Historically High - ILM: Industrial Light & Magic

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

In 1975 a man named George Lucas began preparing to make an audacious film that would come to be known as Star Wars. The movie, released in 1977 would go on to blow the minds and capture the hearts of countless people all over the world. The movie showed them things they'd never imagined they'd see, space battles, laser swords, a battle-station the size of a moon destroying a planet, and a guy in a suit with asthma.  The problem was, back in 75 no company existed to create the effects George needed to see his dream become reality...so he created one. Industrial Light & Magic was born. The crew that initially created the visual effects were a rag tag team of nerds, outcasts, and people with hobbies other's saw as ridiculous. Together they literally made magic happen, and it didn't end there. For the last 50 years ILM has been making the impossible possible by creating some of the most memorable moments in cinematic history. ILM has put you on the edge of your seat, they've put your jaw on the floor, and they've taken your breath away more times than you know. It's time to tell their story, the Historically High way. Punch it Chewie. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

God, you drew that one out. Is that a long bell? That's a long bell. Long bell go hard. We have a teaching episode this week from Professor Chris. I, Professor Adam, get to sit here and enjoy this as much as you guys do. There have been some teaching episodes in the past that he's done that I've had kind of some peripheral knowledge. Obviously, the last one, Game of Thrones, it was just hot fire, as all of them have been, pretty outside my purview.

Chris is doing something this week. I know the acronym I-LM. He explained it to me. Don't know what it stands for. But basically, as far as I can understand it from what you said, this was kind of the creation engine that allowed George Lucas to do what George Lucas has done. Yes, when it first started. Industrial Light and Magic.

Oh. Which makes it sound even cooler. Yes, it does. So Lucas didn't put his name in it. The M was getting me. I thought the L would be Lucas. Light makes sense. Industrial definitely makes sense.

The M just wasn't coming, but magic is the perfect M for this. Yeah. So this was founded back in May 26, 1975, and ILM was founded by George Lucas, initially funded by George Lucas, basically as the vehicle to create on camera the visions that he had in his head for how he wanted Star Wars to look. This company goes on, and it's still in existence

today, to basically create a murder's row isn't even the right term for the movies that this company has created. If you look at their list, there's no chance that you haven't seen many, many, many movies where ILM is responsible for the special effects in the movie. and without having the ability to do special effects, you can present a studio with a script, and it could be an amazing script, but if it requires certain visual aspects in order to make it watchable

for an audience to be drawn to it, if you don't have the ability to do those effects, the movie doesn't get made. I don't know how many scripts sit on a shelf just waiting for technology to catch up to it. I think that was the whole point with... I don't think that's really, thing anymore. Do you? There still

are things. I think the last one that was a good example was probably James Cameron with Avatar. He's still making this. I don't know why he's fucking still making Avatar. Didn't the last or the newest one just come out? Yeah. Have you ever seen an avatar? I've seen the first one. Is it good? I mean, visually

it's really cool. Yeah. And speaking of Avatar, ILM. ILM. ILM. Really? So Cameron needed ILM as well. This is just basically the business that anybody who wants to have great special effects in their movie, this is who you go to.

The only time you don't go to these guys, especially early on, is when they say, no, we don't have room to do this and you've got to go elsewhere. Is it weird to me? Because before we, obviously, we're going to go a little bit here

before we get started, not a whole long, but why have I not seen their logo on movies before? Where is it in the end credits? Yeah. Okay, because I figure ILM... So when it scrolls very, down to the very bottom,

and you see that weird, logo that's like a kind of a weird pill shape and it's got the four dots and it's like that's the motion picture of America. If you keep watching it, it'll give you stuff and it'll say special effects by industrial light magic. Okay. But it also says that in the credits, but I mean, shit, how often are people sitting there be like, uh, trying to read individual names? Yeah, I feel like they need to throw it in the beginning. If you watch a movie that has special effects in it, watching the credits is insane. Because anybody that had a part in the movie, so the, the, the special effects and like the programmers is just, you watch a show.

just, it looks like you're reading it from an actual like page. Damn. Yeah. I guess it's true. All right. Well, before we get too far into it, uh, remember guys, rate, review, subscribe. Um, if you guys are, hope you guys are enjoying the patron. This episode will come out after we've started the Patreon. Hopefully. No, I, I think it will. I think we're timed up and now it has to. We're required to now put this one further back. Okay. That makes sense. did, I got to space this out from Game of Thrones. Yeah. True.

But again, before we get into it, if you subscribe, thank you. If you haven't yet, get on it. There's some good shit in there. You got anything before we start? Teach me. Teach me, sir. Let's find out how the magic happens. All right. So again, industrial light and magic founded May 26, 1975, as a result of George Lucas

wanting to make his first Star Wars movie, which is Star Wars 4, new hope. Where did Lucas get the funding? Did he have backers? Yeah, yeah. He had financing and everything. He had, I want to say before Star Wars, he had made American graffiti because those are smaller, lower budget.

That's a, that's a movie about Americana, I think, in like the 50s and out hot rods in it and everything. And so he obviously had a little bit, not a ton of pull, but he probably had enough clout from that movie to get a meeting. present this crazy-ass story about, because like the first drafts of Star Wars were pretty insane. I think it was originally called the Tales of Luke Star Killer as written in The Journal of the Wills, The Star Wars. Huh. It was, it was like, because it was, you know, it's a space opera, basically.

I understand that it's, it's still very, very. very wordy. So George Lucas gets funding to make this and he's not going to have another opportunity to do this. So he wants to basically get his vision out for this movie as much as possible. The rub to that is the things that he's seeing in his head have never been done before. There have been space movies that have had special effects. I want to say Stanley Kubrick's movies. Um, movie that was about space God, what was that called? I'll look it up.

The moon landing? Is that what you're talking about? No. They shot in the soundstage? No. Come on. Jesus, don't do that. How weird would it be for somebody who George Lucas is pitching

this to, to have him lay it all out for you, and then just have everybody in the room be like, well, this is different than American graffiti. Yeah. That's what's been rolling around. He just walks in with a dude in a chewy costume.

And he's like, this is going to set the stone for the story or set the tone. It's 2001 of Space Odyssey. Okay. Is the one that Kubrick did. And then I want to say there may have been close encounters, but that may have been a little bit after. And that's Spielberg, I believe. So he needs somebody or a company that's a company that's, to produce the effects for these scenes in his movie.

If he doesn't have the effects, the movie's not going to be made. Yeah, there's no shortcut to doing Star Wars. No, we look at special effects now, and we see the end result. So to us, everything just looks seamless. When you're watching an older movie and you see an early iteration of special effects, your eye catches something, but there are still certain movies that were made a long time ago where the special effects like hold up and of course some of them

have been like remastered retouched up but you watch a movie like Jurassic Park with the combination of animatronics and then CGI for farther away shots but then combining those in together it's hard in that movie

to try to distinguish the difference I'm also partial because that's my fucking favorite movie I was going to say is it weird that I almost appreciate that and enjoy that more than what it has become. Like, now Jurassic Park sucks. I think we can all probably agree that it's outlived its lifetime. But for some reason, the dinosaurs, and maybe it's nostalgia of being a kid, I like

those dinosaurs better in the first Jurassic Park than anything in the Jurassic World. Yeah, but how much of that are you? Let's say that you just sat there and you watch them both on mute. The story of Jurassic Park is great. It was written in, you know, the book by Michael Crichton, which the book has some pretty badass shit in it that the movie doesn't. But you're seeing scripts go down too. Like visually speaking, think of this way.

Visually speaking, if you're just watching Jurassic World and you're seeing all of it, you're probably like, okay, visually, this is pretty good. The complaints are like, the plot in this is kind of ridiculous. Maybe that is to a certain extent, but there's, obviously it's cool. The special effects are cool, but I don't know if the dinosaurs really hit the same. And maybe, like I say, it's because of the bio, of being a child and seeing it be like, that's what this is supposed to look like.

We're the first generation of people that saw what dinosaurs probably moved like, for the most part. We saw the closest that anyone has ever seen to a dinosaur. True, yeah. I think I was 11 when that came out, and that fucking just grabbed me. And I'd love dinosaurs before that.

So this movie was like, oh, we're going to show you. Like, where else? could you see that? But again, we're getting ahead. We're already back, we're already in the 90s. So going back to the, to 75, no special effects. There wasn't a thing, such a thing as a special effects house. So it's not like Lucas could be like, I'll contract out to this guy, I'll contract out to that guy. No one could do what he did. They had little studio effects that kind of like studios would have their own effects houses, but they weren't going to pour all of these resources and tailor everything just to making George Lucas's movie. They didn't understand the necessity for budgeting that stuff out, I'm assuming, because it really hadn't been critical to a lot of movies. You had no clue what it would cost or what this cost to make or what it would look like and what it was worth. This is completely uncharted territory, which is why this topic is so fascinating to me. Well, there's an interesting, like, physical mediums that already exist, a la, an American graffiti when you can throw a muscle car on the screen and you can kind of rely on. human interaction back and forth.

Yeah. Whereas the juxtaposition of creating spaceship environments that looks somewhat real is just... The other thing, too, is when I was watching them create and how they had what they had to consider for certain special effects, we can look at a movie that takes place here has cars like American graffiti. And everything in that movie from a scale perspective makes sense to us because we have seen those things. We know how big the average person is. We've seen cars like that. We know how wide a road is.

We know how fast what a car traveling that fast looks like. Everybody's seeing a pack of cigarettes rolled up in somebody's sleep. Yeah. We could relate in our minds to scale and for familiarity. What he's trying to do is he had this obsession with wanting to create spectacle and speed and movement. Like, you know, we talked about World War. We talked about Battle of Britain. There's footage from those battles where everything is so very kinetic.

It's all moving. It's all quick. can sense that because planes are zooming by other planes. He wanted to be able to do that, but have dog fights in space. Can't do that in real life. Correct, because what are you going to do? You're either going to take the, a model of the thing. What are you going to do, run it on a string, and then just try to throw it in front of

the string and have it passed by a camera, then it's literally taking one shot past a camera. If you are then moving the camera and being like, oh, we'll shoot it down the line diagonally, you're still only getting one shot of that from that fixed position. And then you can't stick something like they used to do in FlashGord where you have it on a stick. Yeah. And then you're moving. Exactly.

Because it moves and it's jerkyed everything. So that stuff isn't going to work. Well, and as you just pointed out, to scale that to make it look like a believable shot or semi-believable shot, it's just not possible. Because there's nothing to reference it off of. So this, he kind of taps this guy named John Dykstra.

and or Lucas does he finds this guy John Dykstra and this guy was kind of a jack of all trades you had people that were like scene builders you had people that were artists you had people that were um animators that were stop motion claymation people and you know those people existed within Hollywood because if you look at think of like clash I don't know if it was Clash of the Titans or anything but you always think of those old movies when they first made them that the like skeletons are fighting during the odyssey and it's the weird like the early early early special effects or like a dinosaur would be stop motion clay. Oh yeah. It would move all jerky in a movie. Gumby. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So through kind of just this weird shared network of a bunch of these people knowing each other

or knowing people that did other things, John Dykstra is able to kind of bring in this team of model makers and, you know, set designers, map painting designers to do backgrounds, stop motion animators, scenery, you know, constructors. And he would, you know, bring them together. And he's like, okay, we're doing this movie. It's in space. We have these storyboards that have been written up by all these artists. They were doing the storyboards there at ILM.

And also, you know, George Lucas being a director, he sees things in his head that he wants. But, you know, the documentary that I watched, any director that they're talking to, they're like, we have pictures, but we're not going to walk in there and show you like a fully fleshed out sketch. Some of us can maybe get something close, but we'll be like, we'll draw some shapes and be like, this is kind of how I want it. They have artists at these plays who are just drawing different iterations of starships and robots and planets and locations. And then the director's coming by and is like, I like the curves of this one, but I like, you know, a line of this one. Let's go ahead and throw those together and draw me up a mock-up.

They're essentially building a new car. Exactly. Yeah, in more ways than one. This feels very ghost army to me. It is very ghost army. So you have these people that as they're going through, and Lucas is giving them parts of the movie to try to, you know, work out. Again, special effects, too, is going to fall into, like, costume design.

It's going to fall into, like, physical props, something showing as, you know, an action on the screen. They would run into situations where they'd be like, hey, I think. you know, we're going to have to do it this way. We're going to have to do the shot this way. And then everyone would look around me like, do we have anyone that does that? And some guy would just raise it hand and be like, I actually know a guy that works with that type of camera and that type of lighting.

I could ask him. And they'd hire that guy. So they create this just weird misfit island or island of misfit toys of all these people that have had all these little niche things that have never been probably considered cool or mainstream or anything. And they're coming in and starting to develop these process. for creating special effects to go along with Lucas's vision. So as far as Lucas having to check these people off,

he's kind of left them to their, he's left Aikstra to his own devices to kind of build this team. Yep. So before Lucas goes and starts actually shooting, because he's going to be shooting over, I believe, like in Pinewood in England, or shoot, I think they shot in Tunisia for Tatooine during the first episode four.

Did they give him like a proof of concept? Or was this just all kind of a handshake deal? No, no, no. So what do you mean, prove a concept? Like, we can produce things such as this, is this more into your vision of how you want this shot. Like about ILM to Lucas? Yeah. He didn't really have to have a deal. It was his company. But I mean, okay. So I guess it is his company.

But at the same time, you would think that he would want a little bit more security and knowing that these guys are up to the challenge. He just felt that they could figure it out and that they could do it. And here's the thing. If he didn't get this movie made now, and there wasn't some form of group of people trying to create special effects, it would never get made. Wow. So he was hedging his bet that these people would be able to figure this thing out.

