(December 27, 1904 in Brooklyn, New York – May 20, 1998 in Los Angeles, California) was an American pioneer of visual special effects in motion pictures and an inventor of related technology.
Dunn worked on many films and television series, including the original 1933 King Kong (1933), Citizen Kane (1941), and Star Trek (1966–69).
[2][3] His early contributions in camera work and special effects at RKO included films such as The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1930), Danger Lights (1930), and Cimarron (1931), an Academy Award-winner for Best Picture, and The Monkey's Paw (1933).
This early experience led to the World War II development of the first practical commercially manufactured optical printer, a device consisting of cameras and projectors allowing for the accurate compositing of multiple images onto a single piece of film.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) were other well-remembered RKO films on which Dunn worked before America entered the second world war.
[citation needed] For Bringing Up Baby (1938), separate footage of Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and a leopard were photographically combined by Dunn.
Dunn resolved the situation by rephotographing Russell's close-ups with a tiny scrim inserted between the projector and camera, so as to soften the line of her cleavage.
Other later large-format and/or high-profile films Dunn's company did opticals for are My Fair Lady (1964), The Great Race (1965), Hawaii (1966), The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966), Darling Lili (1970), and Airport (1970).
[1] During World War II, Dunn developed the Acme-Dunn optical printer to be mass-produced out of a request from the United States' military.
[4] Dunn produced the lightning-electrocution scene at the end of The Thing from Another World (1951) by scratching the lightning, frame-by-frame, on a strip of black film and then compositing the best of that footage with live action footage of the monster burning and shrinking (done by Dunn via pulling back the camera on a track while filming the monster image element against a black background), with those two elements then photographically combined with the unmoving image of the floor and walls that surround the creature in the final composite.
During the brief 3-D craze and the more permanent shift to widescreen processes such as CinemaScope, Dunn pioneered the use of optical composites using these developments, inventing and refining new equipment to achieve it.
[2] Dunn shared an Oscar win for special effects in 1949 for his work in collaboration with Willis O'Brien for the original Mighty Joe Young.