Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American motion picture visual effects, computer animation and stereo conversion digital studio founded by George Lucas on May 26, 1975. It is a division of the film production company Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when he began production on the 1977 film Star Wars. ILM originated in Van Nuys, California, then later moved to San Rafael in 1978, and since 2005 it has been based at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio of San Francisco. In 2012, the Walt Disney Company acquired ILM as part of its purchase of Lucasfilm. As of 2026, Industrial Light & Magic has won 15 Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects.
History
Lucas wanted his 1977 film Star Wars to include visual effects that had never been seen on film before. After discovering that the in-house effects department at 20th Century Fox was no longer operational, Lucas approached Douglas Trumbull, best known for the effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Silent Running (1972). Trumbull declined, as he was already committed to working on Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), but suggested his assistant John Dykstra to Lucas. Dykstra brought together a small team of college students, artists, and engineers and set them up in a warehouse in Van Nuys, California, in 1975. After seeing the map for the location was zoned as light industrial, Lucas named the group Industrial Light and Magic, which became the Special Visual Effects department on Star Wars. Alongside Dykstra, other leading members of the original ILM team were Ken Ralston, Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren, Robert Blalack, Joe Johnston, Phil Tippett, Steve Gawley, Lorne Peterson, and Paul Huston.
In late 1978, when in pre-production for The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas reformed most of the team into Industrial Light & Magic in Marin County, California. From here on, the company expanded and has since gone on to produce special effects for over three hundred films, including the entire Star Wars saga, the Indiana Jones series, and the Jurassic Park series. After the success of the first Star Wars movie, Lucas became interested in using computer graphics on the sequel. He contacted Triple-I, known for their early computer effects in movies like Westworld (1973), Futureworld (1976), Tron (1982), and The Last Starfighter. Triple-I made a computer-generated test of five X-wing fighters flying in formation. He found it to be too expensive and returned to handmade models. Nevertheless, the test had shown him it was possible, and he decided he would create his own computer graphics department instead. As a result, they started investing in Apple and SGI computers. One of Lucas' employees was given the task to find the right people to hire. His search would lead him to New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), where he found Edwin Catmull and his colleagues. Catmull and others accepted Lucas' job offer, and a new computer division at Lucasfilm, named The Graphics Group, was created in 1979, which technically belonged to another division than ILM, with the hiring of Ed Catmull as the first NYIT employee who joined the company. Lucas' list for them was a digital film editing system, a digital sound editing system, a laser film printer, and further exploration of computer graphics. John Lasseter, who was hired a few years later, worked on computer-animation as part of ILM's contribution to Young Sherlock Holmes. The Graphics Group was later sold to Steve Jobs, renamed Pixar Animation Studios, and created the first CGI-animated feature, Toy Story. In 2000, ILM created the OpenEXR format for high-dynamic-range imaging. ILM operated from an inconspicuous property in San Rafael, California until 2005. The company was known to locals as the Kerner Company, a name that did not draw any attention, allowing the company to operate in secret, thus preventing the compromise of sensitive information on its productions to the media or fans. In 2005, when Lucas decided to move locations to the Presidio of San Francisco and focus on digital effects, a management-led team bought the five physical and practical effects divisions and formed a new company that included the George Lucas Theater, retained the "Kerner" name as Kerner Technologies, Inc. and provided physical effects for major motion pictures, often working with ILM, until its Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2011.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
