Original subtitles

*

Industrial light and magic

has created some of the most iconic imagery

that cinema has ever seen.

For the past 35 years,

they have transported us to worlds beyond

the reaches of our imagination.

Their pioneering and breathtaking visual effects

have transformed the way we see movies.

We're all jaded when we go to movies.

I mean, we watch all kinds of stuff

that we aren't suppose to be looking for.

We're looking for the seams,

we're looking for cracks.

But you know, when they make you forget all that,

and pull you into the magic that is the story,

then they've succeeded.

Through their masterful blend of art and technology,

they have revolutionized movie-making

and helped to define popular culture.

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

From "ET" to the amazing work they did on "Transformers".

ILM loves to find different ways

of telling stories visually.

They've made us wonder.

They've made us marvel.

They've made us believe.

It's wonderful to know that the tools are there

to really begin to get what's in here,

you know, out there to the-- into the world.

And ILM has been leading the charge

in that quest since it began.

The digital era that dominates modern day visual effects

was ushered in by ILM.

Hundreds of artists work collectively

to create complex imagery

from a variety of elements that combine

to perform a masterful illusion.

Action.

Through their technology, ILM has given filmmakers

the means to achieve anything.

Photorealistic characters and environments

can be created from scratch,

such as on "Iron Man 2" and "Avatar".

But these high-tech advancements

have not come easy,

nor have they come overnight.

The roots of today's cinema magic

goes back over 100 years.

But the revolution of modern visual effects

began with a story in a galaxy far, far away.

Industrial Light and Magic was formed in 1975,

to realize the complicated special effects challenges

for a new film called "Star Wars".

A space adventure dreamed up

by young filmmaker George Lucas.

His vision was unlike anything Hollywood had heard before.

With "Star Wars",

I wanted to do an action picture.

I wanted to do something where I can pan with the spaceships.

I want to do it with really short cuts.

There's a lot of rhythm, a lot of pace,

a lot of movement on the screen.

I want it to be a very, very cinematic.

And at that point in time that was impossible.

You just could not do that with special effects.

So, when the studio said

"Well how are you going to do this?"

I said, "Oh don't worry we'll figure it out."

you know I got it, you know,

but I had no idea what I was going to do.

At the time, the special effects departments

at the major studios were all but gone.

So George Lucas was able to buy up old equipment

for pennies on the dollar,

and set up ILM in a Van Nuys California warehouse.

With 20th Century Fox onboard,

George Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz

enlisted photographic effects expert John Dykstra

to lead the effort.

Dykstra brought together a rag-tag group

of college students, artists and engineers

whose mixed skills in photography,

model-making, and mechanics

would set the stage for the fantastical space saga.

Creating ILM to do the work for "Star Wars"

was like gambling high odd bets.

We knew we were taking a huge number of risks.

We were incredibly naive to think

that we were going to be successful in doing that.

And we were incredibly fortunate

that George and even Fox in it's own way,

were willing to back us.

When I read the script,

I was just thinking, "my god, what is this movie?"

all these different genres are kind of together

in this massive space film,

and you're reading like the last 30 or 40 pages

and every page is full of another effect shot

of the battle.

Every page it's like-- this thing will never get done.

When I first read the script for "Star Wars",

I think I came across a few lines that were worrisome.

The description,

unlike anything you've ever seen before,

to most studio executives and to producers

and even to directors, was daunting.

We had 365 shots to do for this movie,

which had never really been done for an effects movie.

It was really fun because we all knew we could do it.

We had this nexus of talent that was just outrageous.

To create a believable universe

in the pre-digital age,

known as the photochemical era

ILM had to advance the use of traditional

handcrafted effects techniques,

such as animation and rubber-mask creature work.

Artists would use matte paintings

to increase the scope and production value

of a scene by extending environments

painted on glass that would be photographed

and combined with live action elements.

Detailed miniatures and models were built

and shot against blue screen

to allow the placement

of other elements into the scene.

In a process called optical compositing.

ILM retooled a dormant optical printer

that allowed for a record number of separate filmstrips

to be re-photographed and combined

onto a single layer of film.

I knew what I was up against

and I knew how I wanted to do it.

But I was constantly bumping up

against the technology ceiling.

Sometimes you'd have as many as a hundred

different elements going through

and it would take 24 hours to do it

and if you made one mistake,

with one element, you had to start over again.

There's no second chance.

If anything goes wrong during something,

it's over and you have to sort of 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 in the right way.

Or stop motion characters

to walk across the scene over a period of a 12 hour shoot

and it's only going to last four seconds.

There can't be anything go wrong.

No light bulbs can blow out.

No-- nothing can be bumped accidently,

you know between each frame of film.

So it's really hard to do that.

It had to look real.

And so that was the trick.

We would paint ourselves into a corner

and then have to invent our way out of it.

We all knew we could depend on each other.

There was this spirit of camaraderie

and so many of us gave our best ideas to the show.

John Dykstra designed the revolutionary Dykstraflex.

This computer controlled system

allowed for the programming of dynamic

and repeatable camera moves.

The dykstraflex facilitated the combining

of numerous elements into a single, dynamic shot,

freeing up the stationary camera

that has been the norm in model photography

for over 100 years.

It was like we were in Florence during the renaissance.

There were so few places that did

that type of visual effects

and there were so few artists that could do it.

