Destroying the Death Star — the Empire’s space station and superweapon in George Lucas’s “Star Wars” — was a signature moment for the visual effects artist Bruce Logan.
In the climactic scene of what is now known as “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” (1977), Luke Skywalker demolishes the Death Star by firing two proton torpedoes into it from his X-wing fighter, a triumph for the Rebel Alliance.
“Blowing up the Death Star is my greatest P.R. coup, but was in fact very low-tech,” Mr. Logan told the Los Angeles Post Production Group, a filmmakers’ organization, in 2020. He added that he found newer effects to have “an unsatisfying synthetic gloss.”
Mr. Logan — who was also a cinematographer and director — recalled that he could not film the Death Star’s detonation as if it were happening on Earth.
“When you shoot an explosion conventionally, with the camera straight and level, with forces of gravity and atmospherics acting on it, what you get is a mushroom cloud which doesn’t look like it’s exploding in outer space,” he wrote on Zacuto.com, a film equipment website, in 2015.
To achieve the needed effect, Mr. Logan manned a high-speed camera, which was surrounded by a sheet of plywood, with a hole cut out for the lens and a sheet of glass covering it. With the camera pointed upward, Joe Viskocil, a pyrotechnics specialist, set off a series of miniature bombs overhead, which created the illusion of the explosions occurring in zero gravity in outer space.
The bombs’ ingredients included black powder, gasoline, titanium chips and napalm — and the only protection the crew had was a grip holding a fire extinguisher.
“I do remember wiping some burning napalm off my arm,” Mr. Logan told the Manhattan Edit Workshop, a postproduction school, in 2019.
Mr. Logan died on April 10 in Los Angeles. His wife, Mariana Campos-Logan, confirmed the death but did not cite the cause or specify where in the city he died. He was 78.
Michael Bruce Sinclair Logan was born on May 14, 1946, in London. His father, Campbell, was a director for the BBC, and his mother, Louisa (Rogers) Logan, drove an ambulance in World War II during the Blitz.
Bruce studied math, physics and chemistry at Merchant Taylors’ School in Northwood, England. He started making animated films with toy soldiers, cars and lawn mowers when he was 12; he later drew cels for an animation company before being hired in 1965 as an animation artist for Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” While working on that film, which would open in 1968, he shadowed Douglas Trumbull, one of its special photographic effects supervisors.
“Doug thought so far out of the box that nobody knew how to say no to him, and he had the run of the studio,” Mr. Logan said in a tribute to Mr. Trumbull, who died in 2022. “He worked in the art department, the optical lab, the engineering shop, the model department, and I got to tag along and watch him create. What a ride!”
Mr. Logan’s work on “2001” included supervising the dramatic title sequence, which showed the sun rising over the earth and the moon to the strains of Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” He also shot and designed some of the mock computer readouts and the critical Jupiter Mission sequence.
Mr. Logan then moved into cinematography; among the films he worked on were several produced by the B-movie impresario Roger Corman, including “Big Bad Mama” (1974) and “Jackson County Jail” (1976). He took the “Star Wars” job with some reluctance because it meant returning to visual effects.
But the experience proved rewarding: Working under John Dykstra, Mr. Logan not only helped blow up the Death Star but also destroyed X-wings, TIE fighters (part of the Empire’s fleet) and Alderaan, the peaceful planet that is home to Princess Leia (played by Carrie Fisher).
“Full disclosure, I have to confess a fact, which I am much less proud of,” he wrote on Zacuto.com. “I also blew up Alderaan along with all its innocent inhabitants.”
In 1982, Mr. Logan was the cinematographer on “Tron,” a Disney science-fiction thriller directed by Steven Lisberger that mixed live action and computerized imagery to tell the story of a video game developer (Jeff Bridges) who hacks into his company’s computer to learn who stole his game, and who is then zapped into the computer.
“Without intimate knowledge of the animation process, I wouldn’t have been able to optimize the live-action photography,” Mr. Logan told American Cinematographer magazine in 2019. “Ultimately, I was creating a series of graphic images, so I had to completely eliminate motion blur and create infinite depth of field.”
Although “Tron” was a flop, it had its admirers.
“Nobody had seen anything like it,” Steve Rose wrote in The Guardian in 2022. “As such, ‘Tron’ paved the way for the current era of digitally enhanced spectacle” and anticipated issues including artificial intelligence, digital identity and personal data.”
After “Tron,” Mr. Logan’s work included visual effects (for films like “Firefox” and “Batman Forever,”); and cinematography (mostly for TV, including specials starring the comedians George Carlin and Jamie Foxx, and music videos with Rod Stewart and Prince). He also directed the feature films “Vendetta” in 1986 and “Lost Fare” in 2018.
He also raced in the Sports Car Club of America circuit in the 1970s and ’80s and brought his Mercedes-Benz E55 AMG to race at the Willow Springs International Raceway in Rosamond, Calif., a few months before he died.
Mr. Logan’s marriages to Kathryn Fenton and Margaret Mayer ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Campos-Logan, he is survived by a daughter, Mary Grace Logan, and a son, Campbell, both from his marriage to Ms. Mayer.
Not all of Mr. Logan’s memorable visual effects were in science-fiction films. In the 1980 comedy “Airplane!”, the opening title sequence showed the tail of a jet moving in and out of clouds to mimic the shark’s fin in “Jaws,” accompanied by that film’s ominous John Williams music. Then, all of a sudden, the full aircraft rises out of the clouds.
The sequence was added — after an early screening was poorly received — to give the audience a better idea about the type of comedy they were watching.
“Nobody had done anything like ‘Airplane!’ before, so we needed something to introduce it, so one of us came up with ‘Jaws’ and the John Williams music,” David Zucker, who wrote and directed the movie with his brother, Jerry, and Jim Abrahams, said in an interview. “We had no idea how to do it, but Bruce, wizard that he was, did.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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