Industrial Light & Magic
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| Division | |
| Industry | Visual effects, Computer Graphics, Feature animation, Television animation |
| Founded | May 1975 |
| Founder | George Lucas |
| Headquarters |
Letterman Digital Arts Center, Presidio of San Francisco, California, United States |
|
Key people
|
Sam Mercer (Head of Studio) John Knoll (Chief Creative Officer) Dennis Muren |
| Parent |
Lucasfilm (The Walt Disney Company) |
| Divisions | ILMxLab |
| Subsidiaries | ILM London ILM Singapore ILM Vancouver ILM San Francisco |
| Website | ilm |
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American motion picture visual effects company that was founded in May 1975 by George Lucas. It is a division of the film production company, Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when Lucas began production of the film Star Wars. For many years, during the 1980s and early 1990s during the widespread inception of computer graphics in film, ILM was considered the leading industry standard production house for visual effects; many studios other than Lucasfilm sent scenes to the studio for CG. It is also the original founder company of the animation studio Pixar.
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.
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, famous for the effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull declined as he was already committed to working on Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 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. 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, Joe Johnston, Phil Tippett, Steve Gawley, Lorne Peterson, and Paul Huston.
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