Tom Woodruff junior

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Tom Woodruff junior

Tom Woodruff Jr. (born January 21, 1959 in Williamsport , Pennsylvania ) is an American special effects artist who won an Oscar in 1993 with the film Death Suits Her and was also nominated for an Oscar for the film Alien 3 . Woodruff is also an actor , makeup artist, and director , and is also a co-founder of the special effects company, Amalgamated Dynamics Incorporation, founded in 1988.

Life

Woodruff developed a special interest in monster films early on, which was partly due to the late-night broadcasts of the now classic universal monster films and the special effects of Ray Harryhausen and his films. After watching the Planet of the Apes film series, Woodruff focused particularly on the mask and tried to make small films with his father's 8mm film camera. He especially admired John Chambers for his mask, which gave the title characters in the film Planet of the Apes their gorilla-like appearance. Woodruff graduated from Lycoming College in Pennsylvania with an emphasis on theater studies and business administration.

In 1982 Woodruff moved to Los Angeles , where he worked in makeup and special effects in smaller teams. He came closer to his goal in 1984 when he worked in the crew of Stan Winston on the end-time film Terminator . This resulted in a 5-year collaboration and the opportunity to work on the Predator and the Alien films. During this time Woodruff not only created costumes and created complicated masks, but also worked as an actor in various films ( Monster Busters (1987), The Halloween Monster (1988) or Leviathan (1989)). For The Demon with three Tales , he teamed up with Alec Gillis , also a designer on Winston’s team. Both left Winston’s studio in 1988 and formed a team at Amalgamated Dynamics Incorporated, which they co-founded. Their collaboration has been extremely fruitful and has earned them numerous awards and prizes, including an Oscar for Woodruff, Doug Chiang , Ken Ralston and Douglas Smythe in the "Best Visual Effects" category for the black comedy Death Suits Her by Robert Zemeckis , starring Meryl Streep , Bruce Willis and Goldie Hawn . Woodruff and Gillis also received an Oscar nomination for David Fincher's science fiction film Alien 3, starring Sigourney Weaver, in the same category along with Richard Edlund and George Gibbs . They also won the BAFTA Award and the Saturn Award , which they also received for Starship Troopers, with The Death Suits Her . They also created animal characters for the fantasy adventure film Jumanji and they were nominated for a Saturn Award in the “Best Mask” category for the Christmas film Santa Clause 2 - An Even Nicer Present .

Filmography (selection)

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Tom Woodruff Jr. ( Memento of the original from February 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at wizardworld.com (English). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wizardworld.com
  2. ↑ Tom Woodruff, Jr. at stanwinstonschool.com (English).
personal data
SURNAME Woodruff, Tom junior
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American special effects artist, actor, makeup artist, and director
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Williamsport , Pennsylvania