Hmm. Okay. So he's like, all I wrote the script, I'll approve this stuff, I'll come in with ideas. So before he leaves to go shoot, he comes in, they storyboard out of stuff. He picks a bunch of sketches. is he finalizes designs for ships and things like that. And as he leaves, John Dykstra goes and he finds a warehouse in Van Nuys that's like by the Van Nuys airport that's in an industrial center.

So they have garages and like a big work floor and everything. And like I said, he's bringing in photographers, model makers, set designer artists. Most of these people aren't movie people either. They're making things for either their own just. recreation or pleasure, or it's not something related to Hollywood. Plays. Probably a lot of screen actors. Drawing backgrounds for other things, like just photo shoots, things like that.

So... Broadway set designers, probably? I mean, yeah, to a degree. Because Broadway was definitely around... I wonder if Broadway had that sense of, like, I create Broadway backdrops. I'm not going to write for, or I'm not going to draw for movies. The smut? Yeah, there was some type of...

of pretentiousness to it. So you're trying to figure out how to make special effects when special effects weren't really a thing. So they start out, you know, just kind of giving you a heads up on or kind of fast forwarding a little bit. They have the designs for these ships. So for the first year, while George Lucas is off shooting, you know, and everything like that with the live actors and the sets and everything.

So they are going through all these things he approved, and they're just trying to work out how they're going to do it. They don't know how they're going to do it yet. They know they have like a two, two and a half year timeframe that they're able to use. The entire first year isn't about how do we, you know, create the effects. It's how do we create the equipment that can help us create the effects? While they're over there shooting, what? because they have weapons. They have lightsabers and shit like that

when they're overshooting these first scenes. Did that come out of ILM2? Were those like just mockups that they had built or was that all done in post? So that's all, yeah, that's all done in post. Okay. As far as like the lasers and all that kind of stuff. As far as like the handles of the sabers and guns.

Because in the first Star Wars, like the first three, it might not have been all three. They might have figured it out by the third one. But it was, I want to say it's called rotoscoping and basically the lightsaber had a blade on it and I had a three

it almost looked like a triangle, three sides three facets and it had reflective material and I think it spun so when there was light applied to it from like back behind the camera it would catch that and when they would develop it it could be it would look like it was glowing because it was always reflecting light

from all different angles no matter how you moved it that's why if you're watching the first one it kind of looks a little jerky like if he moves it It goes thin and then thick and thin. And that's an ILM invention? I'm not sure if they invented that specifically, but they probably had a hand and had to develop that. I think rotoscoping was also something that was known at the time.

This application of having it be a laser sword is probably definitely a new thing. All right. So first they design this camera that has basically a motion rig. So what they're going to do is instead of, to get that kinetic feel of movement and of things moving through space and making movements through space, they're not going to move the prop through a space. They're going to design a camera that can simulate the motions and make it look like that. So an example would be there are scenes like in a new hope when the X-Wings are attacking a Death Star and it looks like they're coming in

straight and then they bank and swoop in away from the camera. They're not taking a model where the camera's fixed and bringing it in on a stick and then swooping it down to do that. The X-wing is stationary sitting there to where it doesn't move. It's not rattling. It's not shaking or anything. The camera rig is designed to basically move toward it and then be able to rotate up and over it in a motion. So it makes it look like when they play it back. It's doing a barrel roll or something.

So is it on like a gyroscope? The camera, they have to design the camera to where it can move not just by hand, but where it can be programmed by the computers of the time to be able to mimic the exact same motions. The fluidity of... But to do the exact same motion and move the exact same distance because they need to have cohesive, consistent shots to be able to piece them together.

So they developed one of them that called the Dykstra Flex, named after the John Dykstra, the guy that's kind of overseeing, the manager kind of a violin at this point. Priceless, you think? That camera? I don't know if they ever viewed it like that because once they moved to another location, they bring it with them to use. And then after that, it's just kind of a constant.

George Lucas wasn't nostalgic in the terms of being married to methods of the past. Yeah. If something was better, whatever it was replacing, that died. It wasn't just like, well, this has been doing me well and everything. No, he was like, if this is better, we're doing that. We don't need to do this anymore. That camera in and of itself just opened up a world of new potential in movies. Yes. Here's a good example. So I know you haven't seen them a lot, but have you ever seen the original Star Wars A New Hope?

Yeah. You know the very first scene where it pans down and you see the planet so you get a scope here in space. The smaller ship comes into scene and then the Death Star or sorry, the Star Destroyer comes into scene. and you're riding under the bottom of it, but you just are under it for like 15 seconds. And it just keeps going in. So it gives you that scope of like, this is a big fucking ship. So George is telling them,

this is the opening shot. This is what I want. And they're like, how are we going to make this? Like, this is an insane shot. It has to be a practical. Again, there's no computer effects.

Like, we're not going to get to that until like the 90s. So everything is literally just sets and props and models and camera movement. So they're trying to figure this out. And one of the guys goes to Lucas, he's like, get one of the Death Stars, or fuck, what I keep on the Death Star?

Get one of the Star Destroyers that we built. This thing was probably, I don't know, three feet long. So I mean, some of these props and these models are, are big. And he tells them, get your model guys on here and go over the bottom of this and add as much detail as you possibly can, I'm going to position the camera to basically sit and hover

a few centimeters off of this thing and the camera and we're going to flip it upside down. Not the camera, but the Star Destroyer. And then I'm just going to come from front and I'm going to back the camera up

and when we play it, it's not going to look like the camera is coming back. It's going to look like the thing is moving forward. And you're going to see all of this detail and everything on this. So it's going to be a physical like you're seeing this fly through space. It's got to be a painfully slow shot too

because you would need to speed it up to show just the proportionality and the size of the destroyer too. So you got to just be inching that thing along just so slowly to try to convey how big the ship is. Yeah. And so when it comes to also building these props, you know, they're going off of proposed,

you know, approved drawings. Then a lot of the time the drawing gets turned into a clay model where they can then, you know, shave off areas or reshape things like that. And so they're clay casting a lot of these. And to build some of these, you know, ships, because there's nothing like them that exists. If you look at a tiefighter, if you look at an X-wing and everything, there's no model to go off. Exactly. So what they would do is they would go to like hobby stores. And they would just buy a ton of models of all types. They said a lot of them, they got people. They got pieces and parts because of like gears and like cones for like nose cones and everything.

They would get a lot of stuff out of like World War II airplane and like, uh, cannon models or like artillery models, tank models, things like that. And they would just put out all of these pieces from all these different models and be like, all right,

let's start tearing off pieces, see what kind of fits together, see what looks cool. They call it model bashing or kit bashing. It's Frankensteining models. It's the same way they actually remember, in Batman begins, the first one with Christian Vale. The Batman Vale, it's that Tumblr one that kind of looks all crazy.

That was built the exact same way. The back of that is actually the nose cone off of a, like a P-51 fighter plane from a model. So a lot of stuff is designed through the use of this kit bashing. So all in total with a new hope, do you have how long it took to shoot? Because if you're developing this technology, there's going to be probably some deadlines that you have to hit have this stuff, like creating that model. How long does that take in order to be able to use it in a shot? Yeah, I mean, and you not only have that one, you have models of the ship that it's chasing when you have to get a close-up shot of that. Yeah, you're not just doing one. You have to do fleets.

Yeah, well, and it doesn't even have to be the same ship because they're going to develop ways within shooting this to make it look like they're remote. So they have it scaled. So you'll have, this will be the one for close-ups, but then we have two star destroyers that are a foot long. We have actually one that's six inches long, all of them to scale, that we then place them just behind it or up in the distance, and it just, the force perspective and everything changes. They have rebel ships, they have X-wings, they have tie fighters that do. They have the Millennium Falcon that they have to design where one of the guys is just sitting there being like, I'm supposed to build this, like what, he wants a really, you know, George wants a really unique ship. So he's going over and he's just

picking up parts. And I think he was at home one day and he picked up a plate. And he picked up a plate. He's like, what if I flipped the other plate on top? And he's like, well, I kind of got a flying saucer at this point. That's weird. But I can create movement with it by, I can put engines on one side so people know that it always moves in the direction the engines are pushing it. But then I'll just add some little, maybe like a little fork out the front of it so people know it has that forward movement. Even when it's sitting still, you know which way it goes. He's like, and let's, what do we do with the cockpit?

Well, a guy that had been designing the Millian Vulcan had had it. had gotten a design made, but it looked way different. It looked like another space movie, I think, had come out while they were making Star Wars and had a ship kind of similar to it, and George was like, fuck, I can't use it now. That sucks. Because the Maloney and Falcon is going to look too close. So he assigned this guy to design it. Well, the guy that built it initially was like, well, that sucks.

You can't use my design. But the other guy that was building it is like, I have this nose piece, this is the cockpit window, use this, and then use the satellite from this or something like that. And so he's putting it around. He's like, well, what if we like offset it? Because like in a car, how people can understand it, you always sit off to one side. He's like, so I'm going to put it on this side of it. But then because let's think of European cars, you go over to this side.

So he put the cockpit just off to the side. And then he drew a bunch of models of different positions. It could be in the middle. And he's like, I bet George's going to pick this one. And that's the one he picked. So just even thinking of weird stuff like that of these designs. That's so much time taken to just do all these different renderings. They ended up calling the morning falcon like the pork slider, the pork sandwich,

because it looked like a like a loose meat pork sandwich, like on a bun, that you just bit a bite out of. And that's why it had that little fork area at the beginning. Some of the ways that they would design, do you remember the end of the movie when they're fighting against? They're going through the trench and the Death Star and everything. This is after. it begins to implode.

No, no, no. So this is when the Death Star is, you know, the space station. Yeah. It's coming to blow up the planet. Luke gets in the X-wing and him and the other Rebel pilots. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it's doing the big dogfighting scene. So the way that that was shot is they basically had this huge miniature built of the Death Star

trench and all the pieces on it were different. They had designed six rubber-molded pieces and they would just form cast them all by hand and then paint them gray and then line them up and alternate them in ways that were random and then design little gun towers that would stick out and then have a trench that had all these crazy details that were built into it and to make it feel like you were going down the trench again computers don't exist it has to be something that you can shoot they would have a camera on a truck and the model that they built was so long that they could lower a camera and have it pointing down kind of in the trench and then drive the truck to where it would

then pull the camera through the trench. So then as they're using that again for different scenes, they can copy that. They can reverse it so it has different movement to it. It looks like a different part of the trench. They're doing this during the daytime. They're doing this with little explosions. So they'll follow it in and then they'll have a little pyrotechnic at the end to signify either like a missile that was fired or a ship exploding. Are there videos of this? Are there videos of how they shoot this? Yes. That's, it's so, it just looks like so, it's so low budget. But it feels so interesting to see how these shots are done.

The crazy thing is when you look at how they did it and then you go back and it's like, this is how we did it and then they show you the shot and your mind is trying to wrap yourself around. Okay, remember, they showed me that the model didn't move. The camera went around and then you see the shot and there's no way you can convince your mind that the camera's moving. you're like the ships are obviously moving well there's just no way to see that shot and then to see how they do it it's like you didn't produce

it that way there's just no possible way that you drug a camera with a truck and you made this happen so they spend the first year they have two years and they have like two million dollars they spend the entire first year and half the budget

building the models building the camera the rigs They also are able to, some of these guys they bring in are guys that are just film nerds, or photography nerds, know how lenses work, know what happened if you cross film through different lenses or if you do this. They're building actual machines that can run film through them, adding layers to it that can then be used. Like when they're flying through space, you know, they have to take the X-wing flying that they're filming and overlay it with the background of the Death Star. behind it. Yeah. So they're developing ways in which they're having to integrate shots onto other pieces of film that they've already shot or that are like in the background. And make it look seamless.

And make it look seamless. When again, it's never been done before. So George comes back after like a year of shooting and him and Dykstra get into it because they know that he's coming back. They're like, we don't have anything to show him as far as a scene that's been put together. That's a huge problem. Yeah, we can't show him the fruits of his labor. He's a year in, he shot everything, and now he's waiting to see how the special effects are going to be integrated.

And we have two scenes to show him. They have one of the first kind of special effects scenes, not the one of the ship coming in. But I believe it is where R2D, T2 and C3PO get into the escape pod. And it's the shot from inside the ship where it launches out into space. So you see all these little, you know, he's like, well, we need to show it to where, you know, it would be like ice crystals would be flying out. And you can't put ice crystals in just using a computer. So he's like, what do we use? He's like, okay, well, I'll do like maybe some like dull glitter and some particulates.

And then as I, you know, drop this thing out of this, I have the camera position pointing downward. I have the little escape pod prop underneath it. And then as I release this thing, I bet I could hit some compressed air in there to kind of blow it out. But then it'll scatter this like, kind of. kind of glitterish stuff that I'm putting out here. And maybe that'll look like particulate. It's like ice crystals, like, because it's been in space. So they filmed that shot.

It looks really good. And it might have been the first shot. I want to say it wasn't the first one. It was something a little bit less impressive. So Lucas is pissed. He's like, what have you guys been doing for the last year? And he's like, we've been building this shit. No.

Like, it's not like we don't like, it's like the equipment existed out there. and we just had to go buy it and then figure out how to design the models. Like, the way you want stuff to look and the way you're telling me you want it, you don't want slow-moving ships that have been in every single movie. You want to see fast action. You want to see dog fights. You want to see like World War II, you know, fighters going at each other. We have to figure out ways to make that happen.

So Lucas is still pissed. Dystra's like, listen, we've only spent half the money and half of it was to build all this. We know kind of what we're doing now. We have the tools to do it. Let us figure this thing out. You didn't pay us a million dollars to sit here and play hacky sack for a year, okay? We put some money to use. He's still scared shitless because he's already spent all, like, he can't go back.

He can't be like, well, we shot the movie and now we don't have a way to make the special effects. Because like you said, the eggs are, Star Wars eggs are an ILM's basket. Yeah. Everything. They went to this thing called Vista Vision, which, do you remember the old Charlton Heston Ten Commandments? I know you probably never sat and watched it, but ever seen clips. Oh yeah. It was the one where he like part of the Red Sea and all that kind of stuff.

