ILM - industrial light and magic

A Brief history of Industrial light and magic.

This company created by George Lucas has been huge part of Hollywood high concept films, since it started in 1975. ILM has been a part of a huge rage of Hollywood blockbuster pictures ranging from Star wars to Avatar. Industrial Light and magic is responsible for a lot of the development of special effects and computer generated imagery that we see today, they have also developed hundreds of techniques which make special effects easier to achieve and cheaper to produce.

Timeline of achievements

-Motion control photography (1975) – This technique was developed for the

epic space battles in star wars. It was invented by John Dykstra who was

hired by George Lucas at the birth of the company. This was also called the

“Dykstraflex system” It was a new more effective way of filming miniatures

-Go-motion (1981) – Fully aware of the problems with stop motion animation,

ILM went about trying to find an alternative way of creating stop motion

animation and making it seem more convincingly real and they created a

technique called Go-motion, where stop motion looks more natural.

-Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) – This was the first feature length film to

have a completely computer generated character (The stain glass window

knight)

-First morph (1988) – The first morph scene was created in 1988, ILM had to create a whole new program to complete this; it was a break through in digital imagery.

-Kodak/ILM CCD digital input scanner (1986) – this invention made in easy to convert film into digital information with out losing any of the quality. This made it very easy to create computer-enhanced scenes.

-Terminator 2 (1991) – The first film with a fully computer generated main character.

-Jurassic park (1993) – This film set the new benchmark for computer-generated special effects, with the creation of skin, textures, movement and muscles. This step forward in CGI has extended the possibilities of filmmaking.

-Caspa the friendly ghost (1995) - First fully synthetic speaking character.

-ILM developed Ambient Occlusion - in an effort to produce a greater level of realism for the CG imagery (2001)

-ILM created Imocap (2006)- a brand new image-based capture system exclusively for the production of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, but was used in many films after Pirates of the Caribbean.

-Fez animation system (2008) - this made creating complex facial animation easier, with greater flexibility. Animation based on human anatomy.

-Verte GPU Engine (2009) - ILM developed a new software system that would simulate high-resolution, photorealistic fire that was entirely computer generated.

Rob Bottin's work in "The Thing"

After Rob Bottin was introduced to director John Carpenter, he became involved in one of his earlier films "The Fog". He was responsible for the special effects and makeup of this film, he even had a small role as Captian Blake.

After "The Fog" Rob's popularity and reputation grew, he was offered to work for John Carpenter again on his next film "The Thing". His dedication to this film was huge, he worked seven days a week including late nights he also stayed over night in the studio, for a year and five weeks. He worked so hard on this film that by the end of production he was admited to hospital.

When you're first introduced to the monster in "The Thing", you see a dog transforming into this horrible thing as it tries to absorbe and infect the other dogs. The monster in the thing wasn't designed freely, even though it is very creative and unique. It had to be created around the concepts which would make it possible, with the invent of CGI a modern version of this film would have more freedom to create the monster. The technology used in this film to animate this monster was basically a hand puppet with a animatronic head, this very simlistic technique is used to full effect in this film and made it no less effective.

Albert Whitlock

This very famous matte artist who was made famous by Alfred Hitchcock because, of the films they did together. Matte artists make backgrounds for films before CGI backgrounds came about, this very skillfull way of making epic landscapes for cinematic films. For this technique the artist creates the background and combines it with the moving film to create a fake sense of location. Albert Whitlock was the matte artist for the thing, this gave the film a sense of scale which would not have been acheived with out him.