Light & Magic Season 2 – Ahmed Best, Joe Johnston, & ILM talk 1993 through Present Day
If you’ve ever sat white-knuckled in a darkened theater watching raptors hunt kids, water capsize boats, or Jedi brothers fighting over a lava flow, you have Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) to thank. LIGHT & MAGIC Season 2 is a three-part series that follows Lucasfilm’s visual effects company, ILM, as it enters its most challenging and revolutionary period: the dawn of digital. From creating the first fully realized CG character (Jar Jar Binks) to solving the challenge of digital water (THE PERFECT STORM), it is an era that finds ILM scaling new heights of innovation despite dramatic setbacks.
This season follows the 6-part Season 1 right where it left off – with JURASSIC PARK. The season takes us through the 1990’s, the Star Wars prequels, and brings us up to today’s visual effects. Director of LIGHT & MAGIC Joe Johnston, in a press conference, explained the 1993 starting point.
Joe Johnston: We start this season with JURASSIC PARK because it is recognized as the moment in the history of film when everything changed, when digital technology became viable as a visual effects tool. One of the important stories that I wanted to tell with Season 2 was the effect that George Lucas has had on digital technology and just film itself, all his influences, the things he’s contributed, the things he’s come up with and invented and inspired. That’s one of the focuses of Season 2.
Much of Season 2 focuses on THE PHANTOM MENACE, which has the first fully realized CG character – Jar Jar Binks. The character is a mixture of actor Ahmed Best’s movement and voice, and the digital animators at ILM, headed up by Rob Coleman. It’s fascinating to watch the progression from a line in the script, to casting, to all the trial and error that went into conceiving Jar Jar Binks on screen.
Ahmed Best: Jar Jar walks so Gollum can run and the Na’vi could fly. I was thinking about what performance capture directing is, and how we really created that during PHANTOM MENACE. What is really special about this documentary is that you see two very important things…being in service of the story and having respect for each one of us and what we do, and how we do it. That comes from the top. What you see in this documentary is George giving us the respect to be the best we can be within his constraints, all of us realizing that we have to rise to that occasion because our job is to be in service to this story.
But what happens when the story gives you a line like this:
The Gungan army marches out to war.
And now you’re the one who has to figure out how many Gungans there are, how they should move, and make it all live up to 16 years of pent-up fan expectations. Rob Coleman, animation director on the Star Wars prequel trilogy, explains his headspace when reading that line in the script.
Rob Coleman: We had no crowd system. I could load maybe 10 characters into my software to animate it. There’s no way I could do hundreds or thousands. We reached out to the R&D team and they were feverishly writing this stuff, but time was ticking. I’m getting goosebumps thinking about it right now, which is [that] there was a reality in my head that we weren’t going to be able to deliver the Gungan army. The thing about ILM even to this day is that it’s a company made up of really smart people who sit together and say, ‘How are we going to figure this out?’ It’s about innovation but it’s also about what Ahmed was talking about, which is respect and honoring and knowing that we’re all better because of the people we are with, and that’s in our DNA.
LIGHT & MAGIC Season 2, while focusing on ILM, also examines the effect other visual effects companies had on the industry as a whole during this period. Janet Lewin, ILM general manager and senior vice president for visual effects, was a member of ILM’s production staff all throughout the prequels. She describes this time in visual effects as “the awkward teenage years.”
Janet Lewin: One of the other themes of the series is that it was a transformative time for the industry and for ILM moving to digital. It was the ‘awkward teenage years’ of lots of competition. We had been the only game in town and suddenly there were a lot of facilities, many of which were started by ILMers, who got really strong, really hungry, and really innovative. And that forced us to move faster and I think the visual effects community is a small community. There’s a lot of cross pollination. WEDA is one of our strongest competitors but also an ally. We work together on projects and we’re inspired by each other. That’s a really great thing about this community.
If you are a fan of visual effects or behind-the-scenes featurettes, you will adore LIGHT & MAGIC. Season 2 (and Season 1) are now streaming, exclusively on Disney+, with all three parts available to watch. What do you think of the series? Let us know @skywalkingpod.
