industrial light & magic - the last 35 years

The Last 35 Years

Preface S. 4

History S. 6

Revolutionary Effects And Work S. 12

Awards S. 42

Contents

7

Preface

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an Academy Award-winning United States Company, which provides visual special effects for the entertainment industry. For over 35 years, ILM, a subsid-iary of Lucasfilm Ltd., has set standards for the development of the visual effects and created some of the most stunning film pictures of all time. At the forefront of the digital revolution, IlM belongs today to the most successful and innovative enterprise in the world and continues to break new ground in visual effects. This book will be showing a selection about the com-pany history and the largest work from the last 35 years.

History

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History

Revolutionary Effects And Work

Awards

ILM was founded 1975 by George Lucas in Van Nuys, California. Lucas created the company to generate the special effects for his movie Star Wars when he discovered that the special effects department at 20th Century Fox was shut down after he was given the green light for this production. The effects Lucas wanted for Star Wars were completely unsuited for traditional techniques and Industrial Light and Magic was formed to rebuild the effects industry almost en-tirely.

As unique project planned developed, ILM became pioneer of the optical and later also the digital effects.

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History


Awards

Since then ILM has been pro-viding extraordinary post-pro-duction visual effects services. Motion pictures, commer-cials, trailers, music videos and special venue projects have utilized ILM’s unequaled artistry in techniques such as model making, matte paint-ing, computer-generated im-agery, digital animation and a variety of related processes required in the production of visual effect.

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History


Awards

ILM created visuall effects for nearly 300 feature films and has locations in San Francisco and Singapore and is one of the leading effects companies in the world.

In the early 1980s, Lucas chose to sell a section of the company that dealt mainly with com-puter rendering programs. Within a few years, a department member named John Lasseter, would change the world of animation with the tremendous success of Toy Story, the feature length, computer generated film from Lasseter’s company, Pixar.

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History


Awards

VFX Supervisor Dennis Muren from Industrial Light & Magic

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History


Awards

1983 2005

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History


Awards

Revolutionary Effects

And Works

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History


Awards

1975: Motion control photography is a technique used in still and motion photography that enables precise control of, and optionally also allows repetition of, camera movements.The first large-scale application of motion control was in `Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope` and it contributed a substantial part to the fact that this film became a milestone in causa visual effects.

Motion Control Photography

The DykstraFlex Motion-Control-Cran on the set by Star Wars

In order to achieve the epic space battles for Star Wars, a new approach to filming minia-tures had to be developed.

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History


Awards

Traditional techniques simply would not work for filming the elaborate dogfights Director George Lucas had envisioned so, led by John Dykstra, the team developed a camera system that could be controlled by custom-designed, hard-wired electronics and therefore could re-cord and replicate exacting camera movements time and time again. In addition to camera pan, tilt, and roll movements, focus and changes in aperture were also preprogrammed. The

system, dubbed the Dykstraflex, uti-lized a camera mounted to a crane arm, which in turn rode on a dolly track. ILM revolutionized the Motion control pho-tography and since then developed it to a standard technology, which was used in nearly each kind of filming.

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History


Awards

1985: ILM made further breakthroughs in computer graphics with the creation of the first completely computer-generated character in a feature film, the stained glass man in `Young

First Completely CGI Character

Sherlock Holmes`. A knight com-posed of elements from a stained glass window leaps from a church window.To create the stained glass man, the Pixar group at Lucasfilm used a new motion blur technology and the first 32-bit RGBA paint system.

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History


Awards

The group devoted moths of research and developmet to a digital generation of a seven-foot-tall knight, the first three-dimensional, fully computer animated character in a full-lenght feature film.

