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Douglas Trumbull
Douglas Trumbull is the son of an artist and an engineer. Not long after Trumbull dropped out of junior college in California to work in movies, Stanley Kubrick hired the 23-year-old to work with the special effects team for 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Trumbull’s most striking work came a decade later on the Steven Spielberg 1978 alien-visitation epic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind," in many ways, a far more challenging assignment. We had to be down on earth with totally believable illusions, as Trumbull told a newspaper interviewer. Putting a UFO on screen is like photographing God.
Though the film’s climax is set at Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, the set was actually created in a massive converted blimp hangar in Alabama. Inside, Trumbull built the most massive movie set at that time, including a 100-foot-tall screen for projecting backgrounds. Trumbull’s crew built model UFOs powered by electrical motors that allowed them to move in 12 different ways at once, and flew them on horizontal and vertical tracks in a blacked-out room filled with smoke. To create Close Encounters ethereal look, Trumbull used technical trickery to manipulate the image of light on film, creating the illusion of an object where none existed.
After Close Encounters, Trumbull helped create the post-industrial urban decay of director Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner. But his real dream was to change the technology of cinema itself, with a new format called Showscan. Trumbull wanted to shoot and project movies at 60 frames per second rather than the 24 frames that had been standard since the advent of the "talkies," with a quantum leap in depth, clarity and vividness. His effort to make the film Brainstorm in the new format was thwarted, and the picture itself was crippled by studio infighting and the accidental death of one of its stars, Natalie Wood.
Trumbull ultimately quit Hollywood and moved to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, where he embarked upon a new career creating virtual-reality effects for amusement park rides. However, he told a newspaper interviewer that he’s tinkering with a virtual set technology, an invention that could change the future of movie special effects. Today, many movie shots involve blue-screening," or shooting actors in a studio against a neutral backdrop and then merging the footage with a location background in post-production. Virtual set techology would save money and time and create more vivid effects by inserting live actors into an illusory, 3-D set made by computer graphics.
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Filmography
This still from, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" shows the "Mothership" fully lit as it descends from the heavens for the films climax.
 Trumbull's brilliant photography of a passenger shuttle docking with this space station during the "space ballet" sequence of "2001: A Space Odyssey," produced footage that looked as though it were shot on location in space.
Douglas Trumbull hard at work as the visual effects coordinator on "Close Encounters of the Third kind."
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