A deep history of Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects studio George Lucas founded for Star Wars, and how ILM transformed cinema through motion control, miniatures, CGI, Jurassic Park, Davy Jones, OpenEXR and StageCraft.
Edwin Miller
A deep history of Blue Sky Studios, from its MAGI and Tron roots to its ray-tracing renderer, Bunny’s Oscar, Ice Age and Scrat, The Peanuts Movie, Nimona, and Disney’s 2021 closure.
A company starts in Silicon Valley in 1980 with a few people, some computers, a lot of ambition, and no obvious way to become a movie studio. It makes broadcast graphics. It makes commercials. It makes television images that look like the future, or at least like a very good 1980s version of the future.
A deep history of Pixar, from Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith at Lucasfilm to RenderMan, Toy Story, Disney tensions, the 2006 acquisition, the Braintrust, OpenUSD, and the myth of the story-driven studio.
At night, after the client work was done, Tomek Bagiński went back to his computer and kept building a cathedral.
Not a normal cathedral. A living one. A cosmic one. A structure somewhere between Antoni Gaudí, Polish science fiction, medieval architecture, and a bad idea about sleeping. The computer was not impressive by today’s standards.…
Rhythm & Hues was a visual effects company. It made animals. It made logos. It made aircraft, snow, skies, oceans, fur, muscles, daemons, talking pigs, polar bears that sold soda, lions that were gods, and one tiger that was not real but, for most practical moviegoing purposes, was real.
A director in New Zealand wanted to make movies that were too large for New Zealand. He wanted murder fantasies, ghosts, hobbits, cave trolls, armies, giant apes, blue aliens, intelligent whales, oceans, muscles, skin, hair, rain, mud, water, grief, eyes, and sometimes all of those things in the same shot. Hollywood had some of the…