In early May, William Moritz visited with Con Pederson, a visual effects pioneer, who worked closely with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Credited as one of four Special Photographic Effects Supervisors on the film, he and Doug Trumbull created a myriad of stars, planets and space ships, plus the unforgettable stargate sequence.

Con Pederson. Photo by William Moritz.

WM: So, when and where were you born?

CP: I just turned 65, which means I was born in 1934, just as the Depression was easing up. We lived up in the woods of Minnesota, but then we moved to California in 1943. So from then on my childhood was spent amongst airplanes; both my parents worked building bombers and fighters. Where the LAX airport is now was just bean fields, artillery emplacements, barrage balloons and that sort of thing. I was selling newspapers during WW II and it made an effect on me in two ways: I think I'm very conscious of the global character of the 20th century, and also I learned how to scavenge, which I've been doing ever since.

WM: What led you into the film world?

CP: Accident! I think the fact that I grew up in Inglewood, which isn't far from Hollywood. After a couple of years at City College, I went to UCLA, 1951 to '53. I eventually worked on my M.A. but never quite finished because at that point I discovered the animation school over in Theater Arts at UCLA. Somebody told me that it was a lot of fun doing animation so I thought I'd try it, and made a couple of student films. The next thing you know, I was vacuumed up by Disney.

WM: What were your student films like?

CP: They were little cartoons, inspired by UPA, which in those days was the avant-garde of animation. John Hubley and the other UPA guys were doing two-dimensional design with flashy colors, like Rooty Toot Toot. Hubley was kind of an icon.

WM: So Disney hired you?

CP: Yes, I took my student films there. My instructor at UCLA, Bill Shull, who had worked at Disney, thought they might be interested in hiring me, primarily because at that point I'd already written science fiction and gotten heavily immersed in rocketry and that sort of thing. I don't think they had ever hired a college kid before, but they decided to take a chance on me for story. I began working on their space documentary series, which got me even more deeply involved. Their technical advisor was primarily Werner von Braun, who was at Redstone Arsenal at that time. It turned out to be fortuitous, because I was drafted into the army in fall of '56, and by a circuitous route I ended up in Alabama working for Werner von Braun. They had shipped me off to the First Armor Division in Louisiana, from which nobody was ever known to escape short of their time, but Walt Disney personally brought me to the attention of Werner von Braun because they had just got an animation camera there and didn't know how to use it. The next thing you know I was in a nice outfit of scientific and professional personnel at the Redstone Arsenal Army Post and Missile Agency doing very short films to present ideas to Congress, to explain what they were doing -- mostly secret undertakings of the Cold War, atomic testing in the Pacific for which we supplied short-range missiles. I got a look at what was going on in astronautics at that time, which was mainly propulsion systems.

Von Braun was primarily a chemist. He had a couple of hundred Germans there, whom they had managed to get before the Russians did. They had quite a level of expertise. These people were at White Sands for a while in '46 and eventually ended up in Alabama. We were involved with all the test procedures for Cape Canaveral. We launched the first satellite in February '58. It was an answer to Sputnik, but it took us 40 months to put something up in space. The first Explorer satellite was kind of fun. I worked in graphic engineering, which did illustrations. Mostly we worked on how to get to the moon. It was called Project Nova, but actually everything about it was used by the Apollo project. Our rocket was a much tubbier thing, more like the Soviet rockets, but basically the plan of taking off with a booster rocket, going around the earth, going around the moon, landing on the moon, and then going back up to the orbiter and bringing it back to earth, plus, the propulsion system based on unsymmetrical dimetholidozyne (which was von Braun's favorite rocket fuel) -- all of that was worked out at Huntsville in 1957 and '58. We also did a lot of stuff about Mars. Everyone was interested in rockets for military use, and they were so efficient at testing things that they were able to squirrel away hardware and stuff that could be used at the advent of NASA.

WM: You were right in the heart of things there.

CP: Yes, but when I got out, I went back to UCLA to finish my graduate work, moonlighting part time at Disney for awhile. Then that petered out because General Motors didn't want to sponsor some of the stuff Walt wanted to do, primarily a series on conservation which Walt thought was necessary at that time. General Motors said, 'We don't think that's a good idea.' Literally. So Walt broke up the unit that had been doing the documentaries, and I worked on Pluto [the animated dog] and stuff, but I really wanted to go back to school so I took off. A couple of days after I began school full time in '59, I was hired by Graphic Films. They made me an offer that was too tempting. I stayed there for six years, doing mostly Air Force films on space.