Light & Magic - A Fantastic New Series on Disney+
It is 1975 and a young and ambitious film-maker has a vision for a science-fiction film, the likes of which the world had never seen.
But, what does a film-maker do when the technology to create his film does not exist? Well, if you are George Lucas, you invent it.
In 1975 Lucas recruited John Dykstra (fresh from working as a model maker on Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running) to lead his Special Visual Effects Department. Dykstra hired a crack team of college students, artists and engineers and installed them in a warehouse in Van Nuys, California.
What to call them? Local maps showed that the warehouse was in an area labelled ‘Light Industrial’ and so "Industrial Light and Magic” (ILM) was born!
The team would win the Best Visual Effects and Special Achievement Oscars at the 1978 Academy Awards. Over the next decade, in addition to the Star Wars movies, they would add their magic to franchises such as Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, Star Trek, Terminator and Ghostbusters.
Forty years later, ILM has received 33 Academy Awards for Scientific and Technical Achievements and is the leading effects facility in the world, with studios located in San Francisco, Singapore, Vancouver, London, and Sydney. It has created visual effects for over 350 feature films, including 7 of the top 10 worldwide box office hits of all time and has contributed to twenty-five of the top fifty.
Released on Disney+ on 27th July 2022, a six part series Light & Magic will take us back in time, to the earliest days of ILM and look behind the scenes as they create effects for some of the biggest films of the past fifty years.
Here is the trailer.
We cannot wait!
A poster has even been teased. We do not know if it will be printed, or only used digitally. If it does hit paper, rest assured that we will track down a few!
Adam and the Art of the Movies team.
By the way, ILM has one of the largest computer networks for producing digital images, with over 7,500 computers. What do they call it? The Death Star!
