The Paper's reporter Cheng Xiaojun
This month, the news of the death of Douglas Trumbull and Robert Blalack, two Hollywood film special effects masters, came out one after another, which immediately strangled the industry. It can be said that from "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Star Wars" to "Blade Runner", the success of many science fiction classics in the history of cinema is inseparable from the ingenuity of these two special effects masters. More importantly, in the era in which they were active, computer CG special effects had not yet been born, and the special effects in film and television works relied on real artificial realizations, and the requirements for creativity and hands-on ability were by no means comparable to the CG special effects that relied on artificial intelligence to fight the world.
Douglas Trumbull
Trumbull: Special effects artists who don't want to be directors are not good prophets
On Feb. 7, Douglas Trumbull's daughter confirmed her father's death on personal social media. Trumbull, who has been in the industry for more than fifty years, is a three-time Oscar-nominated special effects artist for Contact of the Third Kind, Star Trek 1: Infinite Space, and Blade Runner.
He collapsed from a stroke two years ago, and was later diagnosed with a brain tumor, and although he underwent aggressive treatment, he was still due to multiple complications caused by cancer and could not wait for his eightieth birthday.
Douglas Trumbull was born in Los Angeles on April 8, 1942. His father, Donald Trump, was one of Hollywood's first-generation film special effects artists, most famously known for "The Wizard of Oz," released in 1939. Little Trumbull has been hearing about it since he was a child, and it is also natural to embark on the road of film special effects. In his early twenties, he was picked up by a production company in the 1960s and asked him to work on a sci-fi short film called To the Moon and Beyond. At the 1964 World Expo in New York, the short film was looped through the U.S. Bureau of Tourism and Transportation's pavilion, successfully conquering the famous director Stanley Kubrick, who was also in the audience.
It didn't take long for Kubrick to hire Trumbull to help produce the sci-fi blockbuster 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was being filmed. When he first arrived, the director gave Trumbull a relatively simple task: he was responsible for making various computer display screens on the Spacecraft Discovery. Trumbull found thousands of pages of content from scientific American magazine, copied them all, and then remade them, resulting in a large number of computer display screens in the film.
As the film progressed, Trumbull's importance gradually became apparent, and he was able to participate in the special effects production of several of the film's highlights. In particular, the passage called "Stargate" near the end of the film now seems to be a somewhat pediatric kaleidoscopic light and shadow change scene, but in the year when computer special effects were not yet born, they were all created out of thin air through various light changes and photographic techniques through a set of rotating steel plates and backlit glass plates made by Trumbull. It is said that the special effects of this "stargate" alone were produced for half a year.
Various computer display screens on Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey were created by Trumbull.
However, after the release of "2001: A Space Odyssey", something unpleasant happened between Trumbull and Kubrick. On the film's credits, four people, along with him, are labeled "Special Cinematography Supervisors," while Kubrick is labeled "Special Cinematography Design and Director." At the 1969 Oscars, the film received four nominations, and only this one was the Best Special Effects Award, and the winner was Kubrick himself.
In this regard, the young and vigorous Trumbull at that time was quite dissatisfied, believing that Kubrick was greedy and believed that he and several of his colleagues were more qualified to obtain small gold men. By the 1980s, this contradiction between the two was thoroughly publicized, and it had reached the point of being known in the streets. Until Kubrick's sudden death in 1999, neither of them was able to fully reconcile, which made Trumbull, who took the initiative to attend Kubrick's funeral, deeply regretful.
In fact, the controversy is controversy, but when Trumbull has been interviewed by various media over the years, he has never denied the great influence that Kubrick has given him, and looking back, it was the experience of working for "2001 Space Odyssey" that gave him the idea of becoming a director and making films.
After returning to Hollywood, Trumbull founded a special effects company, bid for special effects engineering for The Andromeda Strain (1971), and successfully conquered director Robert Wise and established himself in the industry. In response, he persuaded Universal to invest in his directorial debut, Silent Running. However, for this newcomer director, Universal Pictures behaved quite "slamming the door", not only gave the production budget only a mere $1 million, but also did not do any publicity before the release of the film, just want to see if purely relying on the audience's reputation can make this film a box office success.
"The Universe Is Quiet" unsurprisingly suffered box office Waterloo. But today, this environmentally-themed science fiction film has become like a prophecy, becoming one of the most neglected classics in the history of film in the minds of many science fiction fans.
Trumbull's directorial debut, The Universe Is Quiet, foresees the environmental protection problems that humanity will face in the future.
After a period of career downturn, Trumbull took another turn in his career in 1975. At the time, director Spielberg was preparing for a new film, "Contact of the Third Kind," and while doing his homework in advance, he re-watched Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and strongly realized that he had to hire Trumbull to help with the special effects in order for "Contact of the Third Kind" to be successful. To this end, Spielberg even paid a "secondment fee" to Paramount Pictures, Trumbull's then-owner.
In "Contact of the Third Kind", Trumbull pioneered the use of so-called "motion control" technology, and achieved amazing visual effects in the scene of an alien spaceship flying through the clouds to Earth, which also earned him his first Oscar nomination.
I still have to go out of my way to reiterate that this is in an era when computer CG special effects have not yet been widely used in Hollywood movies, and the picture of the cascading clouds in the film is the ceiling of the special effects technology at that time. And that kind of effect of seeing the sun, even in nature, can be described as a thousand years of rare encounters, want to rely purely on fate to capture with the lens, is simply an impossible task.
Trumbull came up with the idea of finding a giant transparent fish tank filled with fresh and salt water and pouring white tempera paints into the water to create a wonderful cloud-changing effect. In addition, the sign language used by the scientist played by French director Truffaut to communicate with aliens in the film is said to be the solution recommended by Trumbull to director Spielberg.
