The brilliant special effects makeup artist Stan Winston has passed away at the age of 62, and as sad as that may be for his family and colleagues, it's sadder still that his profession has slowly been dying for years.
Winston worked on Jurassic Park and Terminator 2, movies in which his work was augmented by then-revolutionary CGI effects. Soon, of course, CGI would become the new norm, and when makeup effects would be deployed, they would be hidden under a thick haze of digital effects.
Not that they needed to be. One of Winston's greatest creations, the alien queen from Aliens, was created entirely on set, and is a wonderfully lifelike effect, terrifying and not unsympathetic, a major character in the film.
Aliens remains one of Winston's most impressive credits. He'd done fine work on the oddball TV movie Gargoyles, created impressive character designs for the overlooked comedy Heartbeeps and handled the impressive gore effects in the minor horror classic Dead And Buried. His work with James Cameron on Aliens and other pictures made him a superstar in the world of makeup effects, but like Rick Baker and Rob Bottin, other geniuses of the field, his star began to wane as producers began to bypass the time-consuming practice of on-set effects for CGI they could drop in anywhere they saw fit.
To those producers, I say look at Jurassic Park again. Winston's creations, particularly the scarifying closeup of the T-Rex, had a tactile presence all those digitized critters lack. The camera could linger on them, the actors could react to them, the cinematographer could light them, all because they were there. They were real, and though they could not breathe or bleed or feel, in Winston's hands, they lived.