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History


Awards

1988: Morphing is a special effect in motion pictures and ani-mations that changes one image into another through a seam-less transition. To create the shape-changing metamorphosis sequence for the mythic fantasy film ´Willow´, ILM turned to its then new CG department to produce elements for the memo-rable effect. The story called for a series of transformations to take place on screen without cutaways, an effect that could not be achieved through any one technique but rather a combina-tion of many. Utilizing puppets, live action footage of an actress, a tiger and other elements, the CG department created “Morf,” a software program that introduced the technique of morphing to the transformation effects.

First Morph

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History


Awards

A digital image processing breakthrough, morphing allowed one image to progressively be al-tered to transform into another image. It would be almost two years before any ILM competi-tor could duplicate the technique. In 1992, ILM was recognized with a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in recognition of the critical role in advancing technology morphing played.

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History


Awards

1989: Industrial Light & Magic created the first computer generated three-dimensional fluid-based character with the “pseudopod” in ´The Abyss´.The seminel moment in this film happens when Mary Elisabeth Mastrantonio´s character com-municates with the alien, looks like a transparent worm.

First Soft-surface CG Character

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History


Awards

ILM designed a program to produce sur-face waves of differing sizes and kinetic properties for the pseudopod. They started the project by scanning story-boards for this film and editing them with not-yet-realised software called Photoshop by ILM´s John Knoll and his brother Thomas. The studio then did 3D scanning of a water tentacle maquette using Cyberware´s 3D scanner. They ani-mated the character using commercial 3D software to mimic Mastrantonio´s facial expressions.

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History


Awards

1991: IIndustrial Light & Magic created the first computer graphics main character with the T-1000 in ´Terminator 2: Judgment Day´. This film was arguably the most groundbreaking

First CG Main Character

visual effects film of all time in terms of proving the prom-ise of digital effects. To create the shape-shifting liquid metal T-1000 and slip him into live-action shots, ILM had to wrangle a ton of tools into productionworthy form - complex render-ing tools, compositing software, painting tools. To anchor the

character in frames, VFX supervisor Dennis Muron make sure the character had the correct reflection as the liquid metal distorted. A version of PhotoShop helped artists repair frames that showed torn geometry.

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History


Awards

It was ILM´s first film that used a fully-digital process - a digital scanner that ILM had devel-oped with Kodak, a digital film recorder, and PhotoShop.

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History


Awards

1992: Like most of director Robert Zemeckis’ films, ´Death Becomes Her´ was a technically complex movie to make. Meryl Streep´s neck had to corkscrew and Goldie Hawn´s body had to twist into unbelievable shapes. The extensive CGI effects were in the scene of Meryl Streep´s twisted-around head (and stretched neck) and the see-through hole in Goldie Hawn´s ab-domen. But how? ILM simulated the look of human skin using digital skin for the first time and used there-for extensive digital retouching to remove the head of one actress, and then later placed a talking head on another body.

First CG Human Skin Texture

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History


Awards

With this film, ILM said goodbeye to its opti-cal printer, but it would be another seven years before George Lucas would test an all-digital process from camera to film recorder for five shots in Star Wars: Epi-sode I - The Phantom Race.

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History


Awards

1993: For the first time, digital technology in ´Jurassic Park´ was used to create a living, breathing character with skin, muscles, tex-ture, and attitude. Creating the model for the dinosaurs was the easiest part for the computer graphics artists. Using much of the same technology as they had in Terminator 2, they scanned scale models of the dinosaurs and began animation work. The real chal-lenge lay in making the creatures as realistic as possible.

Landmark CG

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History


Awards

The dinosaurs required much sophisticated textures, includ-ing everything from their yellow teeth and rough skin, to watery eyes, and dirty spots. Every little detail had to be able to hold up for near twenty seconds on film; which is a lot of time in the computer world. The breathtaking shots of a dinosaurs walking trough a field and placidly eating leaves from the tops of trees have become milenstones in visual ef-fects and in filmmaking.

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History


Awards

1995: Industrial Light & Magic created the first computer generated photo-realistic hair and fur for the digital lion and monkeys in ´Jumanji´.