That thing that had like the weird clouds and made the like, it was this style in which it was shot. They were able to use those cameras, but then co-op them to film certain things in space that looks like really, really well. So they end up getting the rest of the effects done. They use that next year, however long they have. They're able to do what they need to do. Lucas comes in. After a few months, he starts kind of seeing what's been put together. And he's like, okay, yeah, yeah, this is starting to look really good.

And movie ends up coming out. It's a huge success. New Hope wins the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. It wins a special like sound effect award because of, you know, you got lasers, you got the hum of the lightsabers, you got space battles. You got the sound of the Thai fighters, the sound of the X wings. How is the, this is what I was going to ask earlier. How do you make the sound for the lightsabers? What is that?

Okay, so from what I saw, I don't understand the principles of it, but I know how they were doing it. So he had a speaker sitting in front of like a big, like, think of your big, like 70 style. It's a three-foot speaker. And as it's sitting in front of it, he has a, like a wand. I'm going to sneeze. Hang on. Sorry about that. He has a wand that I think is also like emitting a frequency.

And as he moves it close, like you would move a microphone close to his speaker. you get that, mm-hmm, except he's able to take that and have more control over it. So as he moves it closer to the speaker, we get, um,

mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And what he's doing after figuring this sound out is in post-production, as he's going through an adding sound, he's watching the scene

and watching the movement of like Luke's like series. He's matching swings up on noise. And he's doing the swings of the sound as Luke's moving it. Then he's doing that again, watching the scene, or not Luke, yeah, watching the scene of like Vader and Kenobi when they fight,

he's matching those as well. When they're trying to figure out the sound of how like blasters are going to sound, they have like really tightly bound. Basically a guy goes out around the world or around nature, just on a walk through the city wherever has a recorder with him and he's going up and he's listening for sounds. And he maybe has a handful of little things and he's banging him against something to see if it a certain sound. One of the sounds for the blasters is he has a little like metal.

It's not like a hammer, but it's like a little, some type of metal like banging device. And he's hitting it against a steel cable. It's going to, chew, choo, choo, and it's making those sounds. Probably pretty weird when he brings that rig in to film the sounds for the guns, or the blasters. No, he's doing out in nature. He's going out there and he might have found like. Oh, and he's recording that. And then he's just putting that sound into the clip.

I think of this way. You have like a power pole. You know how sometimes it has those wires that come down in the security ground? He went up to one of those wires and it was just like, and he had a microphone and a cassette recorder or like a, not a cassette recorder, but a recorder on him in a case. And he would just hold the mic up and he would make that. And then he would go back and be like, how does this sound? How can we alter this? Does that sound good?

So he probably had like 10 of those recordings of hitting that guide wire or whatever it was. And then just went back and... I was hitting it three feet off the ground, two feet off the ground. two feet off the path. Yeah. That changes the pitch. Do we use this one for the rebels? Do we use it wasn't for ships?

Do we use it for a handheld blaster? Crazy job. Yeah. Costume design. So do you remember, I'm going to call back a lot to Star Wars, but hopefully it's the original one, so you have some memory of it. The canteen is seen early on. Yeah.

Well, they play Jiz. That's the music being played. Is that what it's called? In the canteen scene. Yeah, the music is being played. It's called Jiz music. Okay. So.

they had some aliens, you know, costumes designed. But as they're getting ready to, and Lucas is going in and be like, well, we have this scene. We need to film all these aliens. He's like, we don't have enough of these things. So he goes to some of the guys that work there and are like, do you guys know of anyone? He's like, well, in my free time, I actually designed like monster masks and stuff like that. He's like, do you have any homies? Like, oh, yeah, I got a bunch of homies. He's like, go get him. Bring them back. And so a lot of those masks and aliens that are in that first scene are old like monster masks that they were using for like home movies and things like that or they were just making for fun.

Just silicone molded. And then those became established races in or species in Star Wars that then were put in other movies or like cartoons and stuff just because that was the mask that that guy had happened to have. Do you have any special info on how they did Java? Java was a puppet to begin. Like was an animatronic. Yeah. But Java didn't come in until.

technically Java didn't come in until Returned the Jedi. So fast forward to Star Wars movies and that advancement of what they learn during the special editions that they made. He put Java in CGI so you saw Java technically in a new hope but he's CGI and it looks so much worse than the real like the practical Java, it looks so good

because no one knew what a giant slug was going to move like. They're like, obviously that's how it would move and talk. So it's, they're learning things as well. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Just as far as like, we can improve on this in the future. We just have to let technology catch up to where we can make the improvement. Correct.

And a lot of the time, it's not even, we're going to let technology. It's like we have to catch the technology. We have to make the technology. Correct. So Star Wars, you know, don't have to say it, ends up becoming a massive hit. And after that, it's not. not as though like George Lucas is like, all right, number two, let's start on it. That's not like an immediate given. This wasn't at a time where even if it was a box office success, that a second

one was already predetermined. Lucas didn't have a script written or anything like that. He left it, left off to where he knew he wanted to make three, didn't have the script. He had ideas of a, you know, an outline of how it was going to work. Intentionally left the opening of the movie to where there was room to do, the other ones. But he just kind of went about doing other things at that point. He went back to writing. He had to actually make a script. It takes him, he's not a super great writer.

So it takes them a little bit longer to make these scripts. And during this time, he's not like, well, I'm going to go ahead and keep ILM active because what are they going to be doing? I don't know what ships are going to be. I don't know what characters are going to be. I don't know what special effects are going to be needed because I don't know what scenes are going to be in this movie. so he has to kind of like shut it down. Even after this thing wins the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, there's not enough of a demand for movies being made for them to be like,

hey, we can just go do special effects for this movie. Really? Yeah. So a lot of these guys end up getting on with other companies to kind of use their skill sets of being like, hey, I just worked on Star Wars. That's going to get your foot in kind of any day. door. And this is a Walt Disney type thing, right?

And the animators? Just going beyond Disney or going from Disney's first couple ventures to other places? These guys basically, this is, I'm trying to kind of think of how to put it. Because they're freelancers. Yes, but this is basically like a movie where the group of heroes end up defeating the bad guy. And at the end of the movie, they're like, until we meet again. and they all go apart,

you know, they all go their separate ways, but it's like, if you ever need to call on any of us, we'll come running. So a couple of these guys, I had to mention this,

as people go there's separate ways, this isn't a huge team. I think there's maybe 20 to 30 guys that were at ILM at this point. So they kind of go their separate ways. A couple of the guys

go to work on Flesh Gordon. Hell yeah. Good choice. Flesh Gordon. What? A porno? A porno version. A flash Gordon.

They go to design the props and sets for flesh Gordon. Look it up. Okay. Everybody will look at it up. I want to watch it later. So as they go their separate ways, John Dykstra, he moves on to Battlestar Galactica. I think it might have just been called Galactic at that time and helps design the ships and the look of, you know, the look of their special effects and everything like that. He brings a few of the people along with him, kind of keeps some of the group together.

and this allows them as a unit to continue the opportunity to keep developing these effects. Did you just look it up? Okay. So they're working on, and they're still kind of in the wheelhouse of what they're going to be doing next because Galactica is in space. Yeah, it's not really a lateral move, but it's kind of a move in the same area. Correct. And they're having to work within the funding that Galacta has. It's not like they can walk into the warehouse and just be like, hey, we're just going to use all this stuff.

So they're still trying to piece together and kind of, and again, they're developing their craft even more because they're not having to take a break from doing that. Was this a Lucas studio that they were in or a Lucas building or was this something that ILM owned? I guess ILM's still Lucas though. Correct. ILM is just George Lucas's special effects company, specifically at this point used only for Star Wars. So they're not using like the same areas? It's not like Galactica's like, hey, ILM, we were. want to hire you for this.

After Star Wars George Lucas was like, ILM's actually technically not in business right now, and other people from that company have to go find jobs. So they're working for these other special effects companies or production houses or whatever. God, that feels like it would be a step down. And that's why people go, yeah, that's why flesh gourd, man. That's why he's having to make.

They're having to make that. So once the decision is made that Empire, Empire Strikes Back is going to be made, Lucas is like, well, for my special effects, I don't have to be in a position to where I need sound like, sounds or like stages and everything. I don't need to be at a, I don't need to be at Fox. I don't need to be at the studio to use their big, you know, like, yeah, stages, basically, their big sets. These are all things that can be made in an office and an industrial park and it doesn't have to be here in L.A. So he's like, I'm going to actually move ILM up to outside of San Francisco in Marine or Marin,

and he basically tells a ton of the people of pretty much like maybe 80, 90% of the people that were working at ILM on the first movie, hey, it's going to be moving up here, but there's a place for you. If you want to come up here, we'll get you a place. We're going to start working on the new movie. It needs to be, it needs to surpass all the things

that the first movie has built up as expectation. Is this the beginning of Skywalker Ranch? No, no, no. This is just, this is going to be in an industrial park. All right. This office building, they move into. They're like, we weren't even the only ones in the industrial park. We had an auto mechanic down at one side. And then at the other side, there was like another

business. We had a good chunk of it. Um, mechanic could be helpful. Perhaps. But again, they like, just like they did when they were shooting, um, a new hope in some of the special effects, they use the parking lot for a lot of stuff. They blow shit up in the parking lot. They have an empty lot across the street. He's like, we blew a lot of shit up in that empty lot. John Dykstra doesn't get the call though. Really? Yeah, there was some, there was a lot of contention between him and George Lucas. They did interviews in this documentary for both of them.

Dykstra is talking about, he's like, did it hurt? He's like, fuck yeah, I helped, you know, I contributed. I knew that, you know, I was young and that I probably wasn't the most tactful of this kind of stuff. But I feel I had earned an opportunity to come out there. But George felt that there was a lot of distraction from kind of what I brought and that it didn't outweigh the negatives. the guy is really gracious about it. He's like, I think I was probably just too young and volatile at the time. Because again, dude, these aren't like 40-year-old people doing this.

These are guys that are in their early 20s that just have these habits that they still developed from being kids, shooting their own home movies and doing their own special effects that are now coming into this. That takes a lot of self-awareness to be able to look back and say that. Knowing what you missed out on? Well, and just being like, this is probably why I missed out on it. Yeah, it would be very hard not to be bitter about that. Just to be like, yeah, I probably wasn't the guy that I should have been at that time. Like, it's to know that you did the first Star Wars and then you get passed up and you see what the franchise is done to just want to be a part of it, you got to just swallow it and be like, all right, I'm sure Dykstra went on to have a pretty illustrious career.

I don't know. I didn't look up John Dykstra that much. This was, I had to keep moving on to who that. takes over and who keeps doing other stuff. But as far as, he would probably have a fairly decent golden ticket at that point. He definitely stayed within the industry. I would imagine, yeah. So Empire Strikes Back is put into production.

They go to this, they end up calling it the Kerner facility because it was on Kerner Street. And as they're walking into this big-ass warehouse, there's no offices for the artist, there's no offices for sound guys, there's no offices for all these different, you know, the, you know, stop motion capture. So they're like, okay, here's a bunch of two-by-fourts, just lay out what your office wants the size of your office, and then we'll have the construction guys come in and actually put up the walls. Well, you had people that would go in at night, and the artist's department would kick over their board two feet into like the sound departments to try to get more room

out of their office, and then you come in the next day and the walls would already be built. Again, the pressure's on to repeat the magic and to, you know, do even better. So one of the opening scenes for Empire Strikes Back is the Battle of Hoth. It's on the ice planet. it's got the big four-legged Imperial Walkers. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. So all of that is done, the Imperial Walkers, is done with stop motion. That kind of makes sense. I feel like you can see how they move in that.

That would be a... It lends to that because he's like, the only reason that we felt that we could do a great job in stop motion is because these things are mechanical. Yeah, it's a good parent. Yeah, they don't move organically. They move within the joints and articulation that we move when we actually do the stop motion. but they were showing, you know, these guys had a 30-foot section of Hoth that was built, and these models that were probably about a foot tall and had all these different ways to articulate them, and were designed because they had to be so detailed in a way where they're telling the prop designer,

the model makers, hey, we need you to incorporate gears in here that will move and shift as we turn the legs, because this thing has to show mechanical movement and piston movement. We need the guns on it to be able to go backwards and fold. forward. So during shots where it's going to be firing, we can show the recoil on the guns. So there was a guy, I don't know, I want to say his name was Tippett. Let me, I actually have it here. Hold on. Phil, sorry, Phil Dippett was one of the main guys. And he would basically, the stage was set up about two feet off the ground.

And you would have to crawl under it. And there were certain hatches in it that you have to open up, adjust them very, very, you know, adjust the other one behind. find it, go back down, wait for them to shoot it, take a look at the shot, make sure it was done, go for the next shot, go back under the thing, open the trap door, move them a little bit more, move this leg here that maybe it fired a shot, so I need to move the gun in on this one, okay? Oh my gosh. Close it.

I need to go back to take the shot, review the shot, does it look good, okay? Go back and had to just do this for days on end to get that scene. The scene with like the snow speeders coming in was all done with the same kind of effects where they would hold the snow speeder and have the camera rotating around it. The tauntons, those animals, the one that like Han cuts open and shoves Luke inside to keep them warm.

So that's claymation, basically, with a little guy that's very highly detailed on it. So anytime you see that writing, it is the guy, the tiny guy riding on it. But this Dippa guy was showing, he's like, it's not just about the creature's movement. So he would be like, it's an articulated skeleton.

