Derek Meddings (15 January 1931–10 September 1995; age 64) was a renowned Academy Award winning British visual effects (VFX) artist/director, and veteran of more than forty film and television series productions between 1948 and 1995.
Around 1976-1977, Meddings was brought along by Ken Adam (whom he had met while employed as VFX director on the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me both were concurrently working on as well) to work on redesigning the starship USS Enterprise, shuttlecraft and sets for the proposed Star Trek: Planet of the Titans film.
Adam's designs for the film were further developed and illustrated by Ralph McQuarrie but the film was eventually shelved during pre-production. [1]
For the longest of times Meddings' contributions to the Star Trek project had remained undisclosed, and it was only in 2009, long after his death, that former Cinefex reference author Kevin H. Martin had divulged on Doug Drexler's now defunct DrexFiles blog(X) that Meddings was slated to build the studio models for the film, meaning that it was a virtual certainty that it had been he, who had constructed the only two known Planet of the Titans variant Enterprise study models. Not only that, but nine years later, it was also revealed on X (formerly Twitter) that Meddings too had provided the project with concept art as well. [2] [3] [4] [5]
Career[]
An art school graduate Meddings started out his career in the British motion picture industry in the late 1940s as an uncredited title credits letterer before he was taken under the wings of visual effect artist Les Bowie under whose tutelage Meddings worked on several 1950s horror films from Hammer Films, learning the various aspects of the visual effects craft, albeit still remaining uncredited. [6] Meddings remained close with Bowie for the remainder of his career, co-winning with him his Academy and BAFTA awards for their work on the 1978 genre film Superman.
After he had started to work in 1957 (again uncredited at first) for Gerry Anderson on his various popular "supermarionation" television productions, Meddings' claim to fame came a few years later in the early 1960s when he became Anderson's premier VFX artist (duly credited this time around) on shows like Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, and most notably Thunderbirds for which he not only build the studio models, but also designed them. He continued to work for Anderson throughout the remainder of the 1960s and early 1970s on the later shows such as Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and UFO.
In the mid-1970s Meddings' made the transition to theatrical films as VFX supervisor/director, when he started to work for the James Bond franchise, working on the films Live and Let Die (1973), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977 and where he met, and served under, Ken Adam as his supervising production designer), Moonraker (1979, again with Adam and earning him a second Academy Award co-nomination, though not winning it), For Your Eyes Only (1981), and GoldenEye (1995, the film he was working on with his two sons when he died, and earning him a posthumous BAFTA Award nomination). In between Meddings also started to work for Hollywood on films like Krull (1983), Batman (1989, earning him a BAFTA Award nomination), or Hudson Hawk (1991), but most notably on several outings of the Superman franchise such as Superman (1978, the one which won him an Academy Award as well as a BAFTA Award, both shared with mentor and friend Les Bowie), Superman II (1980), Superman III (1983), and Supergirl (1984).
As already indicated, Meddings died in 1995 while working on GoldenEye from the effects of colorectal cancer.