When I was at film school trying to invent CGI, a fellow student was heavily into special effects make-up. Various names kept cropping up in conversation with him: Rick Baker, Rob Bottin and Stan Winston. We subscribed to an American effects magazine that we avidly pored over through each quarterly publication. And then came along the issue that entirely rocked our fantasy forming world – Terminator.

Other students wanted to change the political landscape through exploring the human condition, we wanted to see frickin' killer robots spawned from the mind and made real by a mild mannered genius.

Stan Winston took what people thought they could do in film, dismantled it, reassembled it, and then set it on them, like a hungry raptor. He proved there are no borders to the human imagination, or unshootable movies, only those brave enough to accept something can be done and dedicated enough to explore how to do it.

These are just a few of his greatest creations, in no particular order.

The Terminator

Stan was involved in all the Terminator movies to some degree or another, and was even working on the pre-production for a new one recently. He was the one who created the exoskeleton that pursues Sarah Connor at the end, plus the heads and make-up that represent Arnold’s damaged appearance. The first film was pre-CGI and relied entirely on Stan’s work to make the Terminator believable, and after this movie, many in Hollywood wondered if there was anything he couldn’t achieve.

T-Rex, Jurassic Park

Most people remember this film for the groundbreaking CGI, but without Stan’s amazing full size T-Rex animatronics, many of the best scenes would have lacked the human interaction needed to involve the audience. It weighed 5 tons and was 34 feet long from head to toe; it’s the biggest of its kind ever created and when it stepped on the RVs in the movie, they really did flatten. The CGI in Jurassic Park was impressive for the time, but Winston’s T-Rex is timeless.

Alien Queen, Aliens

H.R. Giger designed the Alien, and a scary man-in-a-suit it really is, but nothing quite prepared people for what came out of Stan’s box of tricks in James Cameron's now seminal sequel, Aliens. It wasn’t just the scale of the alien queen that ate the cinemascope screen, but her entirely outlandish appearance and deceptive speed. Her knock-down and drag-out battle with robotically enhanced Sigourney Weaver is pure cinema magic, and it only works because the queen isn’t a man in a suit or anything approaching one.

Sarris, Galaxy Quest

Somewhere under this incredible make-up is actor Robin Sachs, but I defy anyone to recognise him in there. Perhaps this isn’t as extreme as the work done on Predator, but it’s a much more convincing alien than most movies offer us these days.

The Penguin, Batman Returns

Burton’s second Batman outing required that all memories of Burgess Meredith from the camp 60s TV show be erased, along with all the previous characters played by Danny DeVito. Winston created some impressive make-up to give Oswald Cobblepot a recognisable, yet distinctive look. It turned the character from a scheming aristocrat into something entirely more dangerous, and a worthy nemesis for Batman.

Predator

It’s a common complaint that people make about ‘aliens’ - that they can see they’re just a person underneath. I defy anyone to assume that with the incredible make-up work for the Predator done by Winston in both the first two movies. Brilliant direction by John McTiernan holds the full appearance of the creature till near the end, when we find out exactly how un-human he is under his armour. In many respects, this was a high benchmark in make-up design and execution that’s not been bettered.