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Michael L. "Mike" Fink is the Academy Award-winning motion picture visual effects supervisor who provided special props and miniatures to the production of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, his first effects work for a major motion picture.

Fink's first film as Visual Effects Supervisor was WarGames (1983). This was followed by The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984, starring Peter Weller, Clancy Brown, Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli, and Robert Ito). In 1993, Fink earned an Academy Award nomination for his visual effects work on Batman Returns; he shared this nomination with fellow Star Trek effects alumni Craig Barron and John Bruno (as well as Dennis Skotak).

His other film credits include The Blob (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Braveheart (1995), Mars Attacks! (1996), Contact (1997), Vanilla Sky (2001), Road to Perdition (2002), and Jonathan Frakes' Clockstoppers (2002). In addition, he worked on X-Men (2000) and X2 (2003), starring Patrick Stewart, Famke Janssen, and Bruce Davison, and directed by Bryan Singer; he received Saturn Award nominations from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films for his work on both of these films, as well as Mars Attacks! He was also the second unit director for The Seventh Sign (1988) and Constantine, in addition to being the visual effects supervisor for those films.

Fink most recently worked on the visual effects for The Golden Compass, the 2007 film based on the novel by Philip Pullman. Fink and other members of his effects team won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects for their work on The Golden Compass.

As of 2021, he is a Professor Of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, where he holds the George Méliès Endowed Chair in Visual Effects.[1]

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