Con Pederson, the CGI pioneer who spent two and a half years alongside Douglas Trumbull creating the dazzling Oscar-winning visual effects for the Stanley Kubrick masterwork 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died. He was 91.
Pederson had Alzheimer’s and died Friday at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, his son, Eric Pederson, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Two-time Oscar-winning VFX artist John Nelson noted in a statement that Pederson “could animate by hand and could program the computer to do animation that normal programs could not achieve. He was a Renaissance man and an artist.”
While working for Southern California-based Graphic Films, which produced content for NASA, Pederson wrote and directed To the Moon and Beyond, a 15-minute film narrated by Rod Serling that screened at the Transportation and Travel Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. (Trumbull, hired by Pederson a few years earlier, painted a rotating spiral galaxy for the project.)
Kubrick saw To the Moon and Beyond and invited Pederson to his Manhattan apartment to read the script and view storyboards for 2001: A Space Odyssey. He and Trumball were hired in summer 1965 to go to England, and they worked on the movie through March 1968.
As one of four special photographic effects supervisors credited on the 1968 classic — Trumbull, Wally Veevers and Tom Howard were the others — Pederson helped create stars, planets, spaceships and the unforgettable five-minute Star Gate sequence.
Kubrick would receive the Academy Award for special effects in 1969, the only Oscar of his sterling career.
“Stanley had this sense of adventure when it came to filmmaking,” Pederson said in a 1999 interview. “He was a cameraman. He was a photographer. He was an extraordinary filmmaker. I once asked him kind of stupidly how he thought a certain director would have done something we were discussing, and he said, ‘How would I know? I’ve never seen anyone direct.’”
Conrad Alan Pederson was born in Minnesota on April 15, 1934. With his parents and two older sisters, he moved to Inglewood in 1943, and his folks helped build bombers and fighters on assembly lines during World War II.
Pederson began writing science fiction at age 14 and after two years at Los Angeles City College majored in Art and Anthropology at UCLA. He discovered animation in Westwood in the college theater department, made a couple of student films and was hired at Disney, where he was introduced to German American aerospace engineer and space architect Wernher von Braun.
In 1956, Pederson was drafted into the U.S. Army and through his Disney connections wound up working for von Braun in graphic engineering, drawing illustrations about rockets and space travel. After the service, he went back to Disney before heading to Graphic Films.
In Michael Benson’s 2018 book, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, Trumbull noted that the postproduction process on 2001 was “epic in its complexity, and Con was the smartest guy in the room. 2001 absolutely would not have happened without Con.”
Pederson ran a “war room” where VFX camera shots were planned, scheduled, tracked and evaluated. Eight to 10 elements frequently were added to the original camera negative one by one before the film would be processed. It could take months to see the finished shot, and should Kubrick not approve, each step would have to be repeated.
Pederson took a couple years off after 2001 and eventually teamed with Robert Abel to launch the production company Robert Abel & Associates, creating animated logos for ABC and the Whirlpool Corp. using techniques he had developed for Kubrick.
Nelson first met Pederson at Able’s and said “he taught me (among many other things) that computer camera moves need imperfection to feel more realistic.”
Pederson’s son remembers his dad coming home from work sometime in the 1970s and saying, “We’re going to use computers” on the job.
After Abel’s shuttered in 1987, Pederson joined Metrolight Studios and served as a creative lead alongside Tim McGovern. There, he was a VFX supervisor on HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon, the 12-part 1998 documentary about the Apollo space program, and an animator on the films Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), Imposter (2001), Gods and Generals (2003) and View From the Top (2003).
He also served as an animator for Rhythm & Hues on the 2004 movies Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed and Garfield: The Movie.
In addition to his son, survivors include his second wife, Carole; his first wife, Sharleen; and his grandchildren, Alexandre and Viviane.
Former THR staffer Carolyn Giardina contributed to this report.
