You may not recognise his face but Stan Winston left an indelible visual mark on a number of the greatest Hollywood action films of the last thirty years: a frequent collaborator with James Cameron, he lended his visionary expertise to help create many famous cinema villains, including the Terminator, the Alien and the Predator, as well as bringing to life Steven Spielberg’s dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and creating the striking gothic-influenced imagery of Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns.

It seems a vague coincidence that i was reading this week that legendary visual effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen is to be giving a talk about his life and work at Edinburgh this year, for Winston was very much his spiritual successor; indeed, Harryhausen, Winston and his colleague Dennis Muren are the only special effects artists to have ever been honoured with their name emblazoned on a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Yet he is perhaps the last of the great effects men dealing with the tangible; in this age of CGi, teams of computer-based designers and green screeners seek to make the unreal real, rather than the old-fashioned sculptors and modellers like Winston who used their ingenuity to make the real seem unreal.

Read more about his life and work here:

http://www.stanwinstonstudio.com/home.html