Rob Bottin

Bottin began working in film effects as a teenager, apprenticing under makeup legend Rick Baker while still in his teens and displaying enough raw talent that he was given his own major studio assignments before he was out of his early twenties.

An effects prodigy who was only 22 when he created the shape-shifting horrors of The Thing, he then built RoboCop's suit and Total Recall's mutants — practical effects' wildest imagination given full studio resources. He worked himself to physical collapse during The Thing's production, reportedly requiring hospitalization from sheer exhaustion, and the film's dog-kennel transformation sequence alone took over a month to design, build and shoot.

He continued working at the top of the practical-effects field through the 1980s and 90s, and his willingness to push both his own body and the available materials to their absolute limits became something of a legend within the effects community, inspiring later generations of creature-effects artists.