I have to then put clay on top. of it to where it can move, but it shows the musculature in the body. And then I have to find something to stretch over it to make it look like fur. But there's not synthetic fur made. So what this guy... What? Back then there wasn't synthetic fur yet? Not for what they were going to be saying at the detail and everything like care of like an animal. So what this guy did, he actually goes and finds a piece of calf hair.

skin because calf hair is a lot finer. So he gets this piece. He puts glue. You cover it, and I don't know how they figure out this process. You put glue on the fur side. You then put it in a container with maggots. The maggots eat away all the flesh. As the maggots eat away all the flesh, you then wash out all the glue and you apply

some type of latex to it. And it then designs it to where it's basically a fur covered piece of like stretchable skin. and they take this and they stretch it over the model of the taunton and like pendant in place. So when you see that in the movie, that's real animal hair that they had to create some process designed to put on this little one foot tall model

that they had to use stop motion on it. What about the ton ton that he slices open? That's a physical prop where it's down on the ground. Really? They built it to scale and then they basically just had it to wear. They had pressure and when you opened it and did the lightsaber, they probably had like some type of zipper, like quick release. And then the pressure on the inside would force out whatever prop guts they made.

Wow, dude. That's nuts. So one of the ideas when they were developing this for the Imperial Walkers is one of the guys got a hold of the Norwegian army. And he's like, hey, we're going to be shooting this scene in the snow, probably going to be shooting up somewhere in Norway. Do you mind if we borrow some tanks and then put some stuff on top of them and everything? and they're like, oh yeah, you can have like six tanks to use for your guys' this thing. You guys are shooting the new Star Wars movie, right? Yeah, definitely had these tanks.

Well, one of the guys was looking through this art book and he saw this thing that was basically a picture of a truck, but it was like all of this futuristic Tomorrowland stuff and the truck had four legs on it for cargo movement. He's like, why don't we make it like a four-legged walker? And so, again, these guys are just getting inspiration for these things from just on the fly? Yeah. Basically?

Wow, dude. They figured out because they're shooting on like a white screen that they had to figure out how to do certain things when shooting models against different colored screens because in black, if you have those little like outline, they call them mat lines. If you're shooting something, the camera tends to outline the object that's in focus.

If it's against a white background and you're trying to put that, it's always going to have a little black outline around it and you're going to be like, oh, that obviously looks fake. so there were ways that they found that they could like pass the film through a certain type of projector and then pass it back through another type of like lens that would take out these little fuzz lines so again they're just experimenting like so i was like hey you know what what if we put it through this you know projector because i've noticed that the projection does this on it and then i know that this lens does this let's just give it a try and they just do this shit trial and error

did that soften it enough was that too much does it look worse now. Wow. So during the start of or during kind of the production of Empire Strikes Back, George is like, you know what we need to start doing? We need to start working on digital stuff. You know, film is great and everything like that, but there's this new technology that they're utilizing for even just like pictures and things like that for storage, for sound. The music industry had started to kind of use some stuff for digital recordings. And he's like, I think this is going to be the future. Let's start looking into digital. while still doing all of this, you know, ILM prop stuff,

this is still our bread and better while we figure out if this is going to be the next phase of filmmaking. So was the guy that replaced Dykstra in this second iteration of ILM, had he been a previous member of the original group? That's kind of how it kind of is always going to work. The guys that are kind of the OGs are going to step up into these like positions or be heads of departments. Gotcha.

So this wasn't a completely foreign entity that a guy walked into. this was somebody who already had their feet wet. And then knew everybody, new people's skills, knew, had the knowledge of working with. Everybody worked with everyone, too, to bounce off ideas and try to figure out ways to help each other out. So you just had this pool of knowledge of just weird, out there, like, tactics and tricks.

And not to mention, you had the entire bag that those guys developed doing Flesh Gordon. Exactly. So you can pretty much do anything at that point. Any ship shaped like a dick, they knew exactly how to shoot it. one of the guys that did the original drawings for like some of like star wars the storyboards his name was uh ralph mccreary he did a lot of the he did the posters i want to say for like the star wars movies like the painted ones and everything pretty historic posters yep he's he's done a bunch of other

posters for movies and everything kind of in that same style so he was one of these matt background uh designers so this is um like old school film tactics where you would draw on a piece of glass a really detailed background with a place that was cut out. That would be the focal point where the action for the actors was going to be going on. So in a lot of these scenes in Star Wars, when you see there's a scene where when they get on the Death Star, Obi-1 Canobi has to lower the tractor beam. He walks out and there's this giant like chasm. But it's highly detailed. There's lights coming from it. It's like an exhaust shaft and like the Death Star, and he has to walk out over it and around this other thing.

He's two feet off the ground, but it's not like we can just turn that into a green screen because that doesn't exist. That's simply just a painting that they then put in front of the camera when it was there to make it look seamless. You had stuff that happened like that for backgrounds when they have like the Millennium Falcon. They'll have a section of it built, but then the painting will actually be the other section of it plus the background. And the glasses pulled in,

closer to the lens? Yeah, exactly. Gotcha. Yeah, exactly. And so that means that as these artists, you have to know exactly the lines of perspective that are going to be matching up, the angles for distances, things.

So Ralph was really good of drawing these insanely detailed, very elaborate, like cityscapes and things like that. But the guy, one of the guys that was working with him and doing some of the other map backgrounds was like, Ralph can't draw clouds for shit.

So, like, it's in one of the scenes in Paris Springs back is they're in Cloud City and they're flying through it. And so there was an instance where he was like, I know how to draw clouds. And I know I draw them. He's like, Ralph can't draw clouds for shit. So he'd be like, Ralph, it's like, I'm having some problems over here with the detail work on all of this stuff. Would you be able to come help me? You know what? Why don't you just take the reins on the detailed stuff that's really going to be, you know, front and center?

And I'll take some of the, like, the tedious stuff. Like, I'll do the clouds. Swapsies. Yeah. exactly. So Walter Cronkite actually came by to do like a special on ILM after the popularity of Star Wars. People wanted to know how the effects were made. And so George is showing him around and they're showing him how the like the Tonton movement was done. So they have him in the room. The Tonton is up on like the table. There's the background behind it. And you have like the little stands that hold it in its place. And there are two guys back there. I don't even know if there were the guides that did the stop motion. and they had all, he's like, we were just fucking with Walter Cronkite during this. We had all of this stuff up there that wasn't necessary to do stop motion. We had like, we were looking at stuff through different lenses, and we had like protractors

that we were using to catch the movement. We were moving it and had all these stands. And they didn't know any better. No one knew any better. He's like, it was just funny because we were sitting there and Walter Cronkite is just watching it and like, oh, is this how the magic happens? I think they also, he also turns to Lucas, he's like, you're kind of ruining the magic of the movie for me. Fuck you, you wanted to come see how the sausage was made.

Just weird shit, like during a scene where the Millennium Falcon is escaping through an asteroid field, you know, you have perspective of close up further away. And again, this is all just things placed on like a scene. and then you're shooting the camera and then you're using the motion and the falcon will be put in through like another shot and he's like we got to the point where we were just tired of making these model asteroids so i just told the guys to go down to the store and get the most asteroid-looking potatoes that they could find and we'll just use those for the ones in the back so they show a scene where they're flying through and they're and it stops and it's like arrow potato arrow potato and you're looking you're like and as you look you're like holy shit that is a potato but Then in the scene, there's no way that you could catch it.

One of the scenes, he's like, we had a ship in the back in the distance, and of course you wouldn't be able to tell what the kind of ship it was, but it was my shoe. So as they're shooting that, is that camera moving, or is that them just using gravity for the asteroid fields that they're flying through? So those would be like on sticks where they'd be able to kind of move them past, like the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. So they're having the view from the front of the Millennium Falcon

and then have the asteroids kind of moving on the outside. And they'd figured out how to pull the sticks out. Exactly. The same way that we do it with stop motion, because when you're doing stop motion, you have these things that are holding it from all these multiple angles. ILM starts to actually at this point, Lucas knows that after Star Wars, people are like, if this is the next phase of kind of the evolution of movies, we need to start probably developing methods of either developing our own special effects for other studios, or we can start going to ILM since they already have it set up. So Lucas is like, yeah, let's start taking, you know, other deals from stuff.

Basically, he tells them, if any of my buddies come to you and need special effects work, you do their movies. First and foremost. So these are guys like Steven Spielberg. These are guys like Francis Ford Coppola. So if you're on the outside of Lucas's bubble, you're making a movie without ILM? You would have to hope that they had the manpower and the space available to fit you in. And you had the money. That, okay, I was going to say that's probably what drove anything outside of the circle.

And you'd have to have big studio funding to try to probably beat out at these other places. All right. Before we going further, let's take a bathroom break. Good. Well, hello. Listen, while we had to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourselves? Head on over to patreon.com slash historically high

and get signed up for a little bonus content. I mean, come on, you deserve it. If you want to keep up with this, Our main source of social media is going to be our Instagram, which is historically high pod, P-O-D. You can also head over to, it's Twitter, it's X, it's Twitter, come on, at historically high, and that's high, H-I-like, hi. If you have any recommendations, you want to get to us, just want to reach out and say hello. You can hit us up on our email at Historically High Podcast, H-I-G-H-H-G-H-H-G-H-Podcast at Gmail. all right and with that said let's get back to the good stuff all right so like i was saying

they kind of get the okay to start working with lucas his buddies spilberg is one of them that's obviously going to be on deck and indiana jones is kind of how that comes to to to be a way is kind of funny so after star wars had come out um i'm not i'm not sure if it was before it came out, it was still working, so he was stressed out because he didn't know if all the special effects were going to get done, or if it was right after it came out, and he was just, like, tired of the shit.

But Lucas and Spielberg go on Christmas holiday, Christmas vacation to Hawaii. And while they're there, Lucas is asking Spielberg, he's like, what do you want to do? What do you want to do for your next movie? And Spielberg's like, I've been trying to get a hold of, like,

the broccoli estate about, like, James Bond. He's like, this was when Sean Connery, I think, was Bond. He's like, I want to do a Bond movie. He's like, they just they're not really having me. And Lucas goes, I got something for you. It's not Bond, but it's a globe hopping

paleo- or, uh, not paleo-chosis. Archaeology professor who's just kind of gets in over his head named Indiana Jones. And Tom Selleck was originally supposed to be Indiana Jones, but Magnum P.I. getting picked up. So of course, you got Harrison Ford, George Lucas, that's why when you watch

Indian Jones, it's like a Lucas film production. Indie wouldn't be the same thing. I mean, Sillick's good, but... He's great, but Indiana Jones of the mustache doesn't make sense to me. And if it shaved it, you're like, oh, that Tom Sillick, but that a mustache just looks weird. It's distracting. So he tells Spilberg, though, he's like, here's the deal. I got three of these things figured out. So if you're committing for one, you're committing for three. And Spilberg's like, let's have at it. So ILM is going to step in. Since Lucas already has it written, he knows that ILM is going to be able to do this stuff for the special effects. Some of the just kind of point out, and I'm going to go through some movies and just kind of call out the memorable special effects that'll come to most people's minds. Raiders the Lost Ark is obviously the first Indiana Jones movie. It was just called Raiders the Lost Ark. It wasn't Indiana Jones.

in the scene where they are opening the arc at the very end when Indiana Jones and Marion are tied up to the pole and the Nazis have finally found it and they start to open it, the stuff that flows out of it and the spirits and everything and then the lightning that shoots through all the Nazis, the melting of the little gerbils guy, the little creepy dude, how his face melts and his skin melts off and then it turns into a skeleton. Do you remember that? Yeah, I remember the light. and then one of the guys his face like crumbles in on itself and the other guy his face explodes yeah yeah okay yes so to make melting crumbling in exploding you iLM's taken this so they were like okay so what we're gonna do for the special effects for like shooting bolts through the Nazis is we'll put like

for them that are like glowing we'll put like a reflective piece on their chest we'll put like reflective pieces on their eyes so when the bolt that we'll put in and post through like a, you know, overlapping of scenes will shine a light on it. It looks like it's shocking into them and shocking through their eyes. Oh. And it was just a reflector. Yeah. The bolt was created essentially like the, you know, electric or the spiritual electricity

that comes out and everything. Bit of a lightsaber. Kind of. My favorite thing is how they did the melting guy. So they designed, they took the skull, but it ends up at the very end. Uh-huh. And they basically made a layered head. With different stuff, they're like, this is the layer for the muscles.

This is the layer for the fat. This is the layer for the skin, all that stuff. And they built a model head. They built it out of the same stuff that I believe dentists used to do certain things. Amalgam. It might be for taking impressions. Yep. So the design thing that's thing that's crazy thing about this stuff is when you apply heat to it, it melts off.

So what they did is they put it in front of it, put the head in front of the camera, had it wearing the hat and everything. like that and then just took a heat gun from underneath it and did it and took a long form shot of just watching these different layers melt off of it and just sped it up so it looks like he's just melting via layers yeah that makes sense um the other guy i think they were able to design a head that they had wires all along the inside of it and so when it came time for his face to implode they just pulled all the wires that were connected to different points within the inside of the face and it shrunk it in on itself Wow. They did that too. Do you remember Poultergeist? Yeah. Like, they're here.

Yeah. Do you remember the scene at the end where they get out of the house and the house ends up getting imploded and sucked into that? Yeah, man. That scene haunted me for a while. There's no way to do that except to do it as a practical effect because a computer can't do that. Yeah. ILM did the special effects for Poultergeist. And how they designed it is, and these are different guys that are coming up with these ideas.

He's like, we built a perfect replica of the house, but a smaller scale. It was maybe like five feet by five feet. Highly detailed, you looked in the garage and all the details for like the bikes and the lawnmower and the trash cans were all in there. Lens to the perspective. He's like, we turned it. We built it with balsa wood. But before we built it, we soaked the balsa wood for a few days in a certain solution that made it like brittle like dry pasta. We then did like the lightest materials.

