Industrial Light & Magic's 5 Greatest Technological Breakthroughs
One of the sharpest blades in George Lucas’ scabbard was his effects department. The team at Industrial Light & Magic helped make Star Wars a hit by proving that technological innovation and attention to detail could sell a story, and the company went on to have a hand in some of the biggest blockbusters of the last 50 years. That’s why Disney+ is debuting Light + Magic, a new documentary series that lets you get inside the legendary studio and see how it does its work.
In advance of the show, we wanted to pay tribute to just a handful of concepts and techniques that came from ILM and drastically transformed filmmaking. Here are our picks for some of the biggest breakthroughs to come from the effects shop.
George Lucas knew that Star Wars would succeed or fail on the strength of its effects. Sci-fi fans were over the low-tech methods used in the old Star Trek series, where every alien was just a person in facepaint, and space battles were shown by shaking the camera on the Enterprise’s bridge while the cast fell over. Lucas wanted to make conflicts that evoked old-school dogfights, with fighters weaving around in fully three-dimensional space. But to do that, he'd need to be able to control a camera with pinpoint precision.
Enter the Dykstraflex. Developed by industrial designer John Dykstra and a team at the nascent ILM, this revolutionary computer-controlled camera could move along seven independent axes and record its path, perfectly replicating it as many times as necessary. Couple that with ILM’s clear, precise matte shots, which refined blue screen technology that had been used since the 1950s to incredible effect, and you had the most immersive, realistic-looking sci-fi film to date. Unfortunately, Lucas had a
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