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Special Effects Wizard Stan Winston Dead At 62
Dusty101 writes "Special effects maestro Stan Winston has died at the age of 62. Winston was responsible for many of the physical special effects in films such as The Terminator, Jurassic Park, Edward Scissorhands, and Iron Man. Winston died on Sunday, June 15, 2008, after a seven-year struggle with multiple myeloma."
Here's to the guy who scared the crap out of me while simultaneously inspiring me in so many ways as a child.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
My Mom was diagnosed with it in November and was gone by March and it went down exactly as you described. While she was certainly on the short end of the scale, 7 years is a long fight with this killer. (My Mom was 62 as well)
One off topic thing that I learned. If you have a loved one with something like this ask the hard questions of your Doctor. They usually wont tell you how much time they think is left unless you drill down. Don't settle for a general awnser. I was told 6 months at one point and she was gone the next week. I know they can't give you an exact date, but they do know more then they are telling you.
I remember a cel coming out after Mel Blanc's death of a single microphone with many of the characters he voiced standing around mourning him.
Maybe something similar could be done for Winston.
From everything I've read about him, he was somebody that was generous, helpful and incredibly creative.
He will be missed,
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I worked in visual and make up effects for 25 years before I moved on. I knew Stan somewhat but what's scary is of the people I know 62 is a ripe old age to die at in the effects industry. Of the people I've known well and close friends most haven't made it out of their early 50s and I've known people that died as young as 28 and large numbers in their 30s and 40s. Most were from cancer, heart, liver damage or related diseases. Skin cancer is a rarer one for effects people because of long hours in dark shops but you can also be stuck out in the sun from dawn to dark day after day so I'm sure that's what got him from being on set. Hardly the only profession with that but it's the chemical exposure that adds to conditions like that. Bad food, long hours and stress are also contributing factors. Other careers are famous for danger but old school effects people tend to go more quietly unless they die in an accident on set, I've known several people that died that way. If you add in death by job related illness it's probably among the worst and it's not considered by most to be that dangerous. Most effects work is on computer these days so the risk is fading but for my generation back through Stan's it's been a rough way to make a living. All the great effects films of the past came at a price and not always from dead stuntmen, I've known a few of those that didn't make it as well.
I told my friends about Stan yesterday. And my friends are big sci-fi people. They had no clue who this man was, nor did they care. But the thing was, once I told them what movies he worked on, what creatures he created, they were amazed.
Before CGI, this was the guy to go to for special effects and creature creation. In my opinion, he had the privilege to live the high point of traditional movie special effects, and had the honor of working on the film that ushered in CGI(Jurassic Park). And the thing about Jurassic Park, this movie combined both the classic approach and a modern approach seamlessly.
Watching the interview on the JP DVD you can tell how excited he was to work on that project. The time he took with ILM to make sure a shot that had the actual built dinosaur and the CGI created worked seamlessly, shot to shot. To this day I load up the T-Rex attack scene and ask people to pull out the CGI shot and the non-CGI shot. Barely anyone can tell difference. Yet, I load up "i-Robot" and people just laugh at the compositing.
Last week I watched "Aliens", first time I have ever seen the film. I was blown away. The detailed model work was amazing. This was all pre-cgi also. The thing with Stan Winston, he knew CGI was the new hollywood tool, but just like Phil Tippett, he also knew his skills were not gone. There was still room for traditional effects.
He will be missed, and as more and more films use less and less traditional special effects. You can always look back and watch films like Aliens, Predator, Terminator, and tell your kids this is how they did it before we had computers. And one of the masters of the pre-computer era was Stan Winston.
"Aliens", for which Stan won his first Oscar, is the first movie mentioned in the first sentence of the Wired article linked to in the summary. All the other news sources I've read, BBC News, Los Angeles Times, NY Times et al, mention "Aliens" prominently. And you've got good taste: "Aliens" is also among my all time favorite films. I'm deeply saddened by his passing. I remember seeing an interview with him about 10 years ago, during which he took the interviewer on a tour of his vast workshops, and apart from the fascinating and voluminous collection stored there, the thing that struck me most about Stan was his incredibly playful sense of humor. I laughed out loud at his clowning around, and couldn't help thinking that he would have been a great deal of fun to work with. He will be sorely missed.
The saddest part of the deaths of recent people from Tim Russet to Cyd Charisse is that they were entirely unnecessary. We have the cryonics preservation technology to ensure that although they may be dead from a technical standpoint -- viewing them as permanently dead is open to question. We need a restructuring of how we think about "death" and it probably requires re-educating every physician in the country.
You are not "dead" until all the information in your body has been converted to an unrecoverable state.