Visual effects legend Douglas Trumbull has died at the age of 79.
Best known for his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and Close Encounters, Trumbull died on February 7, 2022, in Albany, New York following a two-year battle with cancer, a brain tumor, and a stroke.
His daughter Amy announced his death via Facebook.
“My sister Andromeda and I got to see him on Saturday and tell him that we love him and we got to tell him to enjoy and embrace his journey into the Great Beyond,” she said. “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.”
Trumbull was also known for his visual effects on Silent Running, The Andromeda Strain, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
He was originally hired by Stanley Kubrik to create the visual effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey after Kubrik saw a documentary he worked on for the 1964 World’s Fair, titled To The Moon and Beyond.
Trumbull was initially given the task of creating the computer displays seen throughout Discovery One – the ship seen in the film. But his responsibilities grew throughout the film’s production.
By the end, he was one of four visual effects supervisors on the ground-breaking movie, having developed and created the film’s iconic Star Gate.
After that, Trumbull worked on a string of other classic sci-fi properties, including Blade Runner.
“One of the things that appealed to me about the project was that it was NOT a space movie,” he once told Cinefex Magazine. “I'm just real tired of doing spaceships against star backgrounds.”
As well as his visual effects work, Trumbull also pioneered several filmmaking techniques, inventing and patenting dozens of film tools that he used for motion-control photography, miniature compositing, and more. He also created the Universal Studios attraction, Back to the Future: The Ride.
Back in 2012, Trumbull won the Academy’s Gordon E. Sawyer Award, which is given to “an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry.”
He also shared an Academy Scientific and Engineering Award in 1993 for the concept behind the CP-65 Showscan Camera System for 65mm motion-picture photography.
Later in life, Trumbull worked on cinematic innovations at his home in Massachusetts, with a brief return to effects work for Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life.
All of us at IGN offer our condolences to Trumbull’s family and friends.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
(Photo by Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images)