We had certain parts of it that were touching but that weren't built together. And then we took guitar string or piano wire and we attached it to all these different points like they did in that guy's face. And then we designed a suction device that sat right under it that was going to be high pressure suction. And it would, once it started crumbling in on itself, it would, the suction would begin. It would start sucking the pieces down. And then one of the guys who was ILM's head for a while, but just kind of a designer or like one of the fucking magicians at this point, he's like, Like, for good measure to make sure the thing came apart, we put two shotguns up on each side of it to where they would also blast it downward, making it cave in on itself, and then sucking in through the thing. And the shot at the end of poltergeist is the, and they're like, we had to do it once because it would have cost $50,000 to do the next, to do the shot again for this.

When in doubt, add shotguns? Apparently, E.T. Most memorable scene in E.T. where all of a sudden, the buy. bikes take off and they're flying and you see him flying across in front of the moon guide wires right for that scene yeah so that would be a scene where to get them off the ground basically you are putting the bikes on wires and then just simply pulling them so that very first shot because you don't see them really gain a lot of height everything else is done in the studio where there's a background behind them you have the kid up there you have someone with a giant fan that's kind of the same way they do green screen now so slow rise is probably them

moving the screen as opposed to raising the bicycle or a tricycle. Yes. Wow. Or doing, or also having miniatures, super highly detailed miniatures of these kids that are on the bikes that they're able to then actually move along how they want or move the camera and pan it around it. Huh. Wild. Before we keep going, the Boulder scene, Indiana Jones. How?

Practical effect. Really? Yeah. So, I mean, it's designed. Basically, that thing is made of like style. All the rocks in there are made of like styrofoam. Yeah, I mean, you can tell the way they bounce, but there's no other way to... But that's just a soundstage that's built, and that's where...

And I mean, ILM had some hand in that, but that's almost a pretty entire practical effect of that, him just running out of that scene. They do the same thing, same thing in when they used to the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular show in Disney World. They would have kind of a recreation of that scene. Huh. They work on the second Star Trek. Oh, now we're crossing. Yeah, so Spielberg's like, fuck it, man. Like, you're doing your own thing.

You want to pay me? You want to help support this company? Yeah. So they work on Star Trek, a wrath of con, where the two ships are like going against each other in the nebula. I think they may have kind of like been like, we're going to give you like B plus work for this. So it's not quite as good. But we're still going to do some good shit. I don't want to offend any Trekkies, but agreed.

I feel like that's the right move. If you're Star Wars to start out, you can't give Star Trek your... But no one knew, because no one knew what ILM was. There was no knowledge of this. They could see ILM at the end and be like, I don't even know what that is. I don't know what special effects are. They're just like, it's fucking spaceship. So special effects, the most underappreciated thing in movies back then.

It kind of feels like it. There's a couple cool things I want to point out for certain scenes. They may not be super memorable, but the effect itself is just crazy. So there are certain scenes in movies. There's one in Indiana Jones. It's Raiders. It's where they are trying to dig down to find the arc. It ends up being that temple that has all the snakes in it.

And there's a scene where Indiana Jones is standing and all the people are digging around him. And it starts to become dark. And the clouds roll in in this really cool, like artistic way. Almost, I'm trying to think, I can't describe it. Like moving cumulonimbus clouds that are like rolling clouds. And I was like, how did they do that? that they're like, and they showed it. So they would have a water tank, a large water tank,

and the water tank would have a platform in the middle of it, underwater. The bottom half would be cold, salt water, and it would be warm, fresh water above, because they would separate. You would take a hose and go down right to where that little divider was, that thin divider, and he would inject this temperate mix in there, and as it went out into the water because of the mixture, it would billow out in a cloud. So kind of how you see there's some of those weird video or things on Instagram where you see the guy injecting ink into like a sphere and it kind of clouds in first.

Yeah. It was kind of that same principle. But they were able to use that, film that, and then overlay that into a movie to have that be like the background. So it's like chemical. They're doing things to create clouds by creating chemicals and sprang, putting them under water. Am I off to say like the blood in some of the beginning scenes of like a Bond movie, like a Bond title? Oh, you're talking about like the, how they're always artsy, but it's never like live action. It's like silhouettes spinning in like naked chicks and oil.

There's like injections of ink or something into water where it looks like it spreads like it. In newer ones, yes, but I don't know if that it was ever in the older ones. But yes, kind of like that. Yeah. During Raiders, I think one of the things, going back to the face melting thing, that's one of the things that Spielberg told him, didn't tell him he had no idea how they were going to do it.

He's like, just so you know with this guy in the movie, everyone hates this guy. He's like painting a picture. He's like, this is the evil Nazi guy. I would like his face to melt off. He's like, done. And they're just like, okay, we'll figure, we don't have a procedure for melting a face off

because it's never been done. We'll figure it out. That has to be what drives these guys, though. Is to keep hearing shit to know that they have to create it. Can you imagine if this is your fucking gym? This is why I, these feel like my people. It's a fantasy factory. It is.

And to have someone come up to you and be like, hey, we're paying you to do this. I want you to figure out a prop in a way to where we can film it to make it look like someone's face is melting. You're just like, that's the fucking. coolest thing. Well, and then you have also just a background or an understanding of how to get similar effects, but you need to tailor it to get it perfectly. You have to get that layering method to be like, all right, we need a color change variance so you can see everything that's dripping off. Yeah. What does George Lucas think probably when he's seeing what they're doing for Raiders? I mean, I would imagine, I think in Lucas's like version, I don't know if it was, I want his face to

melt off. Maybe he was just like, and then the three Nazi leaders standing closest to the Ark die in a spectacular fashion. That's one thing that gets pointed out too. In his scripts, when he gives them to ILM because they're going through them to look for scenes to get ideas even while he's doing filming is sometimes there will just be, and then a very intense space battle breaks out. And he just leaves it that and you're just like, so he just wants us to figure out a way to make a very intense space battle. They would do it. They would come up with storyboards first before they made the commitment to filming it.

And he would come in to the room that had a hundred different storyboards that these artists are constantly just drawing. They said it didn't take them long to figure out that they needed to make copies because the first couple of times they put up the originals not knowing what was going to happen. And Lucas just went up there with a red marker and was like, nope, nope, cross this by. I like this part, crossed this part. And the guys are just like, fuck. that took two hours to draw.

Yeah, exactly. And now I have to redraw that or to get certain. I could have just altered that and release that part. Yeah. But they figured it out. But anyway, so it gets past that point. And then,

you know, he has to be like, okay, I want these 50 shots. And then they have to figure out a way to shoot that. So sometimes he gives them vague direction. And these guys are just like, what would be cool to see?

It's just an open world. It's an open space. Yeah. What does everyone want to see? We're gathered around after work. Hey, call out some cool shit that you want. What have one like barrel rolls and flips over it?

and they're like, yeah. This is me creating wrestling matches in my head with my action figures as a kid. This is me taking two Lego things and flying one after the other and be like, do you and doing shit like that. So after Empire comes out, again, ILM wins the Academy Award for Visual Effects. They also win it for Raiders. They also win it for E.T. Return of the Jedi is kind of the next big thing.

They're doing movies, again, for other companies. I think when it comes time for Lucas's film to be made, it's just kind of like, hey, we're not taking any other jobs. We're focusing on the boss of shit now. Is there anything that they didn't touch? Because I guess you could call Poltergeist horror. But I feel like this is really a right up there alley with the special effects that they could do for like an actual decent horror film.

One of the guys loved horror movies. Yeah. So if it would come to be like doing horror stuff, he would already have an idea about like jumps scares how stuff should look. one of the heads of the departments was that guy. There was another head that was more kind of like even keeled and stuff like that. And he's like, that made us such a good team because he could handle this. I could handle that.

So I don't really think there was a lot off the table. It's just a well-rounded machine. They have a little bit of everything, which is so crazy to think that it's just this wasn't like, hey, we're going to go search these guys out. This is just like, yeah, no, I worked on this project with this guy. I had drinks with this dude he was telling me about what he was doing let's bring him in

let's see what he's got and you just have these pieces coming together yeah wow one of the like Return of the Jedi again they're using a ton of practical models because again there's no

CG this is well before it they're having to step up every time to give something new to make something more fantastical the do you remember the speeder bike scene where they are going through the huge they're on indoor with all the teddy bear dudes Ewoks and Luke and Layett take off

and have to chase down a couple Imperial guys on speeder bikes and they're traveling they shot it in the Redwoods in California but it's the fast action chase on hover motorcycles basically Okay yes yeah that the word bike was throwing me off because I kept thinking tires but I just remember them flying So that's ILM figuring out how do we because we we have to go out and shoot a camera through the woods. We have to be able to speed it up, but then we have to also show action going on between the actors and putting them in the scene.

And then bringing those two scenes together. Yeah. And it showed how they just started out doing it. They had a thing mock-up on the floor, and they had two things on speeder bikes on sticks, and they're like, how about we do this way? And then they hit together, and then this is where they get stuck. And then this is how it swoops around this tree. And they're just storeboard guys right in it down.

and he's like, okay, I'll draw it up. So they're just, they're developing these scenes. Thinking about the way that the X-Wings move, and you were talking about how they move the camera, it just doesn't, it feels like magic. Yeah. Just the way that they flew in different space fights. And the fact that you were saying that a lot of these fights

that they're having in space as far as these shootouts, if this is just left up to the ILM guys, this goes beyond special effects. This is just pure imagination. Yeah. To figure the shit out, this is, I wouldn't say that you would attribute,

like, the way a fight scene necessarily happens in Star Wars to being Lucas brilliance in the way that he writes it. But Lucas looks pretty good in some of these situations, probably because ILM was creative enough

to put together a great battle scene. I mean, he has final approval, so he's picking out. He gives direction if he see something, and he's like, that's good, but I see it more this way. I think there are a lot of circumstances where he gives them a general direction and they're adding in their little flair, their little flavor. And man, if you're going to pick people to do stuff that looks cool in sci-fi, you pick the nerds that have been following at their entire lives.

Yeah, they're your consumers. But to know how many shots, like if you're looking at the space battle and you see how many shots it goes to an X-wing that shows a taken maneuver or a tie fighter and just thinking to yourself, that's literally just one pass with the camera at a certain dedicated angle. And that's just that one shot. And then they go and they have to take it at another angle to make it turn this way. And then they piece these two shots together. Yeah, it's nuts when you think about it. Making Jedi was a really tough experience kind of on everybody because the pressure was so high.

And because they were trying to meet deadlines, Lucas was probably stressed out. There were some people that were just kind of getting burn out as well because they had been working nonstop. they you know other jobs that other directors had or other companies had and so after jedi i want to say that they kind of slowed down another one of their like key founding members he was just like you know i'm i'm going to go kind of maybe start my own thing not so much pressure but i have a skill set that i like to focus on this stuff i'm going to keep going in this direction with it um spilberg it led to some layoffs because they kind of dip down a little bit. Spilberg, however, keeps sending the movies. They got to take care of you got to take care of Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom.

You recall the mind cart scene when they're trying to escape the Temple of Doom. That's all ILM. The set where they are dropping the guy down into it to burn him to take out his heart and all that kind of stuff, that's all ILM. Any of that stuff is the part where they're coming out of the airplane and stuff like that and going down the ski slope. in the raft. You're working on the other parts of the move that ILM isn't working on. You're just kind of trying to get it to the next ILM scene, right? You're just trying not to screw it up in order to get it to more of the... Because you're not having ILM do the entire movie.

The way I look at it is back then, I think story was important if the movie did not have special effects because you have to keep people interested in. Yeah, absolutely. One special effects came on. along, you could make movies that didn't maybe have to be the best as far as the dialogue or the storyline if you could dazzle somebody, if you could fucking show them something they'd never seen before. And I think we're kind of having a reversal of that nowadays where we've seen so much shit. Like there's nothing that can be that we haven't seen. Yeah. Well, just talking about

Avatar in the beginning. I'm sure that it's cinematically wonderful, but I can't we've already seen probably a lot of it in one and two. So it's a great concept, but it almost is going to rely on a better script because we've already seen it.

I think. No, 100%. Think of it this way too. That movie is 95%. Not even the people in it. They're motion capturing characters that are CGI. It's 99 to 100 percent. CGI.

Yeah. And it's, I mean, to draw a parallel in my own mind, I guess, an opposite, a perpendicular in my own mind is you have comedies that have lived through the ages. Dumb and Dumber didn't have any special effects. Tommy Boy didn't have any special effects. They could get by on the shit that they had to because they had such a script that would keep you involved all the time. Spectacle isn't funny all the time.

Yeah. People are fun. Spectacles for action. And yeah. And so when you move into action or horror or anything like that, it's like, yeah, we can take a backseat maybe to some of these. We'll give some powerful monologues. The conversation doesn't have to be really riveting because we're about to have a crazy fight scene coming up in five minutes. Yeah.

So just some other movies that are being made and handled by ILM, Goonies, all of the Back to the Futures. Goonies probably the ending portion. Yeah, where it shows the pirate ship out in the distance. Yeah. Okay. Probably some scenes that maybe required more practical effects, like when they're under the well and the pipes are all like going up and down, things like that. Back to the future, you don't have that movie if you can't figure out a way to, I guess,

believably at that time show that this car is traveling through time. Do you think they were the ones that were writing out some of the verbiage that Doc Brown was using, or do you think that was all in the script? That was probably in the script, but I also think that they, you send that to ILM and you're like, I have this vision, this is the Delorean. How do you think this would travel through time? I just think it'd be cool if when it went through time, if it may be left like tire marks, like flaming tire marks, something like that. Some semblance of reality. So the guys at ILM were thinking, okay, well, it's getting speed of it, it would charge up. And then what if it starts throwing energy in front of it to like open the

the temporal warm hole or something. And then you get that effect where you see that thing disappear before it hits Marty and Doc leaving the trail of flames between their legs. God, so ILM made the Delorean, huh? I don't know if they made the Delorean, but they made the Delorean travel through time.

