RIP – Gary Hutzel (Veteran Visual Effects Supervisor)

Veteran Visual Effects Supervisor Gary Hutzel has passed away at the age of 60  in Vancouver…

News comes to us of the passing of Gary Hutzel, a key member of the Visual Effects teams on television since the days of Star Trek: The Next Generation…

During his career he worked on some of the key science-fiction shows of the last two decades and several feature films. His list of achievements includes work, often as Visual-Effects Supervisor on the likes of forty episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation during its first five seasons, the entire run of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993 – 1999), Red Planet (2000), Spy Kids (2001), A Wrinkle in Time ( 2003), Bionic Woman (2007), seventy-three episodes of Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), BSG: Razor (2007), Virtuality (2009), eighteen episodes of Caprica (2009-2010), Drive Angry (2011), Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome and thirty-four episodes of Defiance (2013-2015 ).

Despite those credits, Hutzel was well known for preferring minature-work to the rapidly all-encompassing CGI that was beginning to take hold at the end of the 1990s and beyond. However he was credited as a major force in making the Deep Space Nine episode ‘Trials and Tribbilations‘ – seamlessly incorporating footage from the original Trek episode from the 1960s. He and his team were nominated fro an Emmy for their efforts.

Hutzel would later be nominated for his work on the various incarnations of the modern Battlestar Galactica series and won Emmys in 2007 and 2008 respectively.He was nominated for his final Emmy for his work on Defiance in 2013.

In 2015 he auctioned off many of the models he had created and saved over the decades, raising many thousands of dollars and creating a massive amount of interest in his contributions to the legacy of Trek and beyond.