I was very rare, very wonderful

and it was a rebirth of the-- the industry.

"Star Wars" was the beginning

of the renaissance of visual effects.

And "Star Wars" woke up the sleeping giant.

George anthropologically

looked out at the world and said,

"What's missing here?"

* ["Star Wars" theme playing]

The first day that I saw "Star Wars",

I was one of those people,

along with my wife Cheryl,

that saw it and immediately went back and got

into the two hour line again to see it right away.

We saw it twice on the first day,

and it was just this transformative,

mind-blowing, cinematic experience.

And I called George and he said,

"well, unfortunately we only got maybe 30, 40 percent

of what I really wanted there."

I'll never forget seeing "Star Wars" for the first time.

I was in film school and it was like,

I was there on opening weekend at the Chinese Theater,

standing in line for six hours.

And the way that that film entertained the audience

was unlike any film in history.

[announcer] from the world famous Chinese Theater

come the stars of the biggest box office success

in motion picture history.

I think the success of "Star Wars"

opened the doors for a whole series of genres of film,

that hadn't been done before because people

simply couldn't figure out how to make the images.

ILM was born out of sort of a rebirth

of the beginning of cinema, which is to say,

it's-- it's all a trick.

And we're in the business of-- we're the tricksters.

The historic success of "Star Wars"

allowed George Lucas to establish a filmmaking center

outside of Hollywood.

He relocated to Marin county in northern California,

and eventually built Skywalker Ranch.

ILM would set up shop

in the nearby town of San Rafael.

Inhabiting a nondescript building

known as Kerner Optical,

their home until 2005.

They immediately began work on the next "Star Wars" film,

"The Empire Strikes Back".

All in all, the real impendence of ILM

was to keep a core group of creative people

and the highly technological environment

they needed functioning.

It was really clear that,

in order for ILM to sustain

we did have to find a model that would work

for becoming a viable business

and working for multiple filmmakers.

ILM, opened its doors to the outside film community,

becoming the first independent visual effects studio

to realize the visions of directors

with unique stories to tell.

First film I collaborated with ILM on

was "Raiders of The Lost Ark".

Most of the effects of Raiders came at the end

when they opened the ark of the covenant,

and the effects involved you know, creating

the power of God I guess.

What was coming out of the actual ark, the spirits.

There were a lot of challenges posed,

I mean I wanted a scene where the one bad Nazi's face

kind of implodes

and where Toht's head melts,

and where Belloq's head explodes.

I didn't know how to do this,

and I just left it to these guys that had done "Star Wars".

I figured well if they can do "Star Wars"

they can certainly melt a head.

And they did figure out how to melt this wax head

they built, it was kind of genius.

And that was all the beginnings of my relationship with ILM.

While ILM continued to push the boundaries

of photochemical effects,

George Lucas could see the potential

for an entirely new way

of creating cinema magic.

In the same way George had so much vision

about marrying computers to cameras and optical printers,

he felt that there were probably ways

to create all the kinds of things he did

in "Star Wars" in the computer.

He felt that there were ways

to do editing with computers.

He thought there were ways to create

and manipulate music with computers,

and those three things led him to start

the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Division

that he hired Ed Catmull to start.

I was asked to bring in technologists

and computer scientists and wizards of various sorts,

to bring this-- into this industry.

Among PhD students Ed Catmull's early advancements

in computer technology

was the ability to create smooth curved surfaces

and wrap textures around them.

This was a pioneering leap

in the rudimentary world of computer graphics

known as CG.

I think their charter was to make a system

that might be able to make images,

ultimately images onto film that look photo real.

And in the process of that, the Apple came out.

And Dennis Muren had said,

"Gee, can I take six months off

and just learn how to use this Apple?"

so he, was the one that first put his foot in the water

and learned what Ed and the guys were doing.

And that started the link,

so that I could transfer the technology

that the computer division was developing

over into ILM, which is where it was meant to be.

It was a very risky thing certainly

for George to fund this,

and also very visionary

because it all really did pay off.

Today's powerful computer generated imagery

owes it's roots to this early CG group,

who by 1982 were able to prove their various skills

to create a sequence in "Star Trek: Wrath of Khan".

While developing hardware and software,

they spent five months advancing texture mapping,

motion blur, digital matte painting

and compositing programs to create

the first visual effects shot

made in the computer for a motion picture.

It was mind-blowing for the time,

and now of course it looks old fashion.

But it was part of earning the way in.

And the minute Dennis Muren saw the types of things

that could be done in computer graphics,

it led to Dennis using computer graphics

to create the stained-glass man in "Young Sherlock Holmes".

Dennis came over to us and said,

why don't we try it in computer animation.

And this was very innovative

and very forward thinking.

It was really exciting.

I mean it was a lot of work

because back in the day we didn't have the tools.

I literally had to take the footage

and project it onto my computer screen

and I matched-- animated the camera move by hand.

I don't know if I've ever worked harder

on six shots in my life.

But it was worth it because when

"Young Sherlock Holmes" came out,

people who worked in the special effects industry

had no idea how it was done.

The stained-glass knight

was the first computer generated character

in a motion picture,

and the film was nominated for an academy award

for best visual effects.

A testament to the growing impact

of computer technology.

ILM's work in stop-motion animation

and optical effects would advance further

into the digital realm with George's next movie,

a fantasy epic he asked Ron Howard to direct.

