About this episode

Doug Trumbull discusses his lifelong obsession with improving film projection and shares insights from his career in visual effects.

Doug Trumbull spent fifty years trying to convince Hollywood that the way movies are projected is fundamentally broken, and most of the industry never listened. The visual effects supervisor behind 2001: A Space Odyssey , Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Blade Runner , and Star Trek: The Motion Picture , and the director of Silent Running and Brainstorm , Trumbull passed away in 2022. This conversation originally aired in July 2020, before a lot of you were listening, and it's one of the fullest records of him explaining his life's obsession in his own words. We're pulling it back out of the archives because it deserves a wider audience than it got the first time around. Chris and Doug cover the whole arc: getting hired at Graphic Films off a satellite painting, cold calling Stanley Kubrick's secret phone number to get on 2001, the accidental discovery of double stars that led him toward persistence of vision research, and the Showscan process he patented at Paramount. They also get into Trumbull's MAGI process, 4K stereo at 120 frames per second, representing 40 times the data of a traditional HD video, and Chris's own experience helping produce a piece of content rendered…

People in this episode

Host: Chris

Guest: Doug Trumbull

Topics covered

• film projection
• visual effects
• Hollywood history
• technology in film
• patented processes
• interviews with filmmakers

Keywords

• Doug Trumbull
• film technology
• visual effects
• Showscan process
• 4K stereo
• Hollywood
• Kubrick
• Gemini Man

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Silent Running, Brainstorm, Gemini Man

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