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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."
The man was truly gifted at his profession, one movie not mentioned and among my all time favorites is "Aliens" the James Cameron follow up to Alien.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
Chances are he probably died from an infection(not actually the cancer). Multiple myeloma in late stages heavily suppress all bone marrow tissue(that means your red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets.) People with Multiple myeloma over-produc non-functional antibody side chains from malignant plasma cells. This impairs immune response and causes renal failure, making them extra susceptible to infections(more so than other cancers).
i am very disapointed by the lack of tact in a lot of these posts. I know this is slashdot, but a man died after fighting with a killer for 7 long years. if you are going to make a crude comment here, at least make it +5 funny, not the -1 stupid i have been seeing so far.
Stan, you will be missed.
Your skill and imagination were an inspiration to me through the years.
-I only code in BASIC.-
I had just watched Aliens over the weekend after not having seen it for awhile (and recently suffering though the AVP:R). It was amazing at how much better the movie was since it didn't dump crappy CGI monsters into it. The Winston team worked hard to make realistic looking Aliens, not to mention all the models and the lifesize stuff like the load-lifter and the queen....*sigh*
Your death can be reasonably symbolized by a red light flickering out in a velociraptor's eye.
Thanks for the magic.Ceci n'est pas une signature.
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.