Stan Winston
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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
In 1969, after attending California State University, Long Beach, Stan Winston moved to Hollywood to pursue a career as an actor. Struggling to find an acting job, Winston began a makeup apprenticeship at Walt Disney Studios.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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).
According to Bloody-Disgusting.com, next for Stan Winston is Jurassic Park IV. [2]
[edit] Academy Awards
- 1982 - Oscar Nomination For Best Makeup: Heartbeeps
- 1987 - Won Oscar For Best Visual Effects: Aliens
- 1988 - Oscar Nomination For Best Visual Effects: Predator
- 1991 - Oscar Nomination For Best Makeup: Edward Scissorhands
- 1992 - Won 2 Oscars - Best Visual Effects & Best Makeup: Terminator 2: Judgment Day
- 1993 - Oscar Nomination For Best Makeup: Batman Returns
- 1994 - Won Oscar For Best Visual Effects: Jurassic Park
- 1998 - Oscar Nomination For Best Visual Effects: The Lost World: Jurassic Park
- 2002 - Oscar Nomination For Best Visual Effects: A.I.
[edit] Notable films
- Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
- Big Fish (2003)
- A.I. (2001)
- Jurassic Park III (2001)
- Small Soldiers (1998)
- The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
- Ghosts (1997)
- T2 3-D: Battle Across Time (1996)
- The Island of Doctor Moreau (1996)
- Congo (1995)
- Interview With The Vampire (1994)
- Jurassic Park (1993)
- Batman Returns (1992)
- Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
- Predator 2 (1990)
- Edward Scissorhands (1990)
- Pumpkinhead (1989)
- Predator (1987)
- Aliens (1986)
- The Terminator (1984)
- The Thing (1982)
- Heartbeeps (1981)
[edit] Upcomming films
- Jurassic Park IV (2008)
[edit] Trivia
- 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.
