An electron microscope needed to be simulated for The Andromeda Strain. “I devised this whole methodology for linking up a 35mm Mitchell camera to a real microscope,” recalls Trumbull. “I found a Zeiss stereo microscope with a zoom lens and came up with the idea of the microorganism being a tetrahedron-shaped molecule illuminated by a strobe light and shot with filters so that it glows. It was going to be a small two-and-a-half-inch hexagon of plexiglass mounted on a metal rod connected to a motor. The motor was going to be in this yoke and be upside down, inside out, backwards.

“Jamie Shourt worked out this program that put this thing in one position, fired the strobe, closed the camera shutter, wait, put the thing in another position, open the camera shutter, fire the strobe, and add all six sides of the tetrahedron onto one frame of film with separate exposures. The idea was these things would start folding on their edges and multiply the number of flash exposures on each frame. He wrote this program that would go on into infinity. We just had to stop after too many hours and no sleep.”

For his directorial debut, Silent Running, the three-time Oscar nominated visual effects supervisor experimented with computerized motion-control photography. “My father-in-law told me about these things called computer-controlled stepper motors where the shaft is broken into 200 segments. If you put a square wave pulse in there it will move one segment. If you can make a series of pulses, then the motor would run under automated control. I bought a stepper motor and a driver board. I figured out a way to record square wave pulses on my stereo tape recorder, play them into the motor, and repeat exactly the playout.”

The front projector system was scaled down in size by using a slide projection lamp, 35mm Arriflex camera, a beam splitter mirror on a whirl head, and 4 x 5 plates. “As long as you planned ahead and had projection plates matching the scenes that were going to be shot, then you could shoot all day long with it. Sometimes we would shoot 15 process setups in one day. Everything shot in the domes, out of the windows and behind the spaceship were front projection. There were no post-production optics. It was all shot in camera.”