Woodsy's World of Star Wars: Review of 'Industrial Light and Magic - Creating the Impossible'
I watched the ILM documentary Creating The Impossible, directed by Leslie Iwerks, last Tuesday night and was pleasantly surprised. Having worked there I thought “what could I possibly learn from this?” Oh was I wrong.
George started ILM in 1975 in Van Nuys to create the special effects for Star Wars. John Dykstra was its first employee, along with talents like Lorne Peterson, Jon Berg, and Bill George. Lorne Peterson also wrote a great book called “Sculpting a Galaxy” which I highly recommend checking out!
George said “ILM was born out of the rebirth of the beginning of cinema...It’s all a trick and we’re the tricksters.” And to think that George only got 30-40% of what he really wanted out of Star Wars, way back in 1977! After the success of Star Wars George decided to move ILM up to San Rafael in Marin County, he wanted a film making center that was outside of Hollywood. Little factoid, did you know that Jodie Foster’s Egg Productions moved into ILM’s old Van Nuys building?
ILM opened up its doors to the outside film community beginning with Steven Spielberg for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Technology was advancing and up until this point, ILM’s effects had all been traditional -- creature models, matte paintings, optical, live explosions, etc. But George saw the wave of the future and hired Ed Catmull, a Ph.D. in computer science, to start the CG department at ILM. It was a very risky but very visionary move to do. By 1982 ILM did a sequence of a planet imploding in Star Trek - The Wrath of Kahn, using motion blur, digital matte painting and compositing to create the first visual effects shot made for a motion picture. Did not know that...but again, not a Trekkie.
There are interviews by several of the visual effects supervisors that have been with ILM since the beginning. Dennis Muren is one that made the transition from traditional to CG. Dennis said “There’s no second chance. If anything goes wrong during something, it’s over, and you have to stop and start the entire process over again, and that is really difficult. And that takes a good team and a lot of concentration to get a high speed model to blow up quick enough and the right way. Or stop motion characters to walk across a scene over a period of a 12-hour shoot that’s only going to last 4 seconds. There can’t be anything going wrong, no light bulbs blown out, nothing can be bumped accidentally, between each frame of film. So it’s really hard to do that.” Precision and team work -- Dennis, you are soooo right.
ILM also pioneered effects being used for more than sci-fi, by using them in character-driven films like Forrest Gump, and as Ed Catmull states, “It’s not about special effects, it’s about telling a story.” Now I don’t want to give too much away, but there are great clips from The Abyss, Willow, Mask, Forrest Gump, Jumanji, etc. showing how all that magic is done!
I had the honor of working as a digital artist on both The Phantom Menace and Wild Wild West. On Phantom I worked on the same shot for I think THREE MONTHS, the pod race scene, AHA341A, a shot number permanently embedded in my brain. I didn’t even get a credit because I only worked on the show for FOUR MONTHS. George, there’s still hope with the Blu-ray release, K? And when I worked on Wild Wild West, I had to show a shot in dailies that I’d worked on, and the effect supervisor asked me what I had done to it. And you know what? When the supervisor doesn’t even know what you did, that’s the best compliment you can get (p.s. it was wire removals.)
There are interviews by Pixar’s Jim Morris, Steven Spielberg, Jerry Bruckheimer, Jon Favreau, and ILM vfx supervisors John Knoll, Roger Guyett, Ben Snow, Bill George and Dennis Muren. J.J. Abrams, who used ILM for the new Star Trek, calls ILM “a huge amazing team.”
Definitely worth a watch, the history of ILM is an epic drama in itself and anyone who’s worked there, knows what I mean!
Airing on Encore Channel, running time 60 minutes.
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