Ken Ralston

Ken Ralston, born in 1954, is an American visual effects artist whose career runs from television commercials to some of the best known effects films of the late twentieth century. He began at Cascade Pictures in Hollywood, where he worked on well over a hundred advertising campaigns in the early 1970s, and in 1976 Dennis Muren brought him to Industrial Light and Magic to help George Lucas realise the effects of Star Wars. He stayed at that company for about twenty years before moving to Sony Pictures Imageworks, where he became president and later its visual effects supervisor and creative head. He is especially associated with the films of director Robert Zemeckis, and he has received five Academy Awards in the visual effects categories, one of them a Special Achievement Award for Return of the Jedi.