Career
After earning his associate's degree, Muren began working as a visual effects artist full-time. In 1976, Muren was hired at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), then an upstart visual effects studio founded by little-known director George Lucas. Lucas's and ILM's first film, Star Wars, was released in 1977 to wide critical and public acclaim and was the highest grossing film of all time up until that point.
Muren has been an important voice for pioneering new technologies in special effects. Muren spearheaded ILM's move from models and miniatures to CGI for the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In a 2000 interview, he stated that Terminator 2: Judgment Day was the film he was most proud of.
Muren, along with Steve Williams and Mark Dippe, helped to usher in a new age of computer generated imagery with the CG dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. Steven Spielberg had intended to use go-motion for the dinosaurs, but quickly changed his mind when shown a test of a CG T-Rex (with Marin County as the backdrop). Jurassic Park was the breakthrough that convinced George Lucas that technology had advanced enough to make the Star Wars prequels.
In June 1999, Muren was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first visual effects artist to ever be so recognized. He has also been the recipient of nine Academy Awards (including special achievement awards), the most of any living movie-maker.
Muren continues to work for ILM to this day; his title is Senior Visual Effects Supervisor. Currently he is taking time off to author a book on visual effects; he also consults for Pixar. His most recent project was War of the Worlds, in which he led a team to create complex effects in a span of only three months.
He has a small, non-speaking role in Raiders of the Lost Ark as a spy. Standing in for an absent Ronald Lacey as Major Toht, due to their similarity in facial appearance (though great variation in height), he's the man who looks over the Life Magazine as Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) boards the passenger plane.
Muren has an almost invisible cameo in the theme park ride Star Tours. He and two other ILM'ers are visible in a movie-within-a-movie... they are rear-projected into the windows of a miniature Maintenance Bay building, which is then rear-projected into the cabin of the flight simulator. They can be seen ducking in fear as the point-of-view spaceship almost careens into them.
Dennis is married to British documentary filmmaker of "Dream of The Sea Ranch" and landscape architect Zara Muren, and they have two children together. They currently live in California.
Read more about this topic: Dennis Muren
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)