First CGI Photo-realistic Hair and Fur

This movie also featured a stampede scene with dozens of elephants, rhinos, zebras and peli-cans, all computer generated. ILM´s Caricature software given the animators the power to move shapes on a character´s face to create expressions.

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History


Awards

To date, modeler´s had been stuck using rudimentary tools that could only move points around the screen. ILM developed software called iSculpt that provided the missing element. With iSculpt, modelers could create large libraries of facial expressions. The studio also inveted cus-tom software to coat the monkeys an lion with digital hair.

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History


Awards

1995: Industrial Light & Magic created the first fully synthetic speaking characters with dis-tinct personalities and emotions for ´Casper´. Whereas Jurassic Park had six minutes of digi-tally animated dinosaurs on the screen, the ghosts in Casper are on the screen for more than 40 minutes. Instead of the Creatures in Jurassic Parc, Casper needed to be an actor.

Fully Synthetic Speaking Characters

He showed emotion and he talked. To make this possible, ILM´s R&D department developed facial animation software they dubbed “Caricature”. They created a character animation de-partment, and hired 40 animators.

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History


Awards

Casper and his uncles Strech, Stinkie and Fatso set the stage for the next decade of digital ac-tors, and beyond. For his work on the design and development of caricature, ILM´s Cary Phillips won an Academy Technical Achievement Award in 1999.

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History


Awards

1999: ´The Mummy´ starred the most realistic digital human character ever seen in film. Fea-turing totally computer generated layers of muscles, sinew and tissue, the ILM team again elevated its artistic and technical skill level in bringing a digital character to life. To make the decrepit CG mummy belivable as an otherwordly version of Imhotep, ILM motion-captured Arnold Vosloo, the actor playing the leader role. Then, they applied his movements later to a digital mummy that had layers of CG muscles, tendon, and issues carved out of digital models with painted displacements maps.

Realistic Digital Human

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History


Awards

Technical directors moved the dangling bits of decayed flesh using procedural animation. The other tremendous accomplishment artists at ILM created for this film was forming a character from particles of sand during a huge sand storm.

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History


Awards

2001: ILM developed Ambient Occlusion in an effort to produce a greater level of realism for the CG imagery in ´Pearl Harbor´ than had ever been produced before. By providing accurate shadowing and directional lighting information, Ambient Occlusion allows renderer´s to create realistic and efficient lighting effects. IlLM discovered a practical method to implement new highlight techniques that slipped realistic shadows onto the CG planes and ships, as well as much of the harbor itself.

Ambient Occlusion

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History


Awards

Because ILM was able to give the director an oppurtinity to imple-ment his vision without limits, the film is filled with seamless visual effects that push the story to new heights. Since it’s development, the technique has become widely used in the field of computer graphics. Now, lighting artistst use the technique for most films with objects and characters. In 2010, ILM was recognized by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences with a Sci-Tech Award for the role that Ambient Occlusion has played in advanc-ing the art of CG in the nine years since its development.

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History


Awards

2006: ILM develops Imocap, a revolutionary image-based performance capture system for the production of ´Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest´. Director Gore Verbinski wanted to work with actors on set who would play the sea creatures, not just with animated characters in post production. To create the sea creature encrusted pirate crew, ILM cap-tured the performances of actors on location an applied that data to CG characters. It was the first time anyone had motion-captured ac-tors so freely on set.

IMocap: On-set Performance Capture

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History


Awards

To do so, ILM invented a new system called iMocap, a stunning blend of creative idea with innovative technology. which was a light bulb concept that was a stunning blend of creative idea and innovative technology. Rather than capturing dots moving in 3D space, because the performance ultimately needed to work only from camera angle, ILM could apply all its computing power to figure out the details only from the angle used to shoot the plate. In 2010, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences awarded ILM with a Scientific and Technical Academy Award for the devel-opment of Imocap.

