Two images 15 years apart summarize the influence and evolution that Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) had in the world of cinema, the special effects company that George Lucas founded in the 1970s when he couldn’t find a company that this could incorporate tricks that Star Wars required. The first, the opening shot of this seminal Episode IV of the saga, in which a gigantic spaceship bursts through the top of the screen and finally floods it completely, to the astonishment of viewers who saw the film in theaters at the time The second, the first test, To see how the fully computer-generated T-Rex that the company’s CGI animation department had been working on for Jurassic Park (1993) looked onscreen a few seconds later. The dinosaur advances toward the audience as determinedly as the Lumière- train at the beginning of the cinema. Steven Spielberg didn’t leave scared, as viewers say of this 1896 short film, but he experienced the brief showing as an “enlightenment” because he understood that the digital image would make everything possible from then on. That’s how he tells it in Light & Magic: A Not So Distant Dream, the docuseries that Disney dedicated to the company’s history, winner of 16 Oscars and nominated for another 46; Birthplace of Pixar and the Photoshop imaging program, and the spearhead that enabled Lucas to realize his plan to digitize the entire cinematographic process, from filming to projection, including editing and sound.
The six chapters, 19 years after his last feature film, Lawrence Kasdan presents his credentials as a documentary filmmaker, beginning behind the camera as a screenwriter for The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Raiders of The Lost Ark (1981), both by Produced by Lucas and with special effects by ILM—recounts this trajectory at a good pace, narrated by the protagonists themselves. Or, which is the same, it presents a dazzling parade of many of the most brilliant illusionists who were responsible for it, sometimes with highly developed technical exercises to design the most effective tricks and, forgive the redundancy, the ingenuity of what it has are called the magic of cinema: John Dykstra, Dennis Muren, Phil Tippett, Ken Ralston or Richard Edlund, guys who remember Lucas, when they were young and illustrious strangers, and today’s legends, Oscar collectors, masters of his, of the matte paintings, those Tromp e-l’oeil, which cinema used to fool us into believing that they were sets or real places long before chromas existed, right down to the pinpoint, extremely detailed models created by stop-motion (frame-by-frame animation). image) and even the design of special cameras to optimize the filming of tricks. The dozens of testimonials are also peppered with extensive archival images showing the flip side of wonder, the intrigue of, say, the Star Wars saga since its inception.
The set from The Mandalorian series, in an image from Light & Magic: A Dream Not So Distant, by Disney+.Lucasfilm Ltd. (Lucasfilm Ltd.)
There are catches. The documentary completely forgets about the late John Stears, the eldest – and only Oscar-winner – of Lucas’s first commitment to Star Wars. And it has limitations stemming from its nature as a self-promotional product, given that the ILM has belonged to Disney since it bought its parent company Lucasfilm from Lucas, which means, for example, that it archives on the fringes of history and tiptoes over disagreements between Lucas himself and Dykstra, the company’s first boss, and the one he fired after the first film. And while it shows how people were already working against the clock in the 1970s, it doesn’t explain that accelerating technological progress not only hasn’t stopped this trend, but also that visual effects professionals are working with more and less pressure deadlines. , as several of them denounced in an article on specialist technology website Gizmodo last month that this happens in Marvel productions also owned by Disney.
But even with those flaws, Light & Magic, available on Disney+, is revealing. The archival footage, these making-of fragments full of detail, at times convey an immediacy similar to Get Back, Peter Jackson’s amazing documentary about the Beatles, and also the emotion that emanates from looking at images that show them to a group of brilliant people, in many cases friends who work hard, doing what they do best, working side by side to create something unique. Kasdan also seems to want to apply the motto repeated by his protagonists: that the visual effects must be at the service of the script and not the other way around.
Phil Tippet presenting “Light & Magic: A Dream Not So Distant” at the annual Star Wars Convention on May 27, 2022 in Anaheim, California. Jesse Grant (Getty Images for Disney)
So yes, we do see the magic being made, but most of all there is a good story full of rich and well-rounded characters. Most touching is Tippett, the great master of stop-motion who suffers from bipolarity and has devoted decades to a job others would find boring, but which not only excites him but saves him from suicide when he discovers that T – Digital Rex, that his art is obsolete before the power of CGI. “I feel extinct,” he told Spielberg in shock. “That’s a great line, I’ll put it in the film,” the director replied. And then I’ll help him retrain. At 71, Tippett is still working.
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