Craig Barron

Craig Barron
Born	April 6, 1961 Berkeley, California, United States
Occupation	Creative director Visual effects supervisor Film historian Lecturer
Years active	1979 – present
Awards	Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Emmy, VES Founders Award, Doctorate of Letters
Website	Magnopus

Craig Barron (born April 6, 1961) is an American creative director and film historian who specializes in seamless matte painting effects. Starting at Industrial Light & Magic, and at his own VFX studio, Matte World Digital, Barron worked on or supervised the crews to create the matte painting effects of more than a hundred films, including The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Titanic, Casino, Zodiac, Hugo, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, for which he won the Academy Award for best visual effects.

Barron is an AMPAS lecturer and exhibition curator, a TCM guest-host, and a University educator with a focus on the history and techniques of visual effects of classic studio films and the digital age. He's featured in documentary supplements for several Criterion Blue-Ray editions, demonstrating classic effects on films by Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Alfred Hitchcock, using computer animations. He co-authored with Mark Cotta Vaz the first book on the history of movie matte-painting, The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting.

Barron is the creative director at Magnopus, a visual development company in Los Angeles.

Barron began working at ILM in 1979 at age 18—then the youngest person at the studio—assisting with the matte-effects photography for George Lucas' The Empire Strikes Back. At ILM Barron would continue to composite matte-painting scenes on such landmark productions as Raiders of the Lost Ark (including the last shot of the secret government warehouse) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. From 1984 to 1988 he was supervisor of photography at ILM’s matte department.

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