"Eileen Moran, a visual effects producer who helped create the look of a bevy of blockbuster movies — from the ethereal world of “Avatar” down to King Kong’s 460 billion strands of wind-rustled specially lighted fur — died on Sunday in Wellington, New Zealand. She was 60.
The cause was cancer, her sister Janet Hamill said.
Ms. Moran worked closely with the director James Cameron on “Avatar” and with the director Peter Jackson on the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “The Hobbit,” which is to be released in American theaters this month.
She had set out to be an actress, but that brought her only nonpaying jobs in Off Off Broadway plays. So she became an assistant on a commercial, then moved up to production manager for commercials. She found her way to Hollywood, where she was hired by Digital Domain, a special effects house partly owned by Mr. Cameron. There she worked on award-winning Budweiser ads, including the one in which an army of ants lug a bottle of Bud down an ant hole.
In 2001 she joined Weta Digital, a visual effects company partly owned by Mr. Jackson. She was a leader of the team that won an Academy Award for best achievement in visual effects in 2010, for Mr. Cameron’s “Avatar.”
In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Cameron said Ms. Moran had “shepherded some of the milestone films of her generation to completion.”
Ms. Moran was a co-producer of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” the first of three planned films based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s book “The Hobbit.” Illness prevented her from attending the film’s world premiere on Nov. 28 in New Zealand.
She helped ride herd on the team of hundreds that did the visual effects for Mr. Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy: “The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001), “The Two Towers” (2002) and “The Return of the King” (2003). Among the other films to which she contributed are “The Adventures of Tintin” (2011), “Fight Club” (1999), “I, Robot” (2004), “X-Men: The Last Stand” (2006), “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011) and Mr. Jackson’s “King Kong” (2005).
“King Kong” involved more than attention to each strand of fur. To replicate the New York City of more than 70 years earlier, all buildings built after 1933 had to be removed by means of advanced computer trickery and replaced with three-dimensional images of the buildings that stood at the time. In a 2005 interview with The Gold Coast Bulletin, an Australian newspaper, Ms. Moran said, “We had great aerial reference photographs taken in the 1930s, and we matched our 3-D city exactly to the photographs.”
Each of more than 90,000 buildings was unique, down to smoking chimneys, fire escapes and door knobs. The varying effects of weather on buildings of different ages was noted.
Ms. Moran’s role in all this was broad. “I oversee the visual effects production of the film,” she said in an interview with The Daily News in New York in 2006. “I oversee the crew, review the work with the director and visual effects supervisor, oversee recruiting, attend the visual effects reviews with the team, review assignments and work, troubleshoot, communicate with each department, ensure delivery, manage the budget.”
Eileen Mary Moran was born in Queens on Jan. 23, 1952, and grew up in Lindenhurst, on Long Island. After studying drama at the State University of New York at New Paltz, she returned to New York City to try acting before switching to commercial production. Her sister said Ms. Moran had delighted in the Budweiser creatures she helped create: beer-loving ants; three frogs who croaked, in turn, “Bud,” “Weis,” and “Er”; and, of course, Larry the Lizard.
When a friend e-mailed her about a possible job on “Lord of the Rings,” she traveled to New Zealand for an interview and, she later said, was surprised to be offered a job. She quickly became essential in necessary tasks like ensuring that trolls had credible dirt beneath their fingernails and that the eyes of Gollum were appropriately bloodshot, Mr. Jackson told Onfilm, a New Zealand magazine, in 2003.
In the Daily News interview, Ms. Moran described the moment that Gollum sprang to computer-generated life: “It was hit or miss for a while, and then one day he was there on screen and you just knew we finally had him and everything was going to be O.K.”
Ms. Moran, a single mother, lived with her two children, Jack and Ava, in a Victorian house in Wellington overlooking the Pacific. They survive her, as do her father, John G. Moran, and three sisters: Ms. Hamill, Patty Mathes and Jackie Meyer.
Of all the commercials she worked on, Mr. Moran said, her favorite was one made for Guinness in 1996 and was based on the feminist slogan “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Her team scanned a real fish into the computer to get the scaly texture right.
“Afterwards,” she said, “we made a great meal from the trout.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
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Special effects wizard Eileen Moran R.I.P.
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