It just looks like something that they could have created. Just based upon what you're saying. Think of back to the future too. Yeah. And they go to the future. Yeah. That's ILM. Who friend Roger Rabbit?

that makes sense i could see that i'm not hopefully spoiling anything but going off of that the mask had to have had some involvement right yeah yeah okay perfect okay so roger rabbit obviously the car or the cartoon inside of the real world that seems like it's right up there alley but there still has to be advancements i mean it's not the same thing as star wars yeah it's i don't know if it's too inside baseball to talk about this. But, buddy, we're so deep now. Okay. When they get into computer graphics and things like that, when they start using those

to a high degree, the challenge becomes creating something believable as in, you know, we have to make this thing move like a human face or like it has to have the musculature because they run into a lot of situations. They ran into one on Jurassic Park that'll go into more detail on where they don't know how a dinosaur runs. but they have to try to kind of figure it out based on the skeleton, based on existing creatures,

and then find something that looks believable, but that also doesn't catch your eye in the wrong way because we're so used to seeing things move in nature. If something moves unnaturally, we can usually tell. Like if your dog just even has a little hitch and limbs, you're like, that's not, okay, what's going on there? So if people see that,

it takes them out of the believability about it. But that's a little bit further up. I'll admit at this point is allowing movies to be made that five years, 10 years before this, people either hadn't had the ability to even come up with because they, what's the point? Like, they don't know what the possibilities are. So why explore those options? It's a massive. Muse isn't the right word.

Inspiration, maybe. Do you think to know like these crazy things that I'm thinking up in my mind or not? now more possible that I can put them into a movie. I think you have a lot more people being creative about that. Yeah. That leaves you a lot more. They have that same potential in them to create a script that will live up to what ILM can do. And when ILM is like working during this time, there's instances where kids, kids that follow Star Wars,

that got really into Star Wars, that bought the books, that found the making of Star Wars, that came out in the, you know, the magazines and stuff. and they got to see these peaks behind the scene at ILM, you have the interviews with people that were with ILM that are like, I was 12 when Star Wars came out, and I knew that that's what I wanted to do. And so when I was 18, I went to this school. And then after that, I figured out that I could get on with ILM

and I went and interviewed and I got this position. Or I, you know, Star Wars inspired me to start studying into this or looking into engineering or looking into art and things like that. And then just by happenstance, they approached me. It's ILM the next generation. And it will continue to do that. And that's how this thing innovates. So Joe Johnston, one of the main guys there, he was one of the heads.

He, after, I think, Jedi, he ends up coming to George Lucas. And he's like, I'm done. I'm burnout. I can't do this anymore. he's like, I'm going to take the next year off, maybe two years. I'm going to take some of this money that I've made. I'm going to travel the world. And Lucas was like, okay, all right.

Wouldn't you rather go to film school? And he's like, what? He's like, no, I, and he's like, I'll make you deal. I'll keep you on at half salary and I'll pay your tuition to USC film school. And he's like, I would have been an idiot to pass that. Yeah. this guy, Joe Johnston, and this was one guy I picked out as an example. I'm sure if you went back and looked at it, it would be kind of a Belichickian directing tree of people that came out of this. Joe Johnston goes, studies film at USC, and through a film that he makes at USC, and I also think through George Lucas whispering to the guy at Disney of being like, this kid's got it. His first movie is Honey I Shrunk the Kids. out of the gate.

And he has ILM backing him up for all the special effects. Do you think that movie is entirely special effects? The kids in the yard, the kids in the cereal, shrinking, the giant aunt. Yeah, dude, I haven't thought about that movie in a long, long time. And just all of the things that they had to create the, was it the sandwich cookie that they had found, the kids had found on the ground? Yeah, the giant. Yep. They have to create that prop.

They have to understand. the blades of grass at a molecular level to be able to make giant blades and make them look fairly accurate. Have it looked like a giant, a lawnmowers coming over the top. Yeah. He goes on also, do you remember the Rocketeer?

Mm-mm. It was like, I liked it. It was this weird movie that seemed like it took place in like maybe the 20s or the 30s. And it was about this dude that found this prototype Rocket Pack that had been stolen and ends up learning how to use it.

and he has like this really stylistically designed helmet. I'm trying to think of what like style it would be called kind of like steampunkish. It's very much just kind of like a guilty pleasure movie. It's not great. You also have Jumanji.

ILM does all the stuff on Jumongi. Their best work. I think it's pretty good. Their work was good. I guess the movie. That's what I can flate is maybe... I'm going to have to go back. as well because we're getting into time when this is all like early computer generated stuff as well

and then uh captain america the marvel movie captain america hell yeah okay so jumping back um after return of the jedi iLM starts to move into more digital methods this also goes toward advancing sound as well so before you would have to go and get tape for certain sounds pick those out you know isolate those then use those to put in certain sections of movie Guy Wacking the cable. Yep. If you, you know, you could still use the guy whacking the cable, but if you could store that digitally,

where you could then just have a catalog of all those sounds instead of having to pull film and reels and just be able to say, I'm going to pull this sound effect into this movie. You're essentially creating a way to edit that's not only so much faster, but you're able to be so much more accurate because you're able to trim

and place it in the exact right place that you want it to. Does that make it sound bad? I mean, in theory, yes, but it feels less natural. But with digital, you can alter it. If you're doing it through just regular tape, it's probably a lot harder to try to change pitches and everything. Oh, probably impossible. And think of the difference between what they're using prior to is you're in a recording studio and you've got the mixing board in front you. Versus sitting on and doing it all through like, you know, a pro editor on your computer.

The pro editor can make it much more user-friendly and accessible. They start to also move toward doing that for film as well. So beforehand, where Lucas would be sitting in the editing bay and have to load the reels himself and have to go through them, have to cut the thing and splice it together and do all that kind of stuff. Or if he was like, okay, I like this scene, I need to see a picture or a two-second thing from a scene on another reel. He can just go, no, no, we'll just pull it from the digital file. and then just put it on the screen and then you can see those

and put those together. So this completely revolutionizes the way that editing is done as well. They create the flashback? Like the... Like the do-l-do-dil-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d- Yeah. I mean, I guess that would be it. I don't know if they created that effect.

They may have done it in certain movies, I would assume. They did the work on Hook, and I think Hook has a flashback scene. Hmm. So with moving over to digital methods. This isn't Spielberg being like, hey, we're going to call up this company and we're going to get a whole bunch of like, you know, hard drives and all that kind of stuff in here.

He's like, now we got to figure out a way to build these hard drives and to build these, you know, storage systems. So he has these guys that have been computer geeks and looking into this stuff, or kids that have seen Star Wars that when they went to college, they went into computer sciences or computer programming and they still think ILM is the tits and movies are awesome. And they're just like, so they're sending people out to these schools like USC and schools like UCLA that have these technology programs. I mean, like, do you guys have anything anyone promising in here? And they're getting students that are picked out. And they're like, hey, do you want to go work for ILM?

They're like, fuck yes. Is this primarily a very West Coast driven organization, you think? They start to get people that they're bringing in from overseas because Star Wars is a global phenomenon. Yeah. It doesn't just have a fan-based organization. here in the state. So you get people that in other countries are looking into computer programming and things like that. They may not be using it for the same things there for movie production, but people are learning how to do graphic design and things of that, you know, of kind of that

elk. Two of the guys that are working at, or no, sorry, one of the guys, name, I believe his name is John Noel. He's with ILM for a very long time. He ends up seeing this program that ILM is developing that kind of allows you to take images from within a picture and alter them or move them around. They're not really using it for anything major, though. They're using it for like, oh, let's put a tree here, let's do that. They're using it very piecemeal as part of the editing process just to move on to the next step. Like filler and a background? Yes.

So his brother was a computer programmer that went to like University of Michigan. He's telling his brother about this program that does this. And he's like, do you think you could like develop something that's kind of similar to this? He's like, yeah. He's like, well, what if it did this and this and this? He's like, okay, let's keep going with that. This is where we get Adobe Photoshop. These two guys end up selling this, and it's developed into Adobe Photoshop.

That's a pretty good feather in your cap. That's a pretty good fucking feather in your cap. So creating this, you know, this method of editing and doing special effects, sound, things like that on digital, he has to start a computer division. Yeah. So he has ILM, which is kind of a separate company under his ownership. He has Lucasfilm. Yeah. So he creates the computer division under Lucasfilm.

He's leaving ILM to do the practical effects and all that kind of stuff. Do you think that's because he realized that's probably more of the money he's going to be in? I guess Fion's both of them. It doesn't matter if he owns both, but I think what it was is he wanted ILM to focus on what they were doing. Oh, yeah, just do what you're doing. And he's also doesn't know what this will entail. he's like what i don't know how long this is going to take to get i don't want to rely on any of this stuff until it's up off the ground enough he's he's starting from scratch on this what at what point of

rich is lucas at this point i mean if he's already done you know all of the star wars he's also the writer and producer for indiana jones probably pretty stupid rich yeah plus this thing is also making money from all these other studios hiring it to do all the special effects for their movies So he's bankrolling this computer gig. Oh, hands down. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're kind of one of the, they're the major game in town. If you can afford them, they're who you go to to do the effects for your movie.

The computer, or sorry, the computer division starts to actually kind of in their free time because stuff is not really advanced to make it look realistic to an eye. They're using computer programs to kind of like, maybe a smooth over. some colors or something or maybe take something out of or, you know, erase the, on the stop motion, erasing the bars and stuff like that that are holding in place. They're using it for touch-ups. Very simple stuff going, you know, from the get-go. But in their free time, some of these people start to make these little animated films out of these little characters that they're able to do on these computers. And they're using this thing called the Pixar Image Computer. That sounds familiar. So once they, you know,

Once Lucas basically has, because again, he's developing this, he doesn't need to technically keep this division specifically. He can just open up another computer division with other people. But he knows he has value in these things. So in 1986, he ends up selling the computer division to Steve Jobs. They're like, hey, can we keep the Pixar name? Because that's kind of what we're known for. And he's like, yeah, go ahead and keep the Pixar name. And he develops it into Pixar Studio.

which releases Toy Stories its first movie in partnership with Disney and then it's bought by Disney in 2006. Turtleneck owning Pixar is just not somewhere that I thought this was going to end up.

From Lucas to Jobs to then Disney? Yeah. So this is when ILM kind of enters into the full digital age. And no one else is doing it at the pace that they're doing it because what's working for them

is continuing to work. Lucas is he's got nine Star Wars movies that he's like I've got like this whole saga mapped out in my head and I have the means to do whatever I need to do to see if I can get the technology to a point where I can make these things that I have in my head. It's a fun place to be unsure. So as they enter kind of that full digital age, they start working on this program for a little movie called Willow. and if you recall there's a scene in Willow where the, you know, the titular character, Willow, changes this woman from, she's originally a goat,

and then she changes into like a giraffe and then like an ostrich and then a peacock and then a lion and then back into a woman. So as they're trying to figure this out, they're like, so are we going to have to use like, it's going to have to be a weird transition between like different stop motion animals that do this? Yeah.

And one of the guys is like, actually we can, let us try this thing where we're able to kind of like offset pictures at different points. We'll take pictures of different. Basically, it's like a flip book. But we're going to take these pictures and we'll be able to, instead of making them look like they're herky jerky going from this point to this and kind of a drastic jump, we can smooth out the edges. So they ended up calling it the morph program, which is M-O-R-F. but that turned into the word M-O-R-P-H, which we now know is when something morphs into something else. No. Yeah.

That word didn't exist before. I guess why would you need it, though, right? It's just transition back then. And back before then, it would have been something about transmutation or alchemy. What the fuck? Yeah. So computers. Yep.

Special effects. Mm-hmm. English language. that's what ILM's business is in. At this point, kind of. Yeah, they're working on the English language part. I'm not going to be able to name everybody who's like the rock stars at this place, but I kind of picked out some of the characters that are responsible for certain pivotal things. There's this guy, Mark Depe and Steve Spaz Williams.

And Mark Depe was this dude that was born in Alaska, knew he had to get away, came down, went to like film school or computer programming school. school. Spaz was this guy that was like athletic, like a jock and everything, kind of a greaser-looking dude. Ended up going into the Navy. Did some like computer work in the Navy or some animation and figured out he could draw like during the Navy. And then after he got out, went to animation school. And this guy goes from working in animation to getting hired by this kind of this tech company because they still need to have animation done for they can then scan it and then manipulate it within the computer system. So they have a more detailed drawing instead of drawing it on the

computer itself. These guys roundabout way find their way to ILM. They end up sharing an office and the office was in one of the old sound rooms and so it was soundproof. So they basically turn this thing into what they call the pit and as there's this jump in this new age of ILM, You still have the people that are out in the model shop and still the people doing that because that's still all viable stuff right now. Computer generation can't do anything as well as models can at this point. But you have this young group who's coming in that are in their 20s. They're working on these programs for film and they just like to come into the pit and party.

So like their office is just like trashed at all times. But this also starts to kind of create this weird divide between like the model shop and people that were like kind of the old school prop people and then also kind of this new age digital group as well a tale as old as time the changing of the guards the future is now here and while the older generation is still valuable the newer generation is proving to be the future yep and again lucas is like if it's not going to help me get to my goals of being able to make what i have in my head it's going to go and I'm going to lean more into this. What's the time frame we're talking about now?

That's a good question because we are right up around the time that the movie The Abyss is made. And the reason I point out the movie The Abyss is there is a scene in the abyss where there is a weird tendril or tentacle made of water that comes into like this, into the facility or whatever. And it is reacting like an animal's tentacle would like kind of move. and it actually almost seems like it has a sentience, and then it morphs into where it's like an image of a face, but like in water. Yeah, so we're like 1990. I'm trying to remember what your The Abyss came out.

