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Stan Winston
The genre of science fiction cinema would have been a lot less exciting, if Stan Winston had stuck to his original major of predentistry at the University of Virginia. Fortunately, Winston -- who, at age 13, shot his first monster movie with a Super-8 camera, using his pet German Shepherd as a canine vampire -- soon gravitated back to his first love, sci-fi, horror and fantasy films. After graduating with a double major in drama and fine arts, Winston moved to Hollywood. He got a job in the makeup department at Walt Disney, and later worked with special-effects guru Rick Baker to make actress Cicely Tyson look 90 years old in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Baker and Winston won an Emmy award for their efforts.
Winston then moved over to the big screen, and metamorphosed from a makeup specialist to an all-around special effects virtuoso. His first big breakthrough was the 1984 film The Terminator. Instead of relying on miniatures and stop-motion photography to depict the robotic machinery within Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, Winston and director James Cameron got an ambitious notion. They created a six-foot-tall Fiberglass puppet, with electronically-controlled, cable and rod-actuated limbs. The effect was so startlingly vivid that when Winston and Cameron collaborated on the 1986 film Aliens, Winston created an even more ambitious mechanical monster, a 14-foot-tall, 20-foot-long alien queen, whose weight was supported by a crane arm discreetly attached to her back. The creature was big enough to house two actors, who manipulated its limbs.
Winston’s combined mastery of lightweight materials and electronics enabled Hollywood monsters to live large instead of in miniature, and freed directors from the constraints of stop-action photography, so that scenes seemed more terrifyingly real. He went on to win Academy Awards in both makeup and visual effects for a third Cameron film, Terminator 2 Judgment Day (1991). This time, he pulled off yet another, even more edgy feat merging full-size mechanical and electronic puppets with state-of-the-art computer graphics. Even so, the movie’s most bizarre moments the twists and reshaping of T-1000, the liquid-metal android assassin were created primarily with complex radio-controlled contraptions of foam rubber, plastic and springs, rather than on a computer screen.
Winston outdid himself yet again in the Steven Spielberg film Jurassic Park (1993) by creating an entire menagerie of prehistoric giants, including a 20-foot-tall, 9,000-pound mechanized Tyrannosaurus rex, so realistic that even its pupils could dilate upon command. Winston’s creatures have become so sophisticated that they take on a personality of their own on the screen. I don't want to do special effects, he told an interviewer in 1997. I want to create characters for film."
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Filmography
Though "Jurassic park" was a landmark film for computer generated effects, some shots just couldn't be done without a physical dinosaur. This massive, 4 ton mechanized T-Rex is so sophisticated that even it's pupils dilate.
For the movie "Aliens" Winston built a 20ft long, mechanized alien queen that required several "puppeteers" to operate.
Stan Winston wears his director's hat on the set of his film, "Pumpkinhead"
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