Richard Edlund

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Richard Edlund

Richard Edlund (born 6 December 1940; age 83), was a multi-award winning and nominated (including several Academy Awards) cinematographer who has specialized in the various aspects of the production of visual effects. Hailing from North Dakota, Edlund was interested from an early age onward in cinematography, and has acquired a basic knowledge of cinematographic techniques and systems, while serving in the U.S. Navy and subsequently during his stint at the University of Southern California. (Cinefex, issue 2, p. 7)

Star Trek association

Around 1967, Edlund got his first professional employment through his life-long friend and mentor Joseph Westheimer at his company The Westheimer Company, where he was enabled to further hone his skills as a visual effects technician. As it so happened the very first project he was assigned to professionally, was Star Trek: The Original Series. Edlund recalled years later what his duties entailed, "Mostly what I was doing was beaming guys in and out, though I did rotoscope the original Enterprise for the opening credits. It was the only Enterprise flyby they had for at least the first season, and they used it over and over – speeding it up, flopping it left for right...Talk about a show with no time or money. That was one of the things that made me uniquely qualified when Star Wars came along." [1]

Edlund stayed in Westheimer's employment for the remainder of the series, having also worked in the same capacity on the contemporary television shows The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone as well as several television commercials Westheimer was involved with.

Early post-Star Trek career

Around 1969 Edlund left Westheimer to work free-lance as a still photographer and promotional filmmaker for a number of prominent rock groups, before joining the new visual effects company Robert Abel & Associates (RA&A) in the early 1970s. While there, he was an integral part of the team that worked on the ground-breaking opticals for the commercials of the era, the company was involved with, among others for the beverage 7-Up and the clothing brand Levis. An artistic difference of opinion with Robert Abel over the acquirement of a sophisticated piece of cinematographic piece of equipment, Paramount Pictures' VistaVision optical printer (last used for The Ten Commandments), made Edlund decide to resign in 1975.

Though Edlund had resigned, he did not leave in animosity toward the head-strong Abel and maintained his respect for him as was evidenced in 1978, when Edlund tried to help Abel. Abel's company was by then deeply involved with the production of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but he was not aware that he was running head-long into a fatal confrontation with the Paramount executives, due to the fact that he was spending far too much of the studios time and money designing and building a massive, interlinked and centrally-controlled camera and optical printer combo unit, while trying to re-invent the process as he did so, running massively over budget and over time in the process. Edlund repeatedly tried to make Abel aware of this, "I admonished him to keep it as simple as possible, because when the release date's breathing down your neck something s going to happen – it always does – and the more complex the system the more difficult it's going to be to fix and keep shooting. I don't know if Bob misinterpreted my meaning, but the end result was so overcomplicated it couldn't respond to changes without two days of re-programming, even though the problem might be something as simple as the magazine on the camera needing more clearance to avoid hitting the spacedock model. [2] Edlund's admonishments fell on deaf ears though.

The ILM years

Upon quitting RA&A, Edlund was not long without gainful employment as he was already sounded out by George Lucas to work in the fledging visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). As part of John Dykstra's visual effects filming crew, he was partly responsible for beefing out new techniques, such as motion control photography, to be used extensively for that company's first motion picture, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977). The production earned him (and the others of his crew) as well as the company the very first of the many Academy Awards for visual effects that were to follow.

Upon completion of Star Wars Edlund continued working for Dykstra on the productions of the pilot of the original Battlestar Galactica series (1978, earning him and Dystra his first Emmy Award) as well as the movies The Manitou (1978) and The China Syndrome (1979). Edlund, however, did not follow Dykstra when the latter went on to form his own effects company, Apogee, Inc., but instead opted to heed George Lucas' invitation to rejoin ILM, for the production of the second Star Wars installment, Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Promoted to visual effects supervisor, an important responsibility for him entailed the restructure and rebuild of the nearly dismantled company.

Edlund remained in the employ of ILM until 1984, and while the company in those years had produced the visual effects for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Edlund was not part of either production team, instead having worked on the productions of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Poltergeist (1982), Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983), and Ghost Busters (1984).

Forming Boss Films Studios

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External links

• Template:IMDb-link
• Template:IMDb-link
• Richard Edlund at Wikipedia
• Boss Film Studios at Wikipedia