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History


Awards

2007: To create the epic sea battle for ´Pirates of the Caribbean: At World´s End´ ILM brought together all of the fluid simulation knowledge that they had gained over the years creating effects. The centerpiece of the sea battle is the half-mile wide CG Maelstrom that required the simulation of over 15.5-billion gallons of seawater and additional simulations to create subsur-face bubbles, foam, spray, splashes and ship wakes.

Fluid Simulation

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History


Awards

To create the monstrous maelstrom, ILM´s crew spun out new state-of-the-art water simula-tion technology. The software environment for this “virtual water tank” was ILM’s proprietary system Zeno. PhysBAM, the fluid dynamics engine that operates within this environment, was written in collaboration with researchers from Stanford University. The engine was parallelized so it could be run across 40 processors and, even so, it took quite some time to compute. The renders for these passes took anywhere from a couple of minutes to 20 hours per frame.

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History


Awards

2010: Paramount Pictures latest film, ´The Last Airbender´, features extraordinary battle visual effects created by Industrial Light & Magic. ‘The Last Airbender’, features dramatic sequences in which characters are empowered to harness the four ancient elements of fire, air, water and earth and manipulate them as weapons in battle.

Plume System

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History


Awards

Giant fireballs, tendrils of water, walls of earth and overwhelming air blasts are a few of the digital simulations created by ILM as part of the film’s 485 visual-effects shots resulting in over an hour of screen time. In order to achieve the desired faster workflows and iterations of the

various sequences, ILM created a proprietary tool called “Plume”. Plume is both a fluid simu-lation system and a GPU-based renderer. ILM realized dramatic speed increases with Plume by running simulation renders on a 12-machine-GPU-based render farm powered by NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 professional graphics solutions.

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History


Awards

While Plume was initially designed for rendering computer-generated fire, its flexibility led it to also be employed in the creation of air-bending dynamics, ocean mist, smoke and the swirl-ing of clouds. A particularly complex shot depicts the film’s main character fighting off hurled streams of fire with gusts of air that push aside the fire and sand particles.

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History


Awards

Awards

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History


Awards

Academy Award 1977 John Stears, John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, Grant McCune and

Robert Blalack

Academy Award 1980Brian Johnson, Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren and Bruce

Nicholson

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope

Star Wars: Episode V - The Empires Strikes Back

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History


Awards

Academy Award 1981 Richard Edlund, Kit West, Bruce Nicholson and Joe Johnston

Academy Award 1982Carlo Rambaldi, Dennis Muren and Kenneth F. Smith

Indiana Jones & The Raiders Of The Lost Ark

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

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History


Awards

BAFTA Award 1982 Richard Edlund

BAFTA Award 1982Dennis Muren, Richard Edlund, Ken Ralston and Kit West

Academy Award 1983 Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren, Ken Ralston and Phil Tippett

Poltergeist

Star Wars: Episode VI - Return Of The Jedi

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History


Awards

Academy Award 1984 BAFTA Award 1984

Dennis Muren, Michael McAlister, Lorne Peterson and George Gibbs

Academy Award 1985Ken Ralston, Ralph McQuarrie, Scott Farrar and David Berry

Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom

Cocoon

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History


Awards

BAFTA Award 1987Michael Lantieri, Mike Owens, Edward Jones and Bruce

Walters

Academy Award 1987Dennis Muren, William George, Harley Jessup and Kenneth Smith

The Witches Of Eastweak

Innerspace

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History


Awards


Ken Ralston, Richard Williams, Edward Jones and George Gibbs

BAFTA Award 1989Ken Ralston, Michael Lantieri, John Bell and Steve Gawley

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Back To The Future II

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History


Awards

Academy Award 1989John Bruno, Dennis Muren, Hoyt Yeatman and Dennis Skotak

Academy Award 1991 BAFTA Award 1991Dennis Muren, Stan Winston, Gene Warren, Jr. and Robert Skotak

The Abyss

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

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History


Awards

Academy Award 1992 Ken Ralston, Doug Chiang, Doug Smythe and Tom Woodruff, Jr.

