Slit-scan photography).
In 1971, Trumbull directed the film Silent Running which utilised a number of unused special effects techniques developed for 2001. Silent Running was a critical success, but a flop at the box office ostensibly due to poor advertising. During the rest of the early 1970s, Trumbull worked on a number of film projects that failed to get backing.
In 1975 Trumbull turned down the offer to provide the effects for George Lucas' Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope but in 1978 contributed effects to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In 1981 Trumbull directed the special effects for the film Blade Runner.
In 1983 Trumbull finally got to direct a second major film, Brainstorm. The film was a showcase for a new film projection system called "Showscan", but the film was overshadowed by the death of Natalie Wood during production. Since that time, Trumbull has concentrated on developing technology for the exhibition industry and theme-park rides.
Trumbull today is held in reverence as a pioneer of the optical and digital effects industry. He has been nominated for Academy Awards on five occasions and has received a life-time achievement Oscar. The majority of the completed cinema projects that Trumbull has been associated with have come to be recognised as classics, gaining audiences over time. His most conspicuous cinematic flop, Brainstorm, predicts the fascination of virtual reality while Silent Running reflected the emerging ecology movement of the early 1970s, and is today regarded as a science fiction classic.