I got you. Okay. So this is something they go to ILM for, and it's going to be something, you can't do something like this really with models. 1989. Okay. It's talking about what they thought they were going to have to do

and what it ended up happening. So the director was thinking they're like, maybe we would take some type of like white, like putty or white, you know, ceramic that would have movement through stop motion, put some type of glaze on it, shoot light from different angles with some refraction, and then maybe it would have a constant flow like water does. And so the computer group gets a whole this and like, let's let's give it a try. Liquids are insanely hard because of the surface, the reflectiveness of the surface. everything is constantly in flux. They end up kind of cracking the coat on this thing and designing what looks to be at that time an insane like special effect.

Like it's hard to, if you're putting yourself in that mindset of 1989, it's, you got to be just sitting there being like, what the shit is this? James Cameron sees this and is like, okay, this is where we get the T-1000 from Terminator 2.

the liquid metal one that's able to basically morph and turn into stuff and turn its arms into blades and it has the scene where it's you know getting ready it's you think it's separated by the bars and then it walks straight through the bars and the bars pass through it so cameron used the abyss to jump into terminator he saw what was possible and he knew he wanted to make terminator two he was trying to figure out what can i do i don't know if i want just a robot against a robot Like that might be kind of boring, but, and he might, he must have saw the abyss and be like, what if we could have a robot that's like made of mercury but could move like that? Yeah, I could see that.

But yep, ILM did all the special effects for Terminator 2. As Steven Spielberg has his next project lined out, he is going to tackle Jurassic Park. And I'm probably going to provide too much information because this is my favorite movie of all time, but this is also when they kind of put the flag down as far as the change when CG basically took off its shackles, and at that point, everything was possible. So how they were going to originally do Jurassic Park is it was going to be a combination of Stan Winston's animatronics. So I'll give you an example. The scene where the T-Rex gets out, anytime it's close up, that's usually an animatronic or when a person is in the scene with it where you can tell it's a real person.

From a distance or where it's moving to where you can see its legs and everything, that's going to be a shot that was originally supposed to be stop motion. Now, the stop motion models are amazing. This isn't Gumby or anything like that or even a taun ton from Empire Strikes Back. the way the cameras that they have, the way they're able to work things through digital, this would be really, you know, well done, but it's still moving these animals and creatures a little bit at a time to where, you know, it just doesn't look the same. The human eyes going to be able to pick up on something. They're not sure what it is. It's just not right.

Exactly. So you have the department with Mark Dippe and Spaz, and they know that. things this thing's being made and they're like let's let's take a crack of this let's see what we can come up with so spas was like i found a um a t-rex skeleton that was the most complete one i was able to take it in digital images and be able to scan the entire thing and get it into the system and so i was basically able to then design and articulate a walking t-rex skeleton it was just a walking t-rex skeleton it didn't say that I could put anything on it to make it look realistic. You could obviously tell that it was just a walking skeleton.

It's not a horror movie. We wouldn't be able to use it, you know, for a real T-Rex. But he knew if he had a little bit of backing and more support for him to pursue this, that it was possible for him to maybe pull this off at his, this, you know, computer department to pull this off. So they, he's like, one of the guys, the spas dude, is like, I knew when, uh, he's, you know, Kathleen Kennedy, who was, I think, either the president at one of the studios or she's president of Luke, she might still be president of Lucasville or she was formerly. But at that point, she was somebody who was working, I maybe think for Universal, who was producing and making Jurassic Park. The name sounds so familiar. He's like, I know when she was going to come in, I think George was going to be with her. And so I just happened to take the thing that I created with the walking T-Rex. And we have a room that we can go. and put stuff up that we're working on and people can come by and kind of pick it apart,

maybe make suggestions about how to make it better. I just happened to have that up there at the time that they were in. They walked in. Kathleen was like, I know we're doing, we're looking for the, you know, we know we're doing the stop motion for the dinosaurs and the animatronics, but what's this you guys are working on? That looks pretty good. And they're like, well, yeah, but it's, you know, it's just a skeleton. She's like, but this looks really good. She's like, what, we can still have the stop motion and stuff and still be pursuing that, but let's, let's actually look into this a little bit more. So he gets some money thrown behind him

and basically has, now his role is trying to get this thing correct. So he goes through and they're able to scan this stuff. He takes a model that either the Dippet guy had made, Phil Dippet, that was going to do the stop motion. Or that Stan Winston had made, because they had to match up and goes through.

They said they cut it up into five pieces. they were able to put it into like this scanner. The only one was in like Monterey for like a 3D scanner. So they had to go down there and do all that. Lucasfilm didn't have one because again, this stuff is so rare at this point. And through the process of trial and error, they ended up creating the T-Rex.

And it's this maybe 30-second clip and it's just the T-Rex and it's walking from a little bit of ways and it just walks through the scene and then kind of walks off the camera. It doesn't do anything. It just walks. It kind of looks around. direction. And so they get this little snippet and they're showing it to the guy that's the head

apartment. They're like, this is, I mean, this could be it. This could replace that. Like, we're not just saying for this movie, but the fact you're able to design something that mimics a living being when its skin moves a certain way, how it stretches, its movement is fluid. It doesn't have any type of, there's no jerkiness to it. It doesn't have any type of stop start. It looks like, you could be looking at, you know, something on animal plane. So they get like George Lucas, I think, in and the heads of the department and they're ready to show this. And they show this like 15 second clip. And I think Phil Dibbitt was watching it.

And he had been kind of button heads with the computer department. He's like, we've been doing stop motion. Like I have never seen a computer be able to do something this detailed or anything. This is how we've been doing it for a long time. There was probably some competition between them. I think Spass mentioned he's like, just because that's the way that was always done, our job was to figure out a better way to do it. And that's what we were going to do. And as they're showing this to Steven Spielberg, it was Steven Spielberg that was there, not George Lucas. They show him this

clip in Spielberg and the rest of his kind of like producers are just like, oh shit. And they're just jaws on the floor. And Dipit is there and see Spielberg's reaction to this. And Spielberg kind of knows what the connotations of this test footage is. And goes up to him and he's like, I know what this means. You know, we appreciate all the work that you've already done. He did done a ton of the movie already, too. It's like, we appreciate what you've done. But if this is something that can work for some of the more complex scenes that we want to

or allows us to do more complex scenes, this is the direction we're going to have to go. We have to film a chase scene with a Jeep or an explorer. This is probably going to be better than stop motion. Yeah, and to have a small Jeep next to it, and you have to like kind of... Uh-huh. So he, and he's asking me, he's like, how do you feel right now, man? He's like, I feel extinct. And Spielberg looks at him.

He goes, I'm going to use that line in the movie. And it is a line in the movie because when Alan Grant and the two, the two paleontologists are walking down to get in the explorers to go take a look out in the park after they see the video and they've seen the brachiosaurus and everything. Oh, no, they're walking into this. Sorry. Jeff Goldblum is like, you know, what are you guys going to, what are you feeling right now? And he's like, I think we're out of a job. He's like, I think you mean extinct.

He got writing credit for that, right? I hope he got something. Here's the cool thing about this, though. Phil Dippet had, he was the man that had been able to do this in so many different movies and what allowed him to do it believably, he knew how animals. moved. He knew the motion of animals. He knew behavior of animals. So they're like, none of the guys that are programming us on the computer know any of this kind of stuff. Come in and suit. You don't need to know how to do this. Come in and tell them how this thing is

supposed to move. And that's going to be your new role. Yeah. You're going to come in and you're going to tell us because you're not going to be doing it physically how they should be doing it physically. And he ends up coming in and taking situations where, like, it's, its stance is too wide. It's running with its feet out like this. It would run more like this. Its head movement would be bobbing. This guy was so good at the stop motion that during one of the scenes he was talking about during Empire Strikes Back when he's working with the taunton. He's like, every movement that has to go, where the legs right here, that would be a movement where the rider is up out of the saddle because of the momentum. So he would raise the rider up a little bit. He's like,

But also all the stuff that's tied to the taunton would have that little flip too. So he goes around, he takes a canteen and he puts it up. He takes a bag and puts it up. And so all these scenes, and when you watch it, it looks like natural movement because the bags are bouncing with it and everything. So this guy understood to the nth degree about how this stuff is supposed to move. Didn't know Dick about how to do it on a computer, but he knew exactly what it had to look like. To give the computer programmers and the people that were designing this stuff and inputting the movement into the system, an idea of how animals moved,

they went out and would do animal acting classes. He took them all out. They would act like they were dinosaurs and they would try to get the idea of movement. So when they went back to their computers, they'd be like, no, that thing hops a little bit. I think that would hop a little bit more because I was hopping a little bit more

when I was doing this. And so they would go out and mimic certain scenes that they were going to do. Like the scene where Alan and the two kids are out in the park after the T-Rexes, you know, total the vehicles. And they walk out and they see that herd of the two-legged faster dinosaurs moving along, the galomino-minus.

Yeah, the big, it's a pack of them, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. And it's just like a flock of birds evading a predator, and the kids, like, they're flocking this way, and they turn around and start running from them. Yeah. So that's, they mimicked that scene of doing that with people where they'd jump over the log and see how the movement would look where to have to jump up. Well, they did that until one of the guys, during one of their sessions, one of their artists, ends up slipping over it and breaking his arm. so then a memo has to be sent out saying no more pretending your dinosaurs

which just reminds me of the scene from stepbrothers where the death talking is like it's time to stop being a fucking dinosaur never lose your dinosaur so as far as the chase scene goes do you think that they added in the rain and precipitation to maybe draw your eye away

from the movement of the T-Rex, or do you think it just tried to enhance it? You don't have to put your eye away from the movement. The way that they do it, I mean, the scans and, like, skin was a huge thing. You had to add the coloring, the pebbling, the way it changed. When the T-Rex's head comes down, I'm assuming that that was animatronic when you see the eye look into the side of the... Yes, that one was. But then you have to match everything to that and the way that it reflects.

So during that chase scene, where that thing comes out of the trees, you also have it blending in and the guy was talking about how this that gave him fits that scene for the longest time he's like I couldn't figure it out everyone I showed the movement to myself included the movement looked wrong and I just I couldn't crack it he's like and then one night I went in there and I was like 20% and he's like I reduced the curvature or something like that by 20% and I reduced the speed by 20% and it just clicked and it ran and it looked natural and he's like and I knew what it was going to do so they then take that in with the Jeep that's filming its own scene where it has something that it runs over at the right time where it looks like the T-Rex's head comes down and smacks the side of it.

And I mean, even nowadays looking at it, it's just, it's so fucking clean. How did they mimic the Triceratop shit? That was probably in the shop. Okay. That had to be a shop job. you had um the spas guy was talking he's like there's funny little details in that he's like so he's like i did the chase scene with the t rex he's like and then i did the scene and he's like i think my lax scene with it with it was when he's chasing malcolm when he lights the flare and he runs and

he runs toward the bathroom jep goldblum gets thrown in the bathroom collapses and the guy's sitting on the shitter and he's like you know when the teorex comes down comes down and grabs him And he's like, that's actually the T-1000 model that we use for Terminator 2. And he grabs him because as soon as he grabs him, it's then a computer-generated guy. And he's like, I just use the same body model. So that's the T-1-000 that's getting thrown around. Wow. There's also got to be the little physical things.

Because if they made the blasters for Star Wars, they probably had their hands on the Delorean design quite a bit. If you even look at the little things, like Wayne Knight's barbersol bottle. Yeah. That had to have been some. something that they had created that was so crazy futuristic at that point in time. I think that was in a Crichton's book. I haven't read it in a while. Yeah.

I think that might be in his book. Really? But then that goes to the design of making it look exactly like he said up to them. Huh. Stuff that wasn't included in there. They have to go in and they have to create all that stuff. So at this point because of how Jurassic Park went and how the computer graphics had advanced at that point, Lucas is like, I think this can

now start, I can start thinking of the story of my next, the prequels that I want to do. I think by the time maybe I haven't completely written and worked out that the technology might be there, or in every instance that I've presented these guys with a problem, they've been able to solve it. I'm going to have to all just rely on them. It's my company anyway. Yeah, that helps. So, Um, ILM starts to look into like, um, more consumer tools and everything like that as well. So they're going around to trade shows and they're trying to figure out how some of these like consumer programs, like certain photo editing software, sound editing software could be integrated into parts of what they're doing to try to make their job easier or a little bit faster. Yeah. When people design a program, they look at it and they say it does this really well because this is what we built it to do.

we didn't test it out doing anything else because that's not what its intention was. But if you're a creative computer programmer and you're like, hey, I actually saw this computer program do this, I wonder if we adapted that aspect of it or used it through that process or what it would do for this. And they're figuring out these little tips and tricks that are just keep bumping them up the ladder of advancement. Because of that, though, less work.

And because of the now prevalent, you know, nature of computer, generated imagery and everything, the shop starts to kind of get on its last legs, like the model shop. So it ends up closing over the period of a couple of years, like reducing down and then ends up closing up shop. They still do have, you know, guys that will build props and sets like that, but they're using them more so for props. They're not using them to design a model to then be shot on camera a whole bunch of times. That bums me out. It does. Yeah, it was a bummer when I was watching that part of it. Wow.

But that's just how fast technology changed. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty quick. Because of the advancements, I think it was George, I think it was, no, it was George Bush Jr. He actually awarded George Lucas. Yeah. George Bush Jr.? GW.

He's still George Bush. I never thought about calling him junior, though. Yeah. Isn't he not a junior, though? because one of them's Walker and one of them's Herbert Walker? The middle name isn't what makes it. It's the first name and the last name. Huh.

You can have different middle names. Okay. So tools are in place for episode one. George is going to start working on that. This is also where he, as he's kind of developing this, he's like, when he finished the first three Star Wars, maybe it was just the new hope. But they'd asked him, you know, was it what you want? wanted it to be. He's like, it was like 25% of what I wanted it to be. It was still amazing.

