Industrial Light and Magic: a studio makes history
When George Lucas set up ILM in 1975, he did so in the realisation that he had to create a whole host of visual effects for his film, ‘Star Wars', which would have exceeded the capacity of any Hollywood studio at the time. So he made a virtue of necessity and, like a magician, he created a top hat out of which he and his untiring staff kept producing ever better rabbits in a fascinating variety of shapes and forms. The magician’s success is based on three inter-related factors: the creation of new techniques, research into what already exists, the creation ofa synthesis between the old and the new.
More names are associated with Industrial Light and Magic than just that of George Lucas. In the early years there were men such as John Dykstra and Ed Catmull. Together with his team Catmull developed a process in 1979 which six years later made it possible to produce the first digitally generated 3D creature - a knight who emerged from a medieval painting in the film ‘Young Sherlock Holmes’.
Dennis Muren, who won eight Oscars, switched to Macintosh and thus brought about the emancipation which led to a breakthrough in the dependence of the film-maker on com­puter scientists. This bite of the apple resulted in the creation of a new paradise with ILM making the ultimate leap into the digital era. Using Adope Photoshop software, the apprentice conjurers created the liquid metal creature for ‘Terminator 2: Judgement Day’ (1991). A year later, astonished viewers were able to witness the modification of human body parts on the screen for the first time in ‘Death Becomes Her’. Following the ‘India­ na Jones Saga’, ‘Jurassic Park’, ‘Casper’ and a host of other films, George Lucas finally considered that the technology he had not had available in the mid-8os was sufficiently well advanced for him to complete his ‘Star Wars’ trilogy. In ‘Phantom Menace’, ILM suc­ ceeded in creating a hybrid world which no longer copies reality but creates it anew.