Dennis Muren called George and I

over to his office there at ILM and he said,

"we're beginning to use computers

to work with film digitally."

the first time I ever--

you know, heard that phrase used,

to sort of blend film images.

So there was this one transformation

that we needed to make in the movie.

I assumed we'd have to do it

the way werewolf transformations

had always been done with dissolves, cuts.

And he thought we could do it in one shot,

which was a really interesting notion to me.

And he said, "I can't guarantee it's going to work,

but you know it just might."

and it was the first morphing shot ever done.

And it really was more like, kind of magic

that you see on stage where there's no camera trickery

it just happened.

And of course there was so much technology behind it.

It was all breakthrough stuff.

That was-- that was amazing for me.

By the late 1980s,

the computer was threatening the analog ways of old.

The Lucasfilm computer group

had developed an astounding array of tools

that remain today's industry standard.

The first digital editing system,

the first digital audio editing system,

a film laser scanner

and a powerful graphics computer

for digital compositing and high-resolution imagery.

The Pixar image computer

and it's processing software called renderman,

enabled the group to create a breakthrough

computer animated short film,

"Andre and Wally B",

which inspired them to pursue their far off goal

of a full length animated feature film.

At the time, as the vagaries for finance come up and down

George realized he couldn't afford all of this,

because there was so many things going on,

and so we had some meetings with George and said,

"We really want to make an animated film."

and he said, "Well that's not what I want to do now."

He wanted the technology,

so we started down the path of selling off the group

to be a separate company, which is what became Pixar.

So we set up our own CG group,

within ILM instead of Lucasfilm,

that's purpose was to use CG work only for films,

and it was great.

And it took a couple of years or so to really get it going.

We did some wire removal stuff

and eventually we did "The Abyss".

It was "The Abyss" that I think, in many ways,

put a larger stake in the ground

for the notion of digital characters

in live-action films created by the computer.

It ended up being about 90 seconds of animation.

It used a mix of computer graphics

and traditional optical compositing techniques

so, it was kind of a transitional step.

That was something very new for us.

There were not a lot of established procedures

for doing any of this work at the time.

So, we just dove into it

and were making it up as we went along.

It was just so exciting to be able to see

that what had been a promise for so long,

and so difficult to do

because nobody had ever done it before.

The tools were now in place,

the software was in place.

The hardware was sort of in place.

It was a matter of applying them.

What happened after "The Abyss" came out

was a number of projects that had been sort of circling

needing effects that couldn't have been accomplished before,

really started to rise up.

One of them came out as a direct result of "The Abyss",

which was "Terminator 2".

After Jim Cameron felt that

we had successfully created what he wanted

for "The Abyss" with CG animation,

um he then created a character in "Terminator 2"

that had to be done in computer graphics.

I think that was the real breakthrough film also for CG.

We did all our work with digital compositing

for the first time.

There's no sign of any sort of matte line around anything,

or any grain mismatching that used to tip people off

to an effects shot.

It looked like it was right in the scene.

So we got 52 shots in it.

And most of the people I don't think

had any idea how we did that work.

In order to create the shape-shifting

t-1000 terminator,

ILM employed a revolutionary laser scanning process

to capture Robert Patrick's form and expressions

that would enable them to animate

and model a realistic computer version of the actor.

It was a lot of breakthroughs

that we had to do to get that show done.

To get the CG to work.

All the reflection maps on it,

and not have it just rip it's geometry apart.

And being able to pan the computer camera

to match the background live action camera.

And so we can follow the guys feet

as he's walking across the checkerboard floor,

and up from that grows this head.

And that was really, really tough stuff to do.

You know it was on the cutting edge.

So everybody in this industry is saying,

"wow everything's changing now."

so then there's this general awareness

that the technology is coming into this industry.

So with that film it made the awareness

that something big is coming.

I was perfectly happy to do the dinosaurs.

The technique that Phil Tippett

had honed to a fine point.

And we had settled on that for "Jurassic Park".

Personally I didn't think the CG was ready

to do "Jurassic Park"

for at least the close ups of the dinosaur.

I thought maybe we could do like some stampede sequences.

Cause what computers are good at is,

like in a word processor

you can clone something a million times,

you can copy a word and duplicate it

100 times on the page or anything you want.

Well it's true also with models

and so you can do it with dinosaurs.

You could make one Gallimimus dinosaur,

and clone 20 of them

and have them all running with the same run cycle.

That's the sort of thing that's really hard to do

with stop motion or anything like that.

But we started doing these tests in CG

before the show was going on.

And our tests started looking better and better.

Until one day Dennis Muren came over to me and said,

"you know I really think we should do this in the computer."

and let me shoot a test and show you.

Dennis was working off in the corner.

We were off going along the normal route.

Dennis then got the audience with Steven,

and part of it is to convince Steven

and part of was me saying,

"we can do this, I will guarantee it,

it'll be fabulous."

the test was a herd of running Gallimimuses,

and he didn't flesh them out.

He just basically put the bones in motion.

It didn't have that kind of artificial look,

it was completely realistic.

It looked like skeletons had come to life

and were just running throughout Hawaii.

And all the onus of stop-motion photography

was suddenly eradicated.

We were both kind of wondrous

about what this was promising this industry.

We literally didn't know from one day to another

how stuff was going to look.

Everyday we'd be looking at the dallies

and saying did we do this?

