Industrial Light and Magic (ILM)

Industrial Light and Magic

Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) is a motion picture visual effects company that was founded by George Lucas in May 1975. 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, particularly during the widespread inception of computer graphics in film during the 1980s, ILM was considered the leading industry standard production house for computer graphics in film; 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.

The Star Wars saga was an incredible achievement by the company

Revolutionising the digital animation of Hollywood is one thing, revitalising the hand-drawn animation world is another. For Robert Zemeckis' Who Framed Roger Rabbit ILM was tasked with creating realistic cartoon characters, or "toons" in 1947's Los Angeles.

The process was an intense procedure, everything from highlights, to low-lights, to translucency, to shadows. More difficult still was the tracking of toons before the age of digital computers. Zemeckis wanted to film the picture like any other movie so as to not take the audience out of the moments he presented; he wanted toons to experience high emotion, high melodrama and serious real-world issues. Unlike Ralph Bakshi's Cool World where the limitations were most prevalent when the toons enter the real world.

ILM do the visual effects for most well known films and blockbusters; all of the Marvel movies (under Disney and Marvel Studios), the upcoming Great Wall, Kong: Skull Island, TMNT, The Revenant, Warcraft, Transformers, and most if not all big blockbusters in the immediate future.