American animator, visual effects artist, and computer graphics pioneer Con Pederson—a pivotal figure behind 2001: A Space Odyssey—has died at age 91. His son, Eric Pederson, confirmed that he passed away following complications from Alzheimer’s disease at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California.

Born Conrad Alan Pederson in Minnesota on April 15, 1934, he was immersed in science fiction from an early age. His family moved to Inglewood in 1943, where his parents worked on bomber and fighter assembly lines during World War II. By his teens, Pederson was writing his own sci-fi stories. After two years at Los Angeles City College, he studied art and anthropology at UCLA, where a chance encounter with the theater department introduced him to animation—setting the course for his career.

Pederson made a pair of student films and was soon hired at Disney, where he met aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1956, he used those connections to work under von Braun as a graphic engineer, illustrating rockets and spaceflight concepts. After his service, he returned briefly to Disney before joining Graphic Films, a Southern California company producing educational and promotional work for NASA.

At Graphic Films, Pederson found his calling. In 1964, he wrote and directed To the Moon and Beyond, a short film narrated by Rod Serling and screened at the Transportation and Travel Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair. For the project, he hired a young Douglas Trumbull, who painted a rotating spiral galaxy—an early glimpse of techniques that would soon transform cinema.

The film caught the attention of Stanley Kubrick, who invited Pederson to his Manhattan apartment to review storyboards and ideas for 2001. In 1965, Kubrick hired Pederson and Trumbull, sending them to England, where they spent the next two and a half years helping to realize one of the most ambitious films ever made. Working alongside effects supervisors Wally Veevers and Tom Howard, Pederson played a central role in creating the film’s planets, star fields, and spacecraft.

Pederson ran what the team called the production’s “war room,” planning and tracking shots through an effects process where individual Individual shots could require eight to ten elements, layered onto camera negatives one at a time over months. In those days, compositing was done in optical printers instead of digitally as it is now. If Kubrick wasn’t satisfied—and sometimes he wasn’t—the process began again from scratch. The hard work paid off: Kubrick received the only Academy Award of his career, for Best Visual Effects in 1969. In Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, author Michael Benson wrote that 2001 “absolutely would not have happened without Con.”

That’s where I met him. The year was 2004, and Con Pederson was one of the animators I helped train during my stay there in the training department. Pederson struck me as being much older than his peers in the animation department, and I wondered why he wasn’t running the place. At 70 years old, he was by far the oldest technical director we had (unlike other studios, every technical artist at Rhythm & Hues was dubbed a ‘technical director’). He was approachable and friendly, very good natured, easy to talk to, and understood everything the first time you told him. It was during my conversations with him that he casually dropped the fact that he had been the FX supervisor for Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece. I felt then that it was an honor merely to be in his presence, and I told him so. It remains one of my fondest memories of my time at the studio.

Pederson is survived by his son, Eric; his second wife, Carole; his first wife, Sharleen; and his grandchildren, Alexandre and Viviane. His legacy lives on in the many visuals he created for 2001, including the motion control shots used to photograph the movie’s many amazing miniatures, but most vividly in 2001’s “Stargate” sequence—imagery that still feels like it arrived from the future, because in many ways, it did.