Stan Winston

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Stan Winston (born April 7, 1946, in Richmond, Virginia), is an Academy Award–winning special effects and makeup artist, and film director. He is best known for his work in the Terminator series, the Jurassic Park series, Aliens, the Predator series, and Edward Scissorhands.

Winston, a frequent collaborator with James Cameron, owns more than one effects studio, including Stan Winston Digital. The established areas of expertise for Winston are in makeup, puppets and practical effects, but he has recently expanded his studio to encompass digital effects as well.

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[edit] Career

Stan Winston studied painting and sculpture at the University of Virginia, from which he graduated in 1968. In 1969, after attending California State University, Long Beach, Winston moved to Hollywood to pursue a career as an actor. Struggling to find an acting job, he began a makeup apprenticeship at Walt Disney Studios.

[edit] 1970s

In 1972, Winston established his own company, Stan Winston Studio, and won an Emmy for his effects work on the telefilm Gargoyles. Over the next seven years, Winston continued to receive Emmy nominations for work on projects such as The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Winston also created the Wookiee costumes for the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special.

[edit] 1980s

In 1982, Winston received his first Oscar nomination for Heartbeeps, by which time he had set up his own studio.

In 1983, Winston designed the Mr. Roboto facemask for the American rock group Styx. [1]

Winston reached a new level of fame in 1984 when James Cameron's The Terminator premiered. The movie was a surprise hit, and Winston's work bringing the metallic killing machine to life led to many new projects and additional collaborations with Cameron. In fact, Winston won his first Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1986 on James Cameron's next movie, Aliens.

Over the next few years, Winston and his company received more accolades for its work on many more Hollywood films, including Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands, John McTiernan's Predator, Alien Nation, The Monster Squad, and Predator 2.

In 1989, Winston made his directorial debut with the horror movie, Pumpkinhead, and won Best First Time Director at the Paris Film Festival. Although poorly received at the box office, Pumpkinhead has since become somewhat of a cult classic. His next directing project was the child-friendly A Gnome Named Gnorm (1990) starring Anthony Michael Hall.

[edit] 1990s

James Cameron drafted Winston and his team once again in 1990, this time for the groundbreaking Terminator 2: Judgment Day. T2 premiered in the summer of 1991, and Winston's work on this box office hit won him two more Oscars for Best Makeup Effects and Best Visual Effects.

Winston turned his attention from cyborgs to dinosaurs when Steven Spielberg enlisted his help to bring Jurassic Park to life. In 1993, the movie became a blockbuster and Winston won another Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

In 1993, Winston and Cameron co-founded Digital Domain, one of the foremost digital and visual effects studios in the world. In 1998, after the box office success of Titanic, the two men severed their working relationship with the company and resigned from its board of directors.

Winston and his team continued to provide effects work for many more films and expanded their work into animatronics. Some of Winston's notable animatronics work can be found in The Ghost and the Darkness and T2 3-D: Battle Across Time, James Cameron's 3-D continuation of the Terminator series for the Universal Studios theme park. One of Winston's most ambitious animatronics projects was Steven Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence, which earned Winston another Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects.

[edit] 2000s

In 2001, Winston produced a series of remakes of old monster films for HBO/Cinemax. The films included remakes of Earth vs the Spider (1958), How to Make a Monster (1958), Day the World Ended (1956), The She-Creature (1956), and Teenage Cave Man (1958).

Stan Winston is currently working on Iron Man, creating the physical suit for use by Robert Downey Jr. According to Bloody-Disgusting.com, next for Stan Winston is Jurassic Park IV. [2]

Stan has also signed on to help with the monster effects on The Suffering, which is based on the horror video game.

[edit] Academy Awards

[edit] Notable films

[edit] Upcoming films

[edit] Trivia

  • Winston was the second special effects artist to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
  • In November 2006, Titan Books published The Winston Effect: The Art & History of Stan Winston Studio, a retrospective of Winston's career, including in-depth interviews and archival photography from every project in which the Studio participated.
  • Stan's son, Matt, is an actor, possibly best known for his role as Crewman Daniels on Star Trek: Enterprise.
  • Despite helping to design the original Terminator Endoskeleton, Stan Winston is not involved with the television series The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

[edit] External links

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