KEN RALSTON

Visual effects supervisor and president of Sony Pictures Imageworks. Academy Awards for Return of the Jedi, Cocoon, Who framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her and Forrest Gump. Other credits include Dragonslayer, Back to the Future I/1I/II1, The Rocketeer, Jumanji and Contact
My favorite effects scene from the past twenty years is the dog in There’s Something About Mary. It blew me away. Worked great I laughed my head off. Budgetarily brilliant.
If I’m being a little facetious here, it’s because there has been so much amazing work done in so many films in the last twenty years, there’s no way to isolate just one thing. It’s like being asked what’s your favorite movie. “Huh? What do you mean? Let me tell you my favorite thousand movies!”
The same applies to picking a favorite from my own work, because I like a lot of different things in different movies. One sequence I did that I think worked great was the boat in the storm in Forrest Gump-which most people don’t even think of as an effects scene. Another scene in Gump that was really lovely and lyrical was the floating feather shot It was such a simple scene, but a really different use of a visual effect
All the Back to the Future movies had interesting work. One sequence 1 really liked and that I had a blast doing was the train wreck in the third Back to the Future, where we made this huge quarterscale miniature that matched to a quarter-scale terrain. We were freaked out because we had to blow the thing up and throw it off a cliff—and if it didn’t work the first time, we were screwed.
The bottom line is that some things work and some don’t; and the most successful effects shots sometimes come out of the simplest, dumbest solutions – like the underwater lighting effect in Cocoon, which was done with two shower doors sliding against each other. Simple solutions like that are what made that whole era so much fun.
Most often cited in our unofficial straw poll of favorite effects sequences of the past twenty years were the epic air-to-ground battle in which Rebel snowspeeders defend their Noth outpost against massive Imperial walkers in The Empire Strikes Back and the opening spinner flight over the festering industrial wasteland and adjoining megalopolis of Blade Runner.
It’s much harder now to make what we do sound interesting. “Here’s this neat Softimage package, and a picture of a guy sitting at a monitor!”