A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Alias:
John C. Dykstra
John Charles Dykstra
Birthplace:
Long Beach, California, USA
Born:
June 3, 1947
John Charles Dykstra, A.S.C. (/ˈdaɪkstrə/; born June 3, 1947) is an American special effects artist, a pioneer in developing computers in filmmaking and a recipient of three Academy Awards, among many other awards and prizes. He was one of the original employees of Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects and computer graphics division of Lucasfilm. He is well known as the special effects lead on the original Star Wars, helping bring the original visuals for lightsabers, space battles between X-wings and TIE fighters, and Force powers to the screen. He also led special effects on many other movies, including Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, Stuart Little, X-Men: First Class, Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. Description above from the Wikipedia article John Dykstra, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Producer:
1978 Battlestar Galactica
Second Unit Director:
1978 Battlestar Galactica
1986 Invaders from Mars
1999 Stuart Little
Senior Visual Effects Supervisor:
1978 Battlestar Galactica
1986 Invaders from Mars
1999 Stuart Little
Special Effects:
1978 Battlestar Galactica
1979 Avalanche Express
1986 Invaders from Mars
1999 Stuart Little
Special Effects Supervisor:
1978 Battlestar Galactica
1979 Avalanche Express
1980 Caddyshack
1986 Invaders from Mars
1999 Stuart Little
Visual Effects:
1978 Battlestar Galactica
1979 Avalanche Express
1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture
1980 Caddyshack
1985 Lifeforce
1986 Invaders from Mars
1997 Batman & Robin
1999 Stuart Little
Visual Effects Designer:
1978 Battlestar Galactica
1979 Avalanche Express
1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture
1980 Caddyshack
1985 Lifeforce
1986 Invaders from Mars
1997 Batman & Robin
1999 Stuart Little
2002 Spider-Man
2004 Spider-Man 2
2008 Hancock
2009 Inglourious Basterds
2014 Seventh Son
2016 X-Men: Apocalypse
2019 Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
Visual Effects Producer:
1978 Battlestar Galactica
1979 Avalanche Express
1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture
1980 Caddyshack
1985 Lifeforce
1986 Invaders from Mars
1997 Batman & Robin
1999 Stuart Little
2002 Spider-Man
2004 Spider-Man 2
2008 Hancock
2009 Inglourious Basterds
2014 Seventh Son
2016 X-Men: Apocalypse
2019 Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
Visual Effects Supervisor:
1978 Battlestar Galactica
1979 Avalanche Express
1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture
1980 Caddyshack
1985 Lifeforce
1986 Invaders from Mars
1988 My Stepmother Is an Alien
1995 Batman Forever
1997 Batman & Robin
1999 Stuart Little
2002 Spider-Man
2004 Spider-Man 2
2008 Hancock
2009 Inglourious Basterds
2011 X-Men: First Class
2014 Seventh Son
2016 X-Men: Apocalypse
2017 Ghost in the Shell
2017 Kong: Skull Island
2019 Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.