John Charles Dykstra, A.S.C. (; born June 3, 1947) is an American special effects artist, pioneer in the development of the use of computers in filmmaking and recipient of three Academy Awards, among many other awards and prizes. He was one of the original employees of Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects and computer graphics division of Lucasfilm. He is well known as the special effects lead on the original Star Wars, helping bring the original visuals for lightsabers, space battles between X-wings and TIE fighters, and Force powers to the screen. He also led special effects on many other movies, including Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, Stuart Little, X-Men: First Class, Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. Education and early career Dykstra was born in Long Beach, California. After studying industrial design at California State University, Long Beach (where he was a member of Phi Kappa Tau fraternity), in 1971 he landed a job working with Douglas Trumbull on Silent Running filming model effects, when Trumbull hired recent college graduates due to the film's low budget. Star Wars In 1975, when George Lucas was recruiting people for the special effects work on Star Wars, he approached Douglas Trumbull, but he was unavailable as he was about to start working on Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Trumbull pointed Lucas towards Dykstra. Lucas formed his own special effects company, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), based in warehouse premises in Van Nuys, and appointed Dykstra to supervise the new team. This led to the development of the Dykstraflex motion-controlled camera, which enabled many of the film's groundbreaking effects to be produced. The system was made possible by the availability of off-the-shelf integrated-circuit RAM at relatively low cost and secondhand VistaVision cameras. However, tensions arose between Dykstra and Lucas, the latter complaining that too much time and money was spent on developing the digital camera systems and that the effects team did not deliver all the shots that he had wanted causing the production to run behind schedule. These tensions would reportedly culminate with Dykstra's dismissal from ILM following Lucas' return from principal photography in London. Regardless, following the release of Star Wars, Dykstra and his team won Academy Awards for best special effects and special technical achievement. Battlestar Galactica After Star Wars, Dykstra began working on Battlestar Galactica for Universal Studios. Supervising the special effects for the three-hour pilot episode