Trumbull completes the footage of the alien spacecraft coming to Earth through the clouds in The Third Kind of Contact in the fish tank.
Around the same time as Contact of the Third Kind was about to be filmed, Trumbull received a new job offer: Paramount wanted him to work on the special effects for Star Trek 1: Infinite Space. The film is derived from the science fiction series of the same name in the 1960s, the mass base is very strong, very popular with the outside world, the director is looking for Robert Wise, who has worked with Trumbull. However, in order to complete the final work of "Contact of the Third Kind", he refused the offer. In desperation, Paramount switched to a special effects team led by animator Robert Abel, but this move buried the bane.
After star trek 1: Infinite Space was filmed for a year, director Wise was furious to find that the special effects work that cost millions of dollars did not completely match his imagination of the film. In February 1979, Paramount was forced to terminate the contract with the film's original special effects team, and Trumbull was ordered to rush to the rescue.
After entering the crew, Trumbull found that all the special effects screens completed by the original team could not be used at all, and they could only be torn down and started from scratch. However, the film's Schedule for December of that year has long been set, and if the prescribed time cannot be completed, the film company will have to compensate the theater for a large amount of money. Forced to be helpless, Trumbull could only use the method of three shifts: three groups of special effects teams rotated 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and finally completed all the special effects of the film in the specified half a year.
Carefully calculated, the special effects workload of Star Trek 1: Infinite Space is equivalent to the sum of the two sci-fi blockbusters of Star Wars: A New Hope and Contact of the Third Kind! The scene of the nearly five-minute "Enterprise" appearance in the film and the scene of Spock flying alone into the depths of the universe did leave an indelible impression on the audience at that time. At the 1980 Oscars, he hit the little golden man for the second time with this film, but he encountered the epoch-making science fiction giant "Alien", and the result was convincing.
The screen of the "Enterprise" in Star Trek 1: Infinite Space.
In 1981, he served as the special effects supervisor of the film Blade Runner, designing special effects that projected various futuristic images directly on airships and skyscrapers, leading the way and receiving a nomination for the 1983 Oscar for Best Special Effects, only to lose to the special effects team behind the film "E.T. Aliens".
Trumbull designed futuristic graphics for Blade Runner.
Trumbull, tired of making wedding dresses for others, began to prepare for his second directorial work, Brainstorm, halfway through the filming of Blade Runner. Like its environmentally-themed debut, The Universe Is Quiet, Storm of the Cutting Edge is also surprisingly predictive. The brainwave sharing technology, which is the core of the film's story, is almost completely equivalent to today's VR virtual reality technology. Trumbull also developed a 70mm camera system, Showscan, for special effects shooting, but the cinema was reluctant to pay for the supporting projection equipment to show the film and could not really use it.
Trumbull's second directorial work, Storm of The Cutting Edge, foresaw the birth of VR.
To make matters worse, halfway through the film, the film's heroine Natalie Wood died mysteriously during a trip, leading to the investor MGM Pictures almost deciding to scrap the entire filming work. Relying on The Passion of Trumbull, "The Great Storm of The Cutting Edge" was finally released after two years of delay, but it was dragged down by the negative news of the unexpected death of the heroine, and the box office performance was even worse than that of "The Universe Is Quiet", which also made Trumbull determined to say goodbye to the film world.
In the decades since, the special effects genius has devoted all of his creative passion to the development and design of Universal Studios' Back to the Future immersive experience project, and in 1993 won the Science and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for that Showscan camera system.
In 2010, after nearly thirty years of leaving the film industry, Trumbull finally re-emerged from the mountain under the deep emotional inspiration of the famous director Terrance Malik to serve as a special effects consultant for "Tree of Life". And the ten-minute-long passage he designed for the film can be described as a collection of his life's work in one battle, giving a deep spiritual impact to the film audience in the new era.
The passage from the origin of life in The Tree of Life.
In 2012, Trump, who failed to win the Oscars three times, won the Gordon Sawyer Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a lifetime achievement award set by the Oscars to recognize technical talent, representing the ultimate achievement of a generation of Hollywood special effects masters.
Robert Braleck
Braleck: The founder of Industrial Light and Magic
Back in 1978, when Trumbull was first nominated for an Oscar for Contact Of the Third, only two films competed for best special effects that year, and in the end, Spielberg's Contact of the Third category lost to George Lucas's Star Wars: A New Hope, and among the five-person special effects team that won the little golden man for the latter was Robert Braleck, another special effects wizard who died this month. On the same day as Trumbull's death, the U.S. media also reported that Braleck, 73, had died of illness on February 2.
Star Wars: A New Hope won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects that year over Contact of the Third Category.
Born in Panama on December 9, 1948, Braleck won an Emmy Award for television in 1983 for the 100 million-dollar nuclear explosive TELEVISION movie "The Day After".
Braleck won an Emmy for the TV movie After the Holocaust.
When Lucas first filmed Star Wars: A New Hope, he was also said to have made an offer to the long-established Douglas Trumbull, but the latter had already begun to prepare for the special effects work for Contact of the Third Kind, so he instead recommended john Dykstra and Robert Braleck, his right-hand men who had served under him for many years.
With the hit of the "Star Wars" series of movies, Industrial Light and Magic, with Dixstra and Bralek as the backbone, quickly grew from scratch. Recalling the experience years later, Braleck said it was like "jumping out of a plane with an unslit parachute."
In the decades of serving Hollywood, Braleck has led special effects work on many well-known American films and televisions, including the science fiction film Altered States (1980), the horror film Wolfen (1981), RoboCop, and the famous Popular Science Show Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.
Editor-in-charge: Cheng Yu