Carlo Rambaldi
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"In the 1984 David Lynch film Dune, the sandworms and the Guild Navigator were designed by special effects modeler Carlo Rambaldi."--Sholem Stein |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Carlo Rambaldi (September 15, 1925 – August 10, 2012) was an Italian special effects artist who is most famous for designing the title character of the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and the mechanical head-effects for the creature in Alien (1979) (for both Rambaldi won an Oscar).
Overview
Rambaldi also has worked on Profondo Rosso (Deep Red) (1975), King Kong (1976), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Nightwing (1979), Possession (1981), Dune (1984), King Kong Lives (1986), and Cameron's Closet (1988). In addition to the two Oscars for Visual Effects, he also won a third Special Achievement Academy Award for visual effects in John Guillermin's King Kong (1976).
Rambaldi had the distinction of being the first special effects artist to be required to prove that his work on a film was not 'real'. Dog-mutilation scenes in the 1971 film A Lizard in a Woman's Skin were so convincingly visceral that its director, Lucio Fulci, was prosecuted for offences relating to animal cruelty. Fulci would have served a two-year prison sentence had Rambaldi not exhibited the film's array of props to a courtroom, proving that the scene was not filmed using real animals.
Born in Vigarano Mainarda, Emilia Romagna, Rambaldi died on August 10, 2012 in Lamezia Terme, Calabria, where he had lived for many years.