Did people make these images?

We had never seen anything like this before, you know.

Where's the trickery?

We've been seeing movies for you know, 80 years?

There's nothing there, it looks real.

A visual effects shot starts

with a line in the script that describes something.

Let's say a dinosaur runs across the field.

You start by going on the live action set,

and shooting what's called a plate.

The plate is the background

that you're ultimately gonna insert

that digital character in this example.

The plate comes back to the artists,

they create a virtual topography

that reflects what they've seen in that shot.

They build a character in the computer.

They build its bones, they build its structure.

They then come up with surfaces and skins for it.

They color it, they give it eyes,

they give it motion, they give it fingernails,

they rig it so that it can be animated.

So they take that photograph background plate.

They take that character,

and they animate the character

in the computer space

to fit into that photographic plate.

When that's done to the director's satisfaction

they actually composite it into the scene.

Once it's composited into the scene

it is filmed out of the computer,

and cut into the film.

And hopefully everybody loves it in the movie house.

Here there was not even going to be a thought

in the audience's mind that what they were seeing

was not absolutely real.

And because Stan Winston did this amazing job

of creating full-size life replicas of a t-rex

we were able to effortlessly cut together

the digital dinosaurs

with the Stan Winston full-size dinosaurs.

And the audience sometimes was confused

as to which was which.

The major breakthrough really was

when Steve bought off on the idea of making that leap

from analog to digital.

And that really is what changed everything.

Once we did those dinosaurs

I saw that we had unlimited possibilities.

From the point of view of the industry,

the turning point was "Jurassic park".

When "Jurassic park" happened then

that was like this big switch was thrown.

It was like the world has changed.

It started kind of a revolution

and an evolution that began to move faster

than the speed of light.

It's-- it's a dinosaur.

I was amazed at how much ILM was able to accomplish

and go beyond the dinosaurs,

with everything else they did

in the next several years.

Transferring the culture from the analog culture

to a digital culture was huge, huge problem.

Lots of pain, lots of heartache,

lots of emotions for people

who were getting crunched in the shift.

It caused concern for the people

who were used to doing traditional effects.

You know would their jobs become obsolete someday?

When I started working in computer graphics training,

they referred to me as going to work for the dark side.

The model shop were threatened by this--

by this whole, division that was growing up.

And I was one of the few people

who made the first jump into CG from the model shop.

Since then there have been many,

and we've all been-- most,

on the whole, been very successful.

But at first it was not considered

to be loyal to the shop.

I had an interesting experience

where we had a shot in the movie that was just really bad.

It was an optical composite,

and we re-did the comp with some frustration

and people didn't want to do it with digital, with Photoshop,

and it was like night and day.

So I showed this to one of the old timer optical guys

who had done it the first time.

Showed him both versions and I said,

"which one do you like?"

cause I wanted to bring him into the digital world,

and he liked-- he picked the old one.

And I thought what the heck are you seeing?

What's going on?

And I realized then there was a problem here.

You know, there's fear going on,

denial is going on,

but he ended up being one of our best digital compeers.

Once he came over to it, and saw what he could do.

Right around the same time

Bob Zemeckis did "Forrest Gump".

And "Forrest Gump" had a similar importance

in terms of changing the industry.

What "Jurassic Park" did

in terms of big in your face visual effects,

big characters, bringing fantasy

and sci-fi to the foreground.

Um, "Forest Gump" did in exactly the opposite

and understated way,

invisible effects.

Doing things that you couldn't do before,

changing people's performances

by changing the way their lips moved,

changing the skies and pictures

to create a different mood.

All kinds of little things

that had you been able to do photograph

it that way originally you would've,

but you couldn't.

So manipulated everything to enhance the storytelling.

At one point in "Forrest Gump", he's playing ping pong.

And he's playing at this phenomenal speed.

And you might ask how did tom hanks

learn how to play ping pong?

Well the answer is of course he doesn't

he's just moving the paddle.

And somebody's putting a ball in

and it's used with renderman.

So, it's this simple little thing,

but what it meant was a story point

would go into the movie and the audience

doesn't know or care about

and we reached that point where

it's not about special effects anymore.

It's about telling a story.

So, suddenly visual effects has a place in dramatic films,

in comedies, all types of things

that it just didn't fit into before.

And at that point in time everybody started to try

to figure out how to dust off those old scripts

the had that they didn't know how to make before.

As ILM approached their 100th movie.

They would be challenged with the next level of realism.

It was the beginning of

kind of, working with CG creatures.

Cause I remember at one point

there's a wall blew open and a guy came through

he's the rhino,

ok,

run away from the rhino.

And that was the beginning of kind of,

ok imagine now that's the rhino,

the one on the right is an elephant,

Phil is the hippopotamus.

Ok, good I got it.

Let's do this.

Run!

It's a stampede!

Basically it's just fight or flight.

Most of the time you're just running.

It's not a creature that's having a dialogue

it's nothing that's talking to you.

It's basically chasing you or confronting you

or running from you or you're both in a state of fear.

I was amazed by all the larger creatures,

it was insanely beautiful.

And I found out they had taken some of the programs

from "Jurassic Park",

and applied them to elephants and rhinos.

And they are working you through

going, you can't go there you have to look over there

and they're going literally this area is a no go

especially if you're thinking can I run over there?

No. Why?

That's a pit.

