Zoran Perisic (visual effects artist)

Zoran Perišić (Serbian Cyrillic: Зоран Перишић; born March 16, 1940)^[1] is a Serbian-born visual effects artist and film director.^[2][3] He is best known for creating the "Zoptic" front projection process, which was invented to achieve the flying scenes in Superman (1978).^[4] For this, Perisic won a Special Achievement Academy Award and a BAFTA Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema Award. He was also nominated for Best Visual Effects Oscar for the film Return to Oz (1985).^[5][6]

Zoran Perišić
Зоран Перишић
Born	(1940-03-16) March 16, 1940 (age 85) Prokuplje, Toplica District, Yugoslavia (present-day Serbia)
Alma mater	University of Belgrade University of Birmingham
Occupation(s)	Visual effects artist, film director

Early life

Perisic was born in Prokuplje in 1940. He graduated from the University of Belgrade, before moving to the UK to study at the University of Birmingham.^[7]

Career

Early in his career, he worked as a documentary and animation cameraman for ITV Yorkshire,^[8] where he created and directed the programme The Magic Fountain.^[9] Perisic's first feature film credit was in the effects department of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In a 2013 interview, Perisic said "We had a lot of challenges on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001- A Space Odyssey with spacecraft and rockets flying against star backgrounds; I felt that there had to be a more efficient way other than rotoscoping and hand painted mattes."^[8]

Selected filmography

• Superman (1978; co-won the Special Achievement Academy Award with Les Bowie, Colin Chilvers, Denys Coop, Roy Field and Derek Meddings)
• Return to Oz (1985; co-nominated with Will Vinton, Ian Wingrove and Michael Lloyd)^[10]
• Sky Bandits (1986), as director