Craig Caton

Craig Caton-Largent's career didn't start with a single breakthrough — it built, film by film, creature by creature, across one of Hollywood's most technically explosive periods. His early work placed him inside the practical effects ecosystem that dominated genre filmmaking before CGI took over, and he proved himself as both a fabricator and a performer in the puppeteer's sense: someone who can make an inanimate thing feel alive under pressure, on a live set, with a director watching. The mid-1980s through the 1990s were his peak run. He helped bring the Slimer ghosts to life for Ivan Reitman's *Ghostbusters* in 1984, a film that still holds up as a masterclass in blending comedy with creature work. Then came Tim Burton's *Batman Returns* in 1992 — the penguin army sequences required the kind of coordinated practical puppetry that don't happen without serious expertise. A year later, *Jurassic Park* (1993) put his raptor work in front of the largest audiences of his career. That kitchen scene — the one where the raptors stalk the kids through the industrial refrigerator light — wouldn't land the way it does without the physical weight his puppetry gave those animals. He co-founded Digital Domain, the VFX company that became a major industry player through the 1990s and beyond, which shows he wasn't just a craftsman but someone thinking about the business architecture of visual effects. His role as custodian of Spielberg's original E.T. puppet from 1994 to 2010 is, honestly, one of the more unusual long-term professional relationships in Hollywood — sixteen years caring for a single prop that carries enormous cultural weight. Six Academy Award nominations for Best Visual Effects followed him across this period. He's now Chair of 3D Animation & VFX at the New York Film Academy Los Angeles, translating all of it into curriculum (NYFA).