The Walt Disney Company has released a new video tracing the origin story of Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects company George Lucas founded in 1975 out of pure necessity, and it’s a good reminder of just how much of modern filmmaking traces back to one director who couldn’t find anyone capable of building what he needed.
We’ve touched on ILM’s history before, including when we covered the StageCraft Volume’s public debut at D23, and again in our piece on Harryhausen’s at Hollywood Studios, where ILM’s own roots trace back to the influence of stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen.
The story starts in May 1975. Lucas was ready to make his space opera, but no visual effects company in Hollywood was capable of bringing his vision to life. His solution was to build one himself, enlisting camera expert John Dykstra and a team of artists and builders to set up shop in an old warehouse in Van Nuys, California, to work on what would become Star Wars. Janet Lewin, ILM’s SVP and General Manager, put the relationship simply in the video: “There is no Star Wars without ILM, and there is no ILM without Star Wars.”
That film reshaped the industry, and ILM never stopped growing after it. Now headquartered in San Francisco with studios across five countries, the company has picked up 17 BAFTA Awards, 16 Academy Awards, and eight Emmy Awards along the way, expanding well past practical visual effects into feature animation, immersive entertainment, and virtual production, the same StageCraft technology fans got to try firsthand at D23. John Knoll, ILM’s Executive Creative Director, and Lucasfilm’s Doug Chiang, SVP and Executive Design Director, join Lewin in the video walking through the company’s evolution.
What stands out watching this alongside everything else Disney has been putting out about its creative teams lately is how familiar the origin story feels. Walt Disney Imagineering gets built the same way, project by project, solving a problem nobody else has solved yet because the vision demands it. ILM’s founding is really the same story that’s played out across Disney’s parks and film divisions for decades, just with a fifty-year head start.
