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Ken Ralston

Biography from TheMovieDB

Kenneth Ralston (born 1954) is an American visual effects artist, visual effects supervisor and Creative Head at Sony Pictures Imageworks. Ralston began his career at the commercial animation and visual effects company Cascade Pictures in Hollywood, where he worked on over 150 advertising campaigns in the early 1970s. In 1976, Dennis Muren hired him at Industrial Light & Magic to help George Lucas create the effects for Star Wars. He remained at ILM for 20 years before joining Sony Pictures Imageworks as president. Ralston is best known for his work in the films of Robert Zemeckis.  Ralston has won five Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, including a Special Achievement Academy Award for the visual effects in Return of the Jedi (1983), and regular awards for his work on Cocoon (1985), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Death Becomes Her (1992) and Forrest Gump (1994). He was nominated three more times for Dragonslayer (1981), Back to the Future Part II (1989) and Alice in Wonderland (2010).  Description above from the Wikipedia article Ken Ralston, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

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Film Performances

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Film Production

Second Unit Director:
1992  Death Becomes Her

Senior Visual Effects Supervisor:
1992  Death Becomes Her
1997  Contact
2002  Men in Black II
2010  Alice in Wonderland

Thanks:
1992  Death Becomes Her
1994  Through the Eyes of Forrest Gump
1997  Contact
2002  Men in Black II
2010  Alice in Wonderland

VFX Supervisor:
1992  Death Becomes Her
1994  Through the Eyes of Forrest Gump
1997  Contact
2002  Men in Black II
2004  The Polar Express
2010  Alice in Wonderland

Visual Effects Coordinator:
1992  Death Becomes Her
1994  Through the Eyes of Forrest Gump
1997  Contact
2001  America's Sweethearts
2002  Men in Black II
2004  The Polar Express
2010  Alice in Wonderland

Visual Effects Design Consultant:
1992  Death Becomes Her
1994  Through the Eyes of Forrest Gump
1997  Contact
2001  America's Sweethearts
2002  Men in Black II
2004  The Polar Express
2007  Beowulf
2010  Alice in Wonderland

Visual Effects Supervisor:
1982  Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
1984  Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
1985  Cocoon
1986  Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
1986  The Golden Child
1988  Who Framed Roger Rabbit
1989  Back to the Future Part II
1990  Back to the Future Part III
1991  The Rocketeer
1992  Death Becomes Her
1994  Forrest Gump
1994  Through the Eyes of Forrest Gump
1995  Jumanji
1995  The American President
1996  Phenomenon
1997  Contact
2000  Cast Away
2001  America's Sweethearts
2002  Men in Black II
2004  The Polar Express
2007  Beowulf
2010  Alice in Wonderland
2012  Men in Black 3
2016  Alice Through the Looking Glass

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TV Performances

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About the Movie Section

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:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

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  • If you would like to correct movie data on this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's corrected on their site, it should soon be corrected on this site.
  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

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.