But he heard. Yeah. So this is at the time also where he goes back and he does like the special editions of Star Wars. Yeah. This is where you get, you know, just little unnecessary scenes that were things that bothered him. Like there's a scene where Luke is driving his speeder through the desert. And how they originally did that scene was they had the speeder, which was on wheels, obviously, and they just hung a mirror down below it and had it really close to the ground. And so the mirror would just reflect the sand that was there and it would look like it was just hovering. George wasn't too crazy about that. It thought it was something he was going to fix.

So he went in, he created new scenes just to show the thing where it was just hovering exactly the right level and you couldn't tell it was bouncing on wheels. He added Jabba the Hutton because he had already made, you know, Jedi at that point. Yeah. He knew that Hobba, or not Jehabba. He knew that Jabba and Han had they'd established history during that movie. He's like, I can go back and I can put, I had filmed a scene with Harrison that he was talking to Jabba, but then I didn't really know what he was supposed to look like. I'll just put Jabba in there at that point.

He like bumped up. He did some X-Wing scenes and everything. They're not like the Lord of the Rings. They're sent an indigent where it adds like some substantial stuff. It was basically George being like, I got this fucking toy. I'm horny. Episode one's not ready yet. I just want to start using this stuff on some stuff.

Star Wars. And all these people having, you know, working for this company, having grown up on Star Wars, are just like, yeah, yeah, let us work on this. Let us do whatever. So how, what do you think of the product then? I think it was just, I think it's exactly that. He had the new toy. He obviously wasn't satisfied with it, which I'm not a director. I don't know. I realize that like when I do creative stuff, I'm not satisfied with the end result all the time. And if I had the tools to go back can redo stuff. And that kind of time, yeah, why not? And a team to do it?

Yeah, I get it. I just don't think it was the, I don't think it needed to be done. Which one would you rather watch? The original. Yeah, the original like, yeah. So, um, this is where, again,

episode one comes into play. He's going to be looking to create a, not just a CG, CGI character. CGI characters have gotten, were a little bit... Is this a very famous Star Wars character? Yeah, it is.

You could create dinosaurs because there was a believability in the sense that people didn't really know how dinosaurs moved or looked. Yeah. You showed us dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Everyone was like, that is obviously how a fucking dinosaur looked.

I mean, it's come to light that those dinosaurs don't look exactly like that. Like, some of them are pretty drastically different. Yeah. But I love the way those dinosaurs look. Yeah. Creating a human-sized. character that exhibits facial features, emotions, movements. That's a much tougher, you know,

thing to do. That's much more nuanced. You have to be much more detailed in facial expressions and things like that than you do with like a dinosaur that you're kind of viewing from a distance. If you're giving him humanistic traits, he's going to have to move like a human that's still a correct. So yes, this is where we do get jar jar binks. I'm not going to give any jar jar hate at this point because after watching this documentary and seeing how much actual hate the guy got um yeah i don't want to participate in that oh it was bad oh yeah it was really bad um because of the way he talked he they were like you're it's a racist character and everything like that because jar jar has like dreads and all this kind of stuff and the guy that did it is black and he's like

no he wanted me to do like a silly goofy voice and so that's kind of what i was doing I don't know if I ever would have tied the racial connotations to that. So when they're creating Jar Jar, they were going to do, because obviously his body structure is that of a person, it's just the longer neck and the head that doesn't look like one. Yeah. So they had originally planned on being like,

what we're going to do is we're just going to do the thing where we put dots on your face because he was wearing basically a Jar Jar Jar Hat, like he had cut off Jar Jar's head and put it on top of his head. Ben Stiller with the panda. And it's like, we'll just take out your face and put it into the neck and everything. like that. So the computer group was kind of looking at this and saying, we can go full CG

with this thing, I think. Like we have the ability to make the movements fluid and all that kind of stuff. We were doing this thing called motion capture where we can just have him do certain movements and they'll be programmed in to do the same movements and we won't have to just have him, you know, it allows us to be more detailed and we might actually be able to do it cheaper than having to go into each shot and remove his neck or remove the face from his neck. Turns out there might have been some tomfoolery, but it came out to where it was actually cheaper

just to do him all as CG. So that's kind of where you get the first instance. Other than in Terminator 2, it was Robert Patrick at the T-1000, and it was partially, he was only CG when he was like morphinger doing stuff like that. Quick aside, what do you think motion capture has made more money in?

Video games or movies? Oh, fuck. I gotta think video games. It's such a big business. Yeah. The fact that it was born out of this and then put into video games, I don't care. I love it. Yeah, absolutely.

But this is also where they start to discover. ILM kind of takes the lead on figuring out this motion capture thing. And then all of a sudden it's this game on about. We're no longer have those shackles about not being able to do people. they also had to figure out how to do the pod racing scene because everything is blurring by so fast and how to blend that in with certain practical effects after episode one came out

it was a huge success everybody a lot of the special effects they were really well done they're not the best Star Wars special effects like probably episode three probably has those or maybe some of the new stuff like Mandalorian but movies start to they start to develop certain things that they're doing during these movies where they have to just make

like little natural effects that are like background stuff. Yeah. It's like, oh, we're not creating a speeder, but speeder has to have exhaust or an explosion that has to have smoke or mist or something like that. Well, this leads into other situations where they're like, well, if we can create mist, we could do like a tornado, right? And so you get ILM doing Twister. I mean, they don't come up with the idea for Twister, but the movie, the script is obviously there. it might be one of those things that's sitting on the shelf waiting for the technology bill you can't have the fucking movie twister if you don't have a believable volcano or jesus quite uh tornado yeah two two hours and 11 minutes in um so iLM ends up doing all of the stuff for twister um they start to tackle not having to go out and film on water if they want to start making movies that encompass a lot of water man i would not have guessed twister I don't know why it wouldn't have come across as something that ILM would have their hands in,

but it, it's, they were the people that did stuff like that. Mm-hmm. And there wasn't any other game in town really at this point. I mean, I'm sure there were other games that were popping up because they saw how lucrative and how much business had to be funneled to this one place. Or guys that went off from ILM and started their own stuff. Yeah, exactly, when we're doing kind of their own shit. But they even get Twister.

Yeah. Wow. I mean, when you're that far ahead and you have something that's just on the cusp and that new technology, being like, can you do this? So like, not right now, but I bet we can figure it out by the time the movie, you know, the special effects need to be put in. We figured out everything else. They also were able to, do you remember the movie The Perfect Storm that had Mock Woblerg and George Clooney about the Gloustoneman, the fishermen that ended up like... It's been a real long time if I've seen it. So they did all the CG for that, for the boat, the storm, everything like that.

And then that led them into being able to do parts of the Caribbean. With parts of the Caribbean, they said that the challenge with that is the special effects are not only with the ship. They did a lot of practical effects because they had an actual scaled ship built. In the later movies, they have ship to ship battles around like storms that are definitely CG. But in the original, the Black Pearl, you have that transition where the cursed pirates go from their regular forms and then moonlight hits them into the skeletal forms. Yeah. So you're having to figure out as a special effects company, how do you go from live action actors,

blending those in within the course of a scene into skeletons, but at the same scene, if their hand is outside in the shadow being the actor's hand again. So they're just, they're, again, like, you could think of any movie that has legitimate special effects in it. They said even movies that you don't think have special effects, those are the ones where the special effects are the best, because you're not expecting that good that you don't even notice them.

For scum. has a ton of special effects in it. Yeah, Tom Hanks can't run that fast. Not just that. I mean, he's meeting Kennedy. Yeah. You think he's hitting ping pong balls that fast and everything? Oh, come on.

Give him the ping pong balls at least. That couldn't have been them. But what this leads to this level of innovation is they're looking at the entire concept of how you make movies where, because they're going digital, they're moving away from film. and they're even starting to need to design their own cameras to be able to shoot the things that they want to be able to shoot the certain way that they want to shoot them. We kind of come to more current day. Oh, sorry, I can't go without mentioning Revenge of the Sith.

That was kind of another step up for special effects because there's so many within that movie as well. But kind of the next leap in technology came when David Filoni and Lucasfilm started looking at TV as well. And so there's this thing called the volume that they created. And you've seen green screen when things are filming on green screen. People are just in front of the green screen. If there's certain lighting that has to be there that's going to mimic what the screen is going to be turned into,

they have to make sure that that's all in place. I think it was starting on the Mandalorian, but they started using this thing called the volume. and basically it looks like a almost complete circle of a seamless screen. And it also has, I think, a little bit of the roof is also part of the screen. And you can project any background you want onto it, which allows you to basically change the background as anything is being set up on that stage. It's insanely big. It's not like a person is just walking in.

This thing probably has close to, I don't know, 50 yards. It's like if you took a football field divided it and just did a half, that much space in the middle of this insanely huge screen to where you can put any type of prop, you can put ships down, and then if you put just the front part of the ship, you get the camera set up on it, and you do the rear part of the ship out to the sides on the screen itself. And then as the ship is moving,

and if the camera wants to move, there's sensors all around this thing that have tracking on the camera, and as the camera moves, the screen itself will shift to the right perspective to make sure that it looks like it's going around onto the side of something. So if you're sitting front on with a ship and it's got two, you know, engines off the side and you can't see the sides of the engine, if you were to walk around to the side of the with the camera,

that screen is now going to change perspective where that screen's going to show you the side of the engine as if you're standing right there. So, and this allowed them to basically just not have to work on green screens and build a film action with something in the background that's giving you, the sense of the lighting and things like that. Yeah, there's just, green screen technology is pretty cool. It's pretty incredible. But that's unmatched.

I mean, green screen can't hold a candle of that. So the depth of what you can get out of it. Kind of a reoccurring theme throughout this whole thing when ILM is going through its development is directors will come in that it's their first time working with ILM. Ron Howard has a story. I can't remember which movie it was that he was working on. It might have been Willow, actually. And so he comes in, he's like,

so we need the scene where Willow transforms her from a goat to this animal, to this animal to this animal, I'm assuming you guys are going to have to do stop motion and then just kind of blurring and things like that. Or we'll have to do an animal and then cut off screen. Willow will do something back to a different animal than back. And the guy's like, no, we'll do it on the, we can kind of do it on the computer.

and Ron Howard is just like, what do you know? Like, what? He's like, no. They're like, Ron, come back in like a couple days. Go get on your dinosaur. Take off. Ron comes back, looks at it, and they said that there was just this common thing with these first time directors where they'd come back and just be like, okay, I guess I'll just shut the fuck up about this and I'll go start, you know,

doing the rest of the work on my movie. When John Favro was tapped to start the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man, they go to ILM. And he, when he was doing the movie, he was like, I want to do as much of Robert Downey in the practical suit because we spent so much fucking money on this thing as possible. But I know it's going to have to be a mixture

of the practical suit and this other suit. We'll have sections of the practical suit he'll wear and then just maybe have, you know, CG on the arms and things like that. And he said it got to the, he's like, I wasn't really confident in it for this because stakes are very high. with this, I kind of had seen what, I knew that CG was still distinguishable between a real life

prop or a costume. So he said, it finally got to the point where I was sitting there watching a scene that we had filmed. And the scene we had filmed was with the actor or with someone in one of the Iron Man suits. It was the like silver one that he first starts out with. And he's like, I'm watching and I'm watching it. And I'm watching for stuff. And he's like, okay, he's like, okay, so in these specific instances, I think what we can do is we can CG this. But other than that, it's, I mean, it's perfect. We don't have to CG at all. He's like, this is the, we did a CG one.

And he's like, honey, he's like, we'll show you the other one. And they showed him side by side. And he's like, and they didn't tell him which one was the real one. And he's like, do you know which one the real one is? He's like, no. He's like, do you want us to keep doing more of it in CG? He's like, yep, I'm just going to shut my mouth going forward. So pretty much all of the Marvel movies have had ILM's touch to it.

Um, the first, I think it was six Harry Potter movies were all done by ILM. Um, as time has progressed and everything, there have been other production houses that have come about and everything. A lot of them very, very good as well. They don't have the kind of prestige. But, um, one of the big ones that came out was Weta. And Weta was the special effects company that was started by, um, Peter Jackson when he was doing Lord of the Rings. And so now they're doing stuff. They used a lot of kind of the, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants and everything with ILM to be able to create like Gollum and have the movement of the skin and have that be so realistic. I've started having my kid watched Lord of the Rings and he's been like into it. But I did Gallum's voice for him like when I was reading a story to him.

He fucking hates it. It scares the shit out of him. And so I accidentally built up Golland to be the scary thing. And so now we're getting to the point of the movie. It's the second one of our first shows it. it. And he's like, I'm not ready for this yet. I was like, God damn it. But it is very realistic. Gollum's a pretty creepy character. Oh, yeah. Well, hands down. But still, like, I want to be able to progress past the first. Yeah. Yeah. You want to break the, break them out. But so you have these other

companies that have definitely been inspired by ILM, have taken the things that they've taken, put their own spin on them, have run with it. But, you know, the pedigree, and I just kind of want to go through some of the live action films that I didn't get to mention just in case, you know, anybody is interested in what ILM has done for some of those other things. So, yeah, all the Indiana Jones movies, they also did Labyrinth, which if you're in your 40s, you know what Labyrinth is about, Howard the Duck. Solid. The Golden Child. Harry and the Henderson's buddy That's my movie

That's right No way They did Harry and the Henderson's They also help They also help with space balls They help with Mel Brooks's satire On Star Wars They did

The Burbs Field of Dreams Ghostbusters 2 They also did Total Recall Araknophobia Backdraft hook, I think I already mentioned on that one.

Do you remember that movie? Oh, fuck, watch one was. Last Action Hero. Mm-hmm. They did that one. Last Action Hero was Roddy Piper, wasn't it? That was with Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's where he was the movie actor, but then somehow came into the real world.

Okay. Already talked about Forrest Gump, Flintstone's Baby, the Mask, like you had mