For decades Tom Proost '77 has been a leading visual artist in Hollywood. It's a career that has given him plenty of reasons to smile.

The man in the left of the frame is raising his paper cup as if giving a toast, grinning in a way that suggests he knows something you do not. It is a remarkable grin, one that is equally giddy and reverent and impish. Maybe the man has discovered the secret to happiness, or maybe he has stumbled upon some sort of magic slot machine that never stops dispensing fulfillment and joy.

The man with the cup is Tom Proost ’77, one of Hollywood’s most respected visual effects artists over the last several decades. And in this picture, one of many behind-the-scenes images shared with us from his personal collection, he is on the set of The Mummy, working with his colleagues to build a wall. The year is 1999. Brendan Fraser is about to star in the iconic role of archaeologist Rick O’Connell for the first time, a performance that will earn him a Best Actor nomination from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films.

The Mummy – or any good movie for that matter – does not happen without visionaries like Tom. If you’ve seen the film you undoubtedly remember the spellbinding moment where the face of a monster morphs to life in the middle of a desert sandstorm. We tend to think of magic as a phenomenon rooted in unexplainable happenstance or in the supernatural. However, in Hollywood, magic is a goal, the endgame, a tangible, executable objective born in the wonderfully creative brains of people like Tom.

And to achieve on-screen magic you must first build a wall.

Maybe this is why he and his co-workers are grinning so unabashedly in this picture. They know their goal is possible. They know what’s about to come. And they know it’s going to be awesome.

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Tom Proost’s smile is probably not the first thing you notice when studying his photo archive. This can be forgiven seeing as how most of the pictures depict cinematically-historic moments in the early stages of their creation.

There’s the snapshot of him piecing together the house from the 2004 dark comedy Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events starring Jim Carrey. What you probably notice first is the house itself, a chaotic, LEGO-set-meets-Lincoln-Log-meets-Jenga hybrid, everything oversized, the entirety of it built atop a stained pallet and c-clamped to a drafting table.

Then there’s the picture from the early 2000s, Tom’s blue jeans caked in saw dust, a pencil clutched in his fingers as he works on Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, his body uncomfortably bent beneath a wing of Annakin Skywalker’s Starfighter.

The way the eye is immediately drawn to the work-in-progress is a testament to Tom’s craft. After all, how can you possibly look anywhere else when the most famous droid in the history of robots – R2-D2 – is right there staring back at you?

However, in these photos and so many others – Tom working on the movie A.I., Tom working on The Nightmare Before Christmas, Tom working on Coraline, Tom working on Wendell & Wild – you begin to notice it again and again. That smile. Aging gracefully over the decades while always maintaining the same excitement. The same confidence. The same zest for life. And for making magic.

The more you sit with these images, the more you study them, the more Tom Proost’s grin and the twinkle in his eye is what leaves a lasting impression.

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At Prairie, a student who starts in Early School or Kindergarten and goes all the way through to high school graduation is known as a lifer. It’s an impressive accomplishment that requires commitment, sacrifice, and hard work. Tom Proost was one the first to ever do it, an original lifer, a proud graduate from the Class of 1977.

“It was 1965 when I first walked into the half circle of Prairie, still under construction,” he recalls. “There’s a photograph from that day that captured my father and I, hand-in-hand. I was six-years-old and about to begin a journey that would shape the next twelve years of my life.”

His time at Prairie, as it turned out, would shape a lot more than that.

Tom loved going to school at TPS. He remembers the uniforms, the wooden lockers, the red brick. He recalls being influenced by the transcendent artistry of Frank Lloyd-inspired architecture even at a young age. And while Prairie’s iconic buildings might have been what he noticed first, they were not what made an indelible impression on his life. That was the people – Dave Drewek, Virginia Jensen, Dick Zimmerman, Adrianne Paffrath, Pat Badger, Ralph Henkes, Bruce Stewart – who cared for and encouraged him, each playing an enormous role in shaping the person Tom became.

Like many art-loving students, he learned at the brush (and easel and potter’s wheel) of Drewek, and thanks to the beloved teacher’s constant encouragement, Tom discovered a passion for the visual arts.

Yes, he loved art from an early age, but it wasn’t until later that those initial impressions congealed into a foundational and profound gratitude.

“It was in college that I truly realized how spoiled I had been,” says Proost. “How many primary schools offer glassblowing and aluminum casting alongside ceramics and photography?”

His junior year at Prairie Tom was awarded the Art Department Student Achievement Award. Following graduation, he attended the Minneapolis College of Art & Design, calling it “one of the few institutions that could rival the facilities and creative freedom I had experienced at Prairie.”

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It’s important here that we return one final time to the notion of lasting impressions. While perhaps not the first thing you notice in these pictures, Tom’s grin is the feature that best captures the joy his creative work has provided. A similar comparison can be made to Tom’s experience at Prairie. While his time in Wind Point was certainly influential and filled with many highlights, it would be years before Prairie’s most lasting impression was fully revealed.

After college, he moved to the West Coast where his work led him to the film industry, and what followed was a brilliant career in which he’s been involved with all aspects of cinema from concept art in early development to editing in post-production. His work has earned numerous accolades, including an Outstanding Creative Environment Award in an Animated Feature at the 2022 Visual Effects Society Awards where his team won for Wendell & Wild: The Scream Fair.

While living in San Francisco in the early nineties he met the love of his life, Mary Keyes, and for the next thirty years they made their home in the Bay Area while raising their two daughters, Oona and India.

“Met”, it must be noted, really means “was reacquainted with” – Keyes is a Prairie graduate from the Class of 1978. The two had known each other in Wind Point years earlier, but it was in San Francisco where they fell in love, got married, and built a life.

“My connection to Prairie is especially meaningful,” Proost says. “This school not only prepared me for a creative and fulfilling career, but it also introduced me to my future wife and became the foundation of the life we built together. For that and for so much more I will always be deeply grateful.”

So, yes, when studying the personal archives of Tom Proost, take time to dwell on the intricacies of the worlds he creates. Just don’t miss the chance to also appreciate the appreciation of the man in the paint-splattered clothes smiling back at the camera.

 

To see a complete rundown of Tom’s film projects, visit his IMDB page. To see detailed imagery of his intricate creations, visit his personal website.