I've been into Special Effects all my life--I wish I'd been talented enough to participate--and we lost one of the giants today. I decided to post this in his first mainstream directorial effort, Silent Running, but he was an absolute legend in the special effects world. He was either directly involved with, or influenced, almost every film you can imagine from the 70's and '80's. Blade Runner, Star Trek the Motion Picture(which he saved from disaster), Close Encounters, and 2001: A Space Odyssey were some of his most notable achievements. Decades before Peter Jackson was advocating for High Frame Rate filming he developed ShowScan, a similar system, though he found Hollywood largely unreceptive. (I'm not an advocate of HFR, myself, but I always admire folks that want to push the envelope.) He was also one of the early pioneers of motion control, which allowed SFX companies to repeatedly film model tracking shots with precision to help with compositing.

A full rundown is on Variety (here), but we've lost an absolute giant in the industry. Folks like Mr. Trumbull have invented so many of the technologies we take for granted it's astonishing.

R.I.P.