Light and Magic

I don't watch movies much – but when I do, they're almost always fantasy or science fiction. Way back then I enjoyed Star Wars: A New Hope but I was blown away when I saw The Empire Strikes Back. I loved the movie but I wanted to know how it was done. How did they do the spaceships? The light sabres? Yoda?

I subscribed to magazines that explained how the special effects were done. I learned that the interior of Darth Vader's flagship was mostly matte paintings, that Yoda was a puppet, that the Taun Tauns were done with stop motion animation and that the spaceships were all meticulously constructed models.Later, the producers added extra footage to their extended cuts explaining how it was done to give more information to geeks like me who care about these things. These days you don't even get that. Because it's all done with computers.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

I've watched (on the Disney Channel) a six-part documentary series about Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) which George Lucas created after A New Hope to keep together the bunch of technical and artistic whizz-kids he'd collected to create the movie's ground-breaking special effects. It's a series of interviews with those young whizz kids who were in their twenties in the seventies (like me) and are now in their seventies (like me). There's a lot of old footage of what they did back then and how they did it. We're talking about luminaries like Phil Tippet, the king of stop motion, Denis Muren, the ideas man, John Dykstra, who made cameras do what he wanted. Of, course, there's George Lucas who was a visionary, Joe Johnston who moved from SFX to directing, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg and heaps of others. While Lucas was writing Empire and Jedi he allowed his director-friends to use ILM's services (eg Indiana Jones) so this wonderful bunch of creatives stayed together.

But there's so much more to this documentary than 'this is what we did'. It's about people, about why it all worked – and one important reason was it wasn't a huge corporation. Guys wore what they wanted, there was plenty of room for play, a family vibe, innovation was encouraged, none of that 'this is the way we've always done it'. And they all loved going to work.

George Lucas always wanted to use computers in his film making but using computer graphics (CGI) didn't sit well with the traditionalists. How do you create something new and artistic with a computer? The documentary shows how CGI was originally introduced. In fact, ILM created a machine called PIXAR to make CGI. Lucas sold the machines and the name to Steve Jobs, who had the money to invest in the fledgling company to make cartoons like Toy Story and Monsters Inc. Lucas kept to his aim of mixing CGI with real footage, which he did with the three Star Wars prequels.

And then came Spielberg's Jurassic Park. The CGI folks were convinced they could do the dinosaur magic. Phil Tippet and his model makers were sure the CGI guys couldn't do living, breathing, animals with a computer. Management agreed so they went ahead with filming with stop motion dinosaurs. But the CGI guys got hold of a miniature of a T-Rex skeleton and fed that into their CGI software. Then they showed the creature walking toward the camera – one of the hardest things to do. From there, the movie was done in CGI.

There's footage of the present-day Phil Tippet when he learnt that his work – almost finished – on Jurassic Park was replaced. It's many years ago now, but he was clearly shattered. His job was gone. But actually, it wasn't. Phil was an expert on how things moved, knowledge that was invaluable to the CGI animators. Lucas insisted he stay on. For some of the traditional animators and model makers moving to CGI was a bridge too far. But others made the switch, recognizing that the new technology was here to stay. ILM paved the way for Pixar and Weta Workshops.

The name of the documentary is Light and Magic. It's directed by Lawrence Kasdan who co-wrote a number of the Star Wars screenplays. (He's another person who was in his 20s in the seventies and is in his 70's in the twenties.) It's a series that has left me thinking about so many things long after the last credits rolled through.