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Trumbull Tribute By Lee Gaskins.  This was done when Lee was a student. Since then, he has greatly improved!  Please visit his website  http://lgaskins.homestead.com/
Copyright © 1987 Lee Gaskins.  Used with permission.

Douglas Trumbull was born in Los Angeles, California. His father, Mr. Donald Trumbull (1909 - 2004), was the winner of two Scientific and Technical Achievement Oscars, and honored with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers Fujifilm Gold Medal Award for outstanding achievement in image origination. One of his first jobs was as special effects rigger on The Wizard of Oz.

 

"One of the first movie experiences I remember really vividly was The Wizard of Oz. I was very fortunate that I even knew at that time that my father had worked on the Wizard of Oz. He was a very young man when he began to work in the movie industry as well. He worked in the grip department of the special effects, holding a fishing rod with a line holding up the Lion's tail. He was also one of the guys inside the rubber trees grabbing apples. And helping rig the flying monkeys, and things like that." 1

 

Professionally, Douglas Trumbull started out as a technical illustrator at Graphic Films, working on documentary films about NASA and the Air Force.

 

“I did some obscure films for the Air Force about the space program and then there was this one film about the Apollo program that was kind of interesting. I was painting lunar modules and lunar surfaces and the vertical assembly building on Saturn 5 rockets and animated this space stuff. And then Graphic Films got a couple of contracts to do films for the New York World's Fair in '64. It was a two year fair in 1964 and 65, and one of them was this dome thing called To The Moon And Beyond, which was kind of a Powers of Ten movie. It went from the "Big Bang" to inside an atom in ten minutes.” 2

 

2001

 

It was at the World’s Fair where the Graphic Films feature, Journey Beyond The Stars, was seen by director Stanley Kubrick, that got Mr. Trumbull hired as a special effects supervisor on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001, released in 1968, is based on Arthur C. Clarke’s book, and written by Kubrick and Clarke. 2001 deals with themes of human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and extraterrestrial life. The film is notable for its scientific realism, pioneering use of special effects, and reliance upon ambiguous yet provocative imagery and sound in place of traditional techniques of narrative cinema. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning one (for visual effects), and won the Kansas City Film Critics Circle awards for Best Director and Best Film of 1968.

 

What was the greatest technical challenge of working on 2001?

"The biggest challenge, and the most satisfying for me, was the Star Gate sequence [in which astronaut Dave Bowman is transported,
via the monolith, into an alternate universe]. It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets - all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before."

 

If you could do it over again with the technology you have now, would your approach to that sequence be different?

"Clearly, if we'd had the kind of computer graphics capability then that we have now, the Star Gate sequence would be much more complex than flat planes of light and color. It probably would have gotten into a lot of weird geometries, and turns, and shifts of angle. I just had a straight track and some straight pieces of glass. The technology of the time dictated the way things looked." 3.

Star Gate sequence from 2001.

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