Eileen Moran, VFX Wizard of Prometheus, LOTR, & The Hobbit, Dies

Eileen Moran, one of the industry’s top visual effects producers, and the Oscar-winning special effects wizard who worked on such diverse films as King Kong, Fight Club, Prometheus, and The Hobbit, died on Tuesday, December 4, 2012, in New Zealand, after a battle with ovarian cancer. She was a longtime confidant of director Peter Jackson.

Moran was involved in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and, as the one of the leaders of the Weta Digital team, she won the Best Visual Effects Oscar for Avatar in 2009.

Moran was a co-producer on Jackson’s latest epic, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Moran was instrumental in "building Weta Digital into the most powerful engine for imaginative imagery that ever existed,” said James Cameron.

Moran won an award from the Visual Effects Society for her work on King Kong (2005),  two for Avatar, and was nominated for The Adventures of Tintin.

Her film work included the three Lord of the Rings films, Fight Club (1999), Lake Placid (1999), EDtv (1999), I, Robot (2004), X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), Eragon (2006), Bridge to Terabithia (2007), Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), 30 Days of Night (2007), The Water Horse (2007), Jumper (2008), The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008), The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), District 9 (2009), The Lovely Bones (2009), The A-Team (2010; executive producer: Weta Digital Ltd.), Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011; visual effects executive producer: Weta Digital) and Prometheus (2012; executive producer: Weta Digital).

Moran was raised on Long Island and went to the State University of New York at New Paltz, with the notion of being an actor. She moved to Los Angeles, and worked for the late director Tony Scott (who died by suicide this year). She then got into music videos, and ended up at the v/sfx group Digital Domain, owned by Cameron. Her breakthrough work was on a pair of memorable Budweiser commercials featuring digital frogs, lizards, and ants.

In 1991, Moran got an email that changed her life: Jackson was turning J.R.R. Tolkein’s LOTR trilogy into a movie and needed a visual-effects producer. She took the job, moved to New Zealand, and the rest, as they say, became part of her history.

Our condolences to Eileen Moran's survivors include her children, Jack and Ava, and her extended family of friends and fans of her work. 

She was in her mid-50s.

Sources: 1, 2, and 3.

Tony Scott Kills Self By Jumping From LA Bridge

"Tony Scott did NOT have inoperable brain cancer, or for that matter brain cancer at all...this according to Scott's family. TMZ has learned ... Scott's wife told investigators the rumor that Tony had inoperable brain cancer is 'absolutely false,'" said TMZ late in the day.

Synchrocinematically significant producer and director Tony Scott, brother of director Ridley Scott, has died due to leaping from an LA bridge on Sunday, August 19, 2012. Tony Scott was a producer on his brother's recent Prometheus, background influence in the important Blade Runner film, and director of blockbuster movies including Unstoppable, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Deja Vu, Man on Fire, Spy Games, and Crimson Tide. He was working on Prometheus II, as well as other movies.

Director Tony Scott, who was the producer on his brother's best known for the films Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop II, died by suicide when he jumped from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, California.

Scott, 68, climbed a fence on the south side of the bridge's apex and leapt off "without hesitation" around 12:30 p.m., according to the Coroner's Department and port police.

A suicide note was found inside Scott's black Toyota Prius, which was parked on one of the eastbound lanes of the bridge, said U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Jennifer Osburn.

Officers with port police, the Los Angeles Police Department and California Highway Patrol joined city firefighters and the Coast Guard in searching the water for his body.

Authorities used sonar equipment to track the man in the port's murky waters and his body was recovered by a dive team around 4:30 p.m., Alva said. Scott's body was taken to a dock in Wilmington and turned over to the county coroner.

"There's nothing to indicate it is anything else at this time," said Lt. Joe Bale of the coroner's office.

Scott, 68, jumped from the bridge that spans the Los Angeles Harbor, connecting San Pedro and Terminal Island. Scott apparently parked his car in the eastbound lanes of the 6,060-foot-long bridge, scaled the barrier fence and leaped.

On October 26, 1990, 1964 Los Angeles Olympics' diving bronze medalist Larry Andreasen was a fatality after he jumped from the west tower of the bridge in an attempt to set a diving record.

The bridge was named in honor of Democratic Congressman Vincent Thomas, a Croatian-American who worked hard to have it built to replace a ferry. The bridge opened to traffic on November 15, 1963.

One of the filming locations (shown at top) in the 1985 movie, To Live & Die in L.A., is the green Vincent Thomas Bridge.

Tony Scott in his signature red cap

Tony Scott was born Anthony D.L. Scott in North Shields (a location just mentioned by me yesterday here), England, in 1944. Tony Scott got his start as a teenager in films by starring in his older brother Ridley Scott's film Boy and Bicycle. In 1995, the two joined forces to create the production company, Scott Free Productions.

In the 1990s, Scott emerged as a big-budget action film director in his own right, with 1990's Revenge starring Kevin Costner and Days of Thunder with Tom Cruise. In 1998 he directed Enemy of the State with Will Smith and Gene Hackman.

It was on the set of Days of Thunder where Scott met actress Donna Wilson, whom he married in 1994. Tony Scott is survived by Wilson and their twin sons, Frank and Max. My condolences to his family, especially to those twin boys who are now fatherless. (Much has been written about twins and the synchroncinematic threads abound.)

The list of films and television productions from Tony Scott is a long one, including the forthcoming Killing Lincoln and Stoker. See more bio info at IMDb here and at Wikipedia here.

See also Brian Gerber suicide.

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