He was born April 8, 1942 in Los Angeles, California to Donald Trumbull, who was responsible for the visual effects in the original The Wizard of Oz (1939). Trumbull got his start at Graphic Films, the company responisble for short films created for NASA and the Air Force. His work there caught the attention of director Stanley Kubrick, who hired him to create footage seen on various monitors, but also the visuals for the "Star Gate" sequence that concludes the film.
He returned to the United States from London in the early 1970s, setting up his own effects company and handling the graphic effects of the 1971 version of Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, which directly led to his directing Silent Running, in which Earth's last forest is sent into space within geodesic domes, the intent to return it home once the world becomes capable of sustaining them again.
Although the film didn't fare well at the box office, Trumbull moved on to Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which led to he and Star Wars' John Dykstra coming aboard Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) to rescue it from what had become.a visual effects debacle by previous effects house Robert Abel & Associates.
Subsequent projects include Blade Runner (1982) and Brainstorm (1983), which was marred by the death of actress Natalie Wood during production. After that he moved away from Hollywood and decided to focus his energy on theme partk attractions, including Universal's Back to the Future. Eventually he returned to film effects with Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011) and The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (2018).
He passed away on February 7, 2022, with his daughter Amy announcing, "My dad, Doug Trumbull, died last night after a major two-year battle with cancer, a brain tumor and a stroke. He was an absolute genius and a wizard and his contributions to the film and special effects industry will live on for decades and beyond ... My sister Andromeda and I got to see him on Saturday and tell him that we love him and we got to tell him to enjoy and embrace his journey into the Great Beyond."