BAFTA Award 1992Michael Lantieri, Ken Ralston, Alec Gillis, Tom Woodruff Jr., Doug

Chaing and Doug Smythe


Dennis Muren, Stan Winston, Phil Tippett and Michael Lantieri

Death Becomes Her

Jurassic Parc

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History


Awards

Academy Award 1994Ken Ralston, George Murphy, Stephen Rosenbaum and Allen Hall

BAFTA Award 1994Ken Ralston, George Murphy, Stephen Rosenbaum, Allen Hall and

Doug Chaing

Academy Award 1996Stefan Fangmeier, John Frazier, Henry Labounta and Habib Zargar-

pour

Forrest Gump

Twister

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History


Awards

BAFTA Award 1998 Roger Guyett, Stefen Fangmeier and Neil Corbould

BAFTA Award 2000Stefen Fangmeier, John Frazier, Walt Conti, Habib Zargarpour and

Tim Alexander

Saving Private Ryan

The Perfect Storm

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History


Awards

VES Award 2004Best Single Visual Effect of the Year

Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl

The Day After Tomorrow

VES Award 2003Outstanding Special Effects in a Motion Picture

Outstanding Matte Painting in a Motion Picture

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History


Awards

VES Awards 2004Outstanding Visual Effects

Best Single Visual Effect of the Year

VES Awards 2005Best Single Visual Effect of the Year - Fleeing the Neighborhood

Outstanding Models and Miniatures in a Motion Picture

Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban

War Of The Worlds

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History


Awards

Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men´s Chest

Academy Award 2006 BAFTA Award 2006John Knoll, Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson and Allen Hall

VES Awards 2006Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture-

Outstanding Compositing in a Motion Picture

Outstanding Models and Miniatures in a Motion Picture

Outstanding Created Environment in a Live Action Motion Picture

Outstanding Performance by an Animated Character in a Live Ac-

tion Motion Picture

Best Single Visual Effect of the Year - Flying Dutchmen Sequence

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History


Awards

VES Awards 2007Outstanding Created Environment in a Live Action - The Maelstrom

Outstanding Performance by an Animated Character in a Live Ac-

tion - Davey Jones

VES Awards 2007Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven

Best Single Visual Effect of the Year - Desert Highway Sequence

Outstanding Compositing

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World´s End

Transformers

It has also received 23 Scientific and Technical Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in recognition of the critical role the company’s advances in technology have played in the filmmaking process.

History


Awards

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Glossary:

CG: Computer Graphics

CGI: Computer Generated Imagery

VFX: Visual Effects

VES: Visual Effects Society

BAFTA: British Academy Of Film And Television Arts

GPU: Graphics Processing Unit

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Impressum

The texts were written partially myself and partially from other sources.

http://www.ilm.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Light_&_Magic

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/perfect-storm6.htm

http://www.altfg.com/blog/hollywood/the-abyss-james-cameron

http://hermansaksono.com/2006/07/davy-jones-di-pirates-of-caribbean.html

http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/2007/1/2007_1_10.shtml

http://www.masterfilm.net/view.php?id=2360

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/specialfx2/1980.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/3496/jurassic.html

Literature:

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http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2008/Volume-31-Issue-2-Feb-2008-/Natural-Forces.aspx

http://www.nvidia.com/object/the-last-airbender.html

http://io9.com/5569150/7-cool-special-effects-ilm-created-for-the-last-airbender

http://features.cgsociety.org/story.php?story_id=5761

Images:

The Images are Copyrighted by Industrial Light & Magic

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Andreas BorschnekAn der Tonkuhle 2732657 Lemgo Deutschland Tel.: 0177/[email protected]

© Andreas Borschnek September 2010Hochschule Ostwestfalen-LippeMedienproduktionBetreuung durch Dipl. Designer Prof. Christoph Althaus

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