From ‘Star Wars’ to ‘Jurassic World’, What’s Next?

Industrial Light & Magic turns 50 this year.

In those five decades, the company has continued to push the envelope with groundbreaking visual effects, from the T-1000 in “Terminator 2,” Davy Jones from “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” to the Tyrannosaurus Rex from “Jurassic Park.”

But none of these innovative creations would exist without George Lucas and “Star Wars.” ILM would not exist today, and without ILM, “Star Wars” would be a very different movie.

Lucas had a vision. Coming off the success of 1973’s low-budget hit “American Graffiti,” he wanted to shake up the status quo even more. But with “Star Wars,” his next project, he realized there wasn’t a company that could deliver his vision. That’s when his Industrial Light & Magic was launched.

“ILM was born out of necessity,” says ILM visual-effects supervisor John Knoll.

For “Star Wars,” Lucas spoke with “2001: A Space Odyssey’s” visual-effects artist Douglas Trumbull. His work was the closest in terms of sophistication to what Lucas wanted. But Lucas wanted more. He wanted dynamic energy and fast-moving cameras. But Trumbull was pursuing a directing career, so he suggested VFX pioneer John Dykstra.

Knoll explains, “John agreed to take on the project and started collecting this amazing group of artists, engineers and people with fairly different backgrounds, many had never really worked in film before.” They were industrial design experts. They were electronics and mechanical engineers and even musicians. Knoll says they had one common goal: “They set out to do something pretty bold and extraordinary.”

“Star Wars” delivered on all fronts and changed moviemaking and visual effects forever. But Lucas wanted to keep that group together. He had plans for a sequel that would be more ambitious than “Star Wars.”

Its sequel, “The Empire Strikes Back,” combined stop-motion creatures with the latest innovations in motion control and was yet another creative triumph. It didn’t end there because Lucas was already thinking ahead, this time to “Return of the Jedi.”

“George was thinking, wouldn’t it be great to keep this group together and make it a service to other filmmakers? He keeps the group together and keeps feeding him projects. They’ll continue to build experience and continue to build new technologies,” says Knoll.

And ILM did.

Knoll joined the company in 1986. A year earlier, they had just created the Stained Glass Knight for “Young Sherlock Holmes,” the first CGI-animated character created for a live-action, feature-length film. “I came to ILM because looking at the state of the visual-effects industry. ILM was where all the really exciting new things were happening, where they were really pushing the bounds of tech,” says Knoll. The company was committed to a very high level of art and freeing filmmakers from restrictions, a spirit that has continued to this day.

The dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park” were another leap forward in what ILM could deliver. At first, the idea was that the dinosaurs would be an evolution of stop-motion animation, the kind seen in “Dragon Slayer,” but that approach, according to Knoll, was limited in terms of how complex the shots would be. “There was talk about trying to use computer graphics for the Gallimimus herd because it would have been too many stop-motion puppets to do.”

Mark Depay and Steve Williams pushed to switch everything over to computer graphics. In the end, CG mixed with puppetry proved to be the solution that again revolutionized effects.

Gareth Edwards, director of “Jurassic Park: Rebirth,” calls the company sacred. “Dinosaurs don’t exist, and we had to shoot footage without any dinosaurs in it. You’d end up editing the piece, and you were just trying to make the relationships work between the characters and have the pacing correct. ILM started to deliver their visual effects, and one notch at a time, the film just got better and better.”

Edwards adds, “It was icing on the cake seeing a new T-Rex or Mosasaurus shot.” ILM also helped Edward overcome his biggest challenge — a 30-minute water sequence in which the main characters are attacked by a Mosasaurus pod.

Edwards says, “ILM were like, ‘We’re gonna do the best water that’s ever been done.’” And they delivered. Edwards recalls sending a video clip to screenwriter David Koepp. Two days later, Koepp wrote back, “Holy shit.” Seeing that, Edwards knew that he could pull the sequence off.

Also among the company’s recent innovations is ILM’s cutting-edge StageCraft LED wall technology. The concept for an LED wall had been talked about for several years, but it wasn’t until Disney+ launched the “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian” that the world got to see its game-changing technology and capabilities for the first time. The LED wall that surrounds the actors with realistic scenes was used
for roughly half the scenes in “The Mandalorian” and propelled virtual production to the forefront of the industry.

Knoll explains, “Stagecraft was an answer to a tricky question of how do you replicate certain kinds of lighting that are really hard to do any other way? If you’re in a vehicle flying through a complex lighting environment, you expect to see that environment lighting up the characters and the set and changing on a per-frame basis. There aren’t any good ways to fake that.”

The team took Image Based Lighting and brought that into the real world. “It’s a powerful lighting instrument, and when used well, can be totally convincing,” says Knoll.

Whether the artists at ILM are depicting something that doesn’t exist, or stretching superheroes as in “Fantastic Four: The First Steps,” the goal remains the same. “You want to try to make the shot look good and have an authenticity to it,” says Knoll.

Janet Lewin, Senior Vice President, General Manager and Head of Industrial Light & Magic, adds, “ILM is up for the challenge and really trying to position ourselves to be great partners to storytellers and all mediums and really expanding our offerings so that it is not as narrowly defined as visual effects.”

As the company seeks to diversify the types of projects they work on, great opportunities have emerged. They have ventured even further into entertainment adjacent projects and created digital versions of the Swedish pop band ABBA for “ABBA Voyage.”

In addition to creating the band for “ABBA Voyage,” ILM has been working with bands to provide graphics for The Sphere. Says Lewin, “We intentionally have taken the step to converge all of our subbrands under ILM more intentionally, so our immersive brand is now really part of ILM, and that allows us to be more proactive in going out to our creative partners and offering end-to-end services.”

ILM has grown from a team of 25 artists working out of a warehouse in Van Nuys to a company that employs over 3,500 VFX artists across the globe. At any given time, they’re working on multiple projects. Next up is Guillermo Del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” which is headed to the Venice Film Festival.

Says Lewin, “We’re always inspired by a great, innovative and creative challenge like that of ‘ABBA Voyage,’ and it’s sort of become a calling card for us, for this, burgeoning new line of business.”

As for AI, Knoll says the threat of things becoming obsolete has always existed. “We’re a company that’s never been afraid of change. We were founded on the idea of new thinking, and is there a better way? And not being afraid or resistant to that because we’re often disrupting ourselves, and in that regard, I think that machine learning and AI are going to be another version of [finding a better way].”