Okay cool.

It's a twister, it's a twister!

The tornado in "Wizard of Oz" to me

just stood out as being strikingly real

compared to other stuff I had seen.

It was beautiful also to look at.

It had this-- I had never seen that done before

and I don't think it's been done since

as well the beautiful cylindrical design.

ILM is consistently breaking new ground.

I think that the visual effects industry requires that.

"Twister" I remember got green lit

because of a special effects shot that ILM did.

And we did a test

and we sat in the screening room at Amblin.

Everybody loved the shot so much

that's when the movie got green lit at that moment.

When we started working on "Twister"

we were dealing with really organic materials.

Things like dust and debris and tornados and water.

And those things hadn't been solved

and creating those elements in the digital world

was extremely difficult.

We had to develop our own particle system,

and a way of rendering the particles

that was realistic.

In doing anything photo real

you need to look at the real world around you.

To see how light bounces off of things

or illuminates us,

or how cloth bends,

or how people move, and animals move.

ILM's stock and trade is photo realism.

That we make stuff that you can really believe is real.

A lot of painters,

a lot of the modelers tend to either fall

into what we call a hard surface camp,

which are things like planes, spaceships, hardware.

And then you've got your organic creature type stuff.

What helps me is to go back to real things.

To study nature to see how a feather functions.

How it's actually constructed so brilliantly,

and if I can take some of that enthusiasm and curiosity.

I can bring that into my work.

To create the reality

the visual effects supervisors lead an army

of production managers, artists, and technicians

to realize the most complicated imagery on time

and on budget.

The starting point begins with the ILM art department.

The concept artists

and the art department in general

are sort of the front end group

or the spearhead to get everybody

on the same page the starting point.

In a lot of cases at ILM

they'll be designing the effects sequences,

or the creatures or the environments

of the world of our clients.

The directors we work with.

As often happens, directors ask ILM

to create imagery that has never been done.

The visual effects supervisor

brings these challenges

to ILM's research and development department.

One of the great things about ILM

is that you have a R&D department.

I can go to them and say you know what?

I need controllable smoke.

It just has to do this,

and you've got a brilliant team of smart people

that can say, "ok you know what?

We're going to make you smoke system."

and they come out with the goods.

Everything that you see on the screen

is meticulously assembled out of hundreds or thousands

of different elements.

And those are all there because an artist put them there.

So much of it is about giving them tools to layer

in greater and greater complexity,

but always with the control that's necessary

to give the director the images that he's after.

On set, the visual effects supervisor

is responsible for delivering the live action elements

to ILM's artists.

When you are in principle photography

you have 300, 350 people in your crew,

your days is costing about 250,000 dollars a day.

And there is a question,

and you need to answer that question,

everybody turns to you and you have about two seconds

to say exactly what you need these people to do,

and then they do it.

One of things I love about this place is the ILM methodology.

You know we try to create an atmosphere here

where creative people are free

to share their opinions about things

if somebody has a good idea about a shot say it.

And when people are honest about what they think,

the work is better.

There's amazing times

when you're struggling with something.

You're maybe working on it for days

or even weeks and everybody is thinking

how to solve this certain problem,

and you really get a sense

of a community art going on at that time,

where everybody's-- where it's all been worth it

to come together and contribute on something

that's never been done.

Nearing the dawn of the new millennium

George Lucas returned to ILM

as a client with a daunting task

of making three new "Star Wars" prequels.

George had to wait to do the prequels.

Because his vision was so grand, and it was so big,

and he wanted to do so much

that he had to wait for the technology to catch up.

And I think what he saw in ILM

and the work ILM was doing throughout the 1990s

sort of encouraged him to believe,

that finally the time had come,

and it was absolutely possible to achieve greatness.

I could sort of come in and push things forward

as the owner and as the client.

You know we're pushing the envelope in a few places.

But the biggest issue is volume.

Just the amount of stuff.

We were attempting a scale of visual effects

that had never been done before.

And over 90% of that movie

had some sort of visual effect in it.

We over doubled the size

of our computer graphics department for that movie.

As well as the potential changing culture

of the company because we were growing so much.

So, there was the trepidation of,

have we bitten off more than we can chew,

and can we do this.

It's not just that we have to do it for this picture,

we have to do it for two more pictures.

And also if this picture works

then everybody else will want it done for their picture.

And what are we going to do?

We had over 2000 visual effects shots in it.

There were so many aspects of what needed to be depicted

that couldn't be done with tools we had at the time.

It was painful, scary, a lot of things.

You need somebody there to hold your hand and say,

"Look I'll take the blame,

if this doesn't work I take the blame"

and that's what I've always done on my own movie.

Okay so, I am doing my damndest to figure out

well how do we even do a shot like this.

And ok these are the techniques

I think are going to be the most bang for the buck,

and geez we'll just have to able to animate

that in two weeks.

We had very dense scenes

with hundreds of thousands of characters in them.

And we had to do rigid body dynamics,

cloth simulations, synthetic terrains.

The list of things that we needed to develop

new tools for was quite large and intimidating.

The real point is how can we manage to change

the operating procedures in a way

that we can completely revolutionize

the way we make movies, so that this is all do-able.

We'd have discussions back and forth in the beginning.

You know the supervisors, myself

now I want to do this and I want to do that,

and they go well...

and sometimes I'd say, "we're going to do it anyway."

they said, "No we can't"

and I said, "we're going to do this.

I know we can do this."

what he brought to us was something

that had never been sort of accomplished before,

and he really pushed us as a company

to grow and learn how to create such a large vision.

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To do a big complicated show like that

you develop some confidence in the process

of you take big problems, you break them down

into smaller problems.

You break those smaller problems

down into yet smaller problems.

Until you get to a scale

where it's tractable by a single person.

And so when a new big project comes

with some kind of scary unknown aspect to it.

You have to comfort yourself with the fact

that we've been doing this for a long time,

and this process works, it always works.

When I was asked to paint Yoda

as a computer generated character

I really remembered what it was like for me

when I first saw Yoda on that screen.

And what Frank Oz had done with him as a character.

That was a really honor to be asked to work on him.

To get Yoda's expression,

to get his character was terribly important

that we get that right.

The fear of loss is a path to the dark side.

In the CG Universe performers were now challenged

to act in virtual worlds

when invisible characters unlike ever before.

That was the time we created the Jar Jar Binks character.

And a lot of people feel different ways

about Jar Jar Binks,

but the fact of the matter was

you had a living breathing character

who was acting alongside the actors

for a large portion of that film.

And it really showed you could have digital characters

integrated with live action people,

and make that work.

Get away, get out of here!

[mumbles]

I remember meeting Liam Neeson

after he had done one of the "Star Wars" movies

and he went, "Robin I don't know anymore

I really don't want to act.

I've given up, I don't really think I can.

Cause I've just spent times looking at an X,

I don't know what it's about anymore really.

I've been trained to do lots of amazing things,

but now I've just been looking at an X for a long time."

and if I saw him--

I'm going, "Oh no they've gotten poor Liam!"

Dear God, Dear God.

I would've liked to work with a Yoda character.

That would've been fun.

'cause I've worked with the Muppets,

I can deal with the fact

there's a guy under there going [mumbles]

I'll work with a puppet, I see you.

It's okay.

[Yoda voice] Syntax none have.

Mhmm the dark side clouds everything.

Impossible to see the future is.

They would bring the puppet in,

so you could see it and get a visual of how tall he was,

or where he was going to be

and sometimes I had to walk with him and talk with him,

which was kind of new too

because he usually didn't walk and talk.

That was a whole bunch of new stuff

they were able to do with him.

So, I just had to pick a spot and kinda do it.

I kind of like that,

I'm an only child so I played by myself

a lot in my room I made up stuff,

and I'm used to fighting things that aren't there,

talking to people that aren't there.

It was perfect for me.

So when actors complain about it

I just kind of look at them and go,

"Where's your imagination?"

this is the perfect time to do what you want.

I was very happy to know

that I was part of something that was changing

the way people were going to make,

watch, and create films

for the rest of the time.

"The Phantom Menace" was released on may 19th, 1999

and became the highest grossing

"Star Wars" film of all.

Its success paved the way

for the next two films that were shot

completely on digital high definition cameras,

and showcasing the most extensive use

of virtual characters and environments ever.

George brought the original "Star Wars" universe

back into popular culture in a whole new way.

You're George Lucas!

Uh, I take it you're here

for the "Star Wars" convention.

Oh dear god.

Oh my god!

George Lucas!!!

Ahhh!!!

All of the films that Lucasfilm have made

have become culturally significant

in one way or another.

And people have a very emotional connection

to props and costumes and artwork.

Because it's part of something much larger

that really effected them.

So when I walk around here

everything that I see fills me with memories

of you know movies that I watched

and the experience I had.

It's pretty incredible to see all the costumes,

and it was like nerd's paradise.

All of a sudden I was 12, that's so cool.

No matter how much you romanticize a weapon or a mask

or a costume or a character,

you come and touch it

and somebody had to paint it and build it

and cast it out of foam or wood or plastic

or what have you.

It's really wonderful and heartwarming

for me to come up here and see these models

that I built almost 30 years ago.

'cause it brings back so many memories

you don't think about these things for so long,

and then you see them and it's like,

oh gosh I remember when I built that.

Whoops, ten people just died.

It's odd though, we didn't build them to last forever,

and we certainly didn't build them

to go out into travelling shows and be in museums.

And so it's kind of odd to see them up here

where they won't let us touch them

and if something breaks off

they photograph where it came off,

and they put it in little plastic bag and seal it up.

When you see them

and you realize that when they lit them,

they had a life.

They were a creature.

Yoda, to see Yoda like,

[Yoda voice] mreaaa moving not.

CG take work is.

In 2001 ILM brought history to life

like never before with the epic

world war 2 battle sequences in "Pearl Harbor".

Another series of landmark achievements for the company.

In 2004 they created the first extreme close up

of a realistic digital human

for "Lemony Snicket's: A Series of Unfortunate Events"

ushering in a new era for digital actors.

The realism paved the way for the highly anticipated

"Pirates of The Caribbean" films.

When the script for "Pirates" came in.

The gag was that our crew of pirates were cursed,

so that when they appeared in moonlight

they were these tattered skeletons.

Which immediately brought back memories

of "Jason and The Argonauts".

There's a scene of sword fighting skeletons

that's an iconic scene.

You know that image came immediately to mind

when I read that in the script.

It's a really fun opportunity

to pay homage to Ray's work,

but to update with some of the newer technologies.

The "Pirates of The Caribbean" series

made extensive use of in camera

motion capture technology.

Otherwise known as Imocap.

This advanced system of sensors records actions

of human actors and uses the information

to animate digital characters.

I mean the characters were all created

by the visual effects.

It wasn't make-up.

They were walking around in gray suits.

And uh you know it's very difficult you know

for actors sometimes to interact with a character

that's wearing a gray suit with a beanie,

but since our actors

are so well trained, so professional,

they did a fantastic job.

Most challenging thing on pirates was Davy Jones.

We had motion capture trackers on him.

He had all these silly dots on his face.

But Bill Nighy was that character.

And I think for me that was the first time

I really saw a direct transference

of someone's performance onto a CG creature,

and it was so complex and so layered.

You've got all these tentacles

trying to get them to operate

like they really would is a major challenge.

Because in the computer

although you've got the shape of the tentacles

if they are going in different directions

they'll just penetrate right through each other.

The idea that they would hit and react

is just not in the computer, it has to be worked out.

And it takes a lot of calculations

to make something like that work.

It was just so incredibly detailed

and the work that the model builders

and the texture painters

and all the guys that contributed

to that show in all the different ways

just bringing this immensely complicated crew

and ship to life.

Technology changes very quickly

and gets better and better

so it gives the artists at ILM

and their supervisors more fun to play with

more things to play with more toys,

and it pushes the limits

which is exactly what we want to do.

We thrive on developing new techniques

to achieve something that's never been done before,

so imagination is unencumbered.

Inspired by the original 1953 version

of "War of The Worlds"

Steven Spielberg teamed with ILM

once again to push visual storytelling

to a whole new level.

Well I had this crazy idea one day

when I was doing my storyboards.

I had sketched out a three minute dialogue scene

between the two kids and tom cruise in the car

after they escape new jersey.

I began sketching it in cuts

you know in close ups, profiles,

and over the shoulder shots.

And then threw all that stuff out

because it wasn't exciting enough.

And I thought,

there's got to be a way to do this,

what if I did this all in one shot?

And then I had some of the pre-vis guys come in

and I pre-vised the entire scene with the moving camera,

that actually went through the car at one point,

when through the back window at another point,

went out into the middle of the turnpike

to make room for cars that are passing,

then went back into the window again.

It was an impossible dream

and I knew it was not achievable

cause I didn't quite know how to blend it,

where are the blend lines going to be?

How do we glue these disparate pieces together

to make it seem like it's one shot.

So when I showed Dennis Muren the pre-vis,

Dennis said, right away this time

he didn't even have to think about it,

he said, "You could do it in two shots."

I said, "Where's the break?"

he said, "When you come back in through the car

through the back of the car."

and then when you're pulling back out

to the high crane shot at the end

as the car moves off into the vanishing point.

So, Dennis thought that was going to be no problem.

I don't think there's much clue

that you're seeing an effect in those scenes

because there are no camera cuts

it's done much more like documentary style,

and that's got a really great

sense of surprise when that happens.

It's much more realistic and immediate,

and that's hard to do with any kind of effect.

Every little thing as a collection

of what we do in the history

of all the films that we've done kind of goes

into every movie we're doing right now.

"Transformers" represents a colossal collection

of all these different stair steps

of ideas on the way.

By this point in time in computer graphics,

we have learned how to do hard shiny objects.

Yes.

But have we really conquered how they are lit.

Have we really conquered

a more realistic style of animation,

or a cooler style lets say.

No.

We're constantly re-assessing what can we do better?

Then we start designing the robots.

I think initially a lot of the robots were made

out of all these questionable material

that looked very CG-ish.

And we actually started building a couple robots

out of these bony fragments that look like,

you know what is alien space stuff,

we don't know what it is.

Michael Bay, our director,

and myself kept going back and forth on this--

you know what, this is not working.

Let's just go to car parts

and just start drawing from real world

because you and I go to the movie

and if we something we don't quite understand

it looks fake.

If you want it to look photo real,

well what does that mean?

It's go to look like people made it.

And so that's why we gravitated

all toward these designs

that were more or less things that we know.

I think the transformation scenes

from the first movie you know,

were something that people had never seen before.

There were about 10,000 moving parts.

And all those pieces have to move and articulate

with one another.

Technology wise that stuff didn't exist before,

so again it puts ILM on the leading edge

of technology breakthrough.

On "Iron Man" we drew a lot

from what they learned on "Transformers".

Um and that made me extremely comfortable

with how ambitious to get with "Iron Man",

because I 've always been a bit of a skeptic about CGI.

I think primarily because it hasn't been done right

in many cases.

A challenge was I think initially

to impress him with the idea

that we could make the Iron Man suit

look pretty seamless and realistic.

I love this suit!!

The other issue was that there were some

very beautiful practical suits

created by what was then known as Stan Winston studios.

Robert, he was finding the suit very uncomfortable to wear,

and so we would usually pull one or two pieces off

just so that he had more freedom with his are movements.

It was clearly still constricting

so we pulled more and more pieces off.

So in the end I said, "look, let's pull it all off.

I'm confident based on what we've done

we can replace the whole thing."

and so we did, we pulled it all off

and I was putting the markers on Robert

he was like, "I love you."

because he was so happy that he could now act and emote,

and we would just add it all digitally later.

At one point in the process

I was giving notes on a shot,

saying how I didn't believe a certain reflection,

it looked fake to me.

And that's when Ben Snow,

who was the ILM supervisor said,

"That's the real suit."

so I was giving notes on the real suit

thinking it was the CGI suit.

And that's when I knew that it crossed that line.

And from that moment on

I realized that technology was a good one

it had passed the point

where I could tell the difference.

And then it became about how best to design the shots

to make full use of what it could do well,

and not to ask of those shots or that technology

what it wasn't good at.

So I think a lot of times now when you see bad CGI

it's because of poor planning on behalf of the filmmaker

as opposed to the artists that are working on it.

And it's a big-- that's a big leap,

that's a big change,

and so now I think it's incumbent upon the filmmakers

to learn more about CGI

because it's a tool that's here to stay.

The suit is the star you know of the "Iron Man" movies.

You watch that suit do stuff

that's what we go there for.

When the screws come out, the boots come on,

the tu-tu-tu-- things come on his arms.

You really wish you had one of those things

and the ability to make you want to be

that particular character is the dream

of, I'm sure all the guys

that are working in those particular places

that sit there and go, ah that would be so cool,

what if the suit did this.

And they make us want to be those characters

the make us want to see that stuff happen.

In 2009 director J.J. Abrams

reinvigorated the original "Star Trek" universe

through the help of ILM's illusionists.

The first challenge

being a new design for the starship enterprise.

The thing about the enterprise was

you can't really play with it too much

because it's so iconic.

I just knew we were dealing with those very vocal fans

who were going to be pissed off no matter what we did.

So I thought, let's just update a little bit

but let's maintain it's essential silhouette.

There's certain level of pressure involved in that too

because I remember when we did the new enterprise

for the J.J Abrams "Star Trek",

and the first image that was revealed to the public,

it sounded like they were going to kill us

if they could find us.

And we were talking about an artist relocation program

because we're like, "Oh my god" you know.

They got so upset,

and then it came out and they loved it.

You know the amazing thing is ILM

took these designs that were done

and it made this thing live and breathe.

It brought this ship to life.

"Star Wars" made it impossible to do anything new.

There's not a weather system, a terrain,

an environment, a character color,

a number of arms or legs.

There's nothing--

I mean he did everything

like in the last three films probably exponentially more

than you know all science fiction films put together.

And every once in awhile

someone would whisper you know

remember, "Star Trek" came before "Star Wars".

And I was like yea yea it doesn't help me

cause George had out done it.

ILM made the most of practical and visual effects magic

by shooting two very different worlds

side by side just 30 feet apart

in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium.

Creating kirk stranded on the icy Delta Vega Planet

was done on a partial set

under the balmy skies of Los Angeles.

It was a really fun magic trick

to get to kind of shoot those things so closely,

and yet have them seem so worlds apart.

There's a step with lighting

and rendering that is just unnervingly magical

that when you get you're like, "huh!"

You can work on a shot for months.

You go and watch one of the movies you've worked on,

and you see the audience react

to something, you go, "Wow that's awesome."

so, it's very fulfilling from that aspect.

It just requires an incredible organizational

and artistic endeavor,

and I think that the fact that it works as well as it does

is a testament to how ILM is built,

and the kind of people that work there.

It's an amazing team, a huge amazing team.

In 2005 ILM moved from Marin county

across The Golden Gate Bridge

to a 23-acre complex at the historic Presidio.

Within this house that "Star Wars" built,

ILM's team of visual effects wizards

continue to push the envelope.

From their humble beginnings in a Van Nuys warehouse

to a state of the art facility.

They've single handedly transformed

the photo chemical days of old into a new digital era

changing the industry one film at a time.

Over the last 35 years

ILM has created visual effects

in nearly 300 movies.

Their innovations and artistry

has been recognized

with 15 visual effects academy awards,

23 additional nominations,

and awarded the National Medal of Technology.

In dark theaters everywhere

they transport us to other worlds

with their cinema magic

always inspired to create the impossible.

I think ILM's greatest challenge

is, in a way, their own reputation.

You know continuing to grow,

and expand and live up to the standards they've set.

This work is very complicated

and it's very labor intensive,

but it's, to some extent become commoditized

and the expectation is that the more of this we're doing

we should be getting cheaper, cheaper, cheaper.

The competition from overseas especially has been really hard

when the salaries are so much less than here

so how do we work faster and better

and still keep the quality of it?

And we've had a lot of people

who have gone through ILM set up other companies

around that are doing great work also

and we need to try to keep on top of it

to come up with the next thing

that's better than what someone else is doing.

ILM's body of work is something to be extremely proud of.

I mean you go back and look at all the things

that ILM has done.

It's the history of movies at the last part

of 20th century and into the 21st century.

Lightning just keeps striking at ILM.

That's the remarkable thing about ILM.

It's not like they had their moment

and it's moved on,

they find ways to reinvigorate

the facility, by breaking new ground.

I think ILM's biggest accomplishment

isn't any one show

it's that they've managed to realize the dream

that any filmmaker would have,

which is the ability to do anything.

The ability to continue to make us believe

what we see is the true genius

of what these guys do.

George made his company available to every studio,

and to every filmmaker.

And in a sense it was the first time

that had ever happened before.

Where a company was formed for all us

to be able to achieve our our impossible dreams.

And George made that possible for all of us.

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