Craig Barron

Craig Barron is a visual effects artist and the current creative director at Magnopus, a Los Angeles media company that produces augmented and virtual reality experiences. Barron has worked at Industrial Light & Magic on such films as Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and later at his own VFX studio, Matte World Digital, on Zodiac (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Hugo (2011). Barron has contributed to the effects of more than 100 films. He received an Emmy Award for By Dawn’s Early Light (1990) and an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects on Batman Returns (1992). In 2009, he won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). Over the course of his career, Barron has become a film historian, author, lecturer, and university educator with a focus on the history of visual effects produced in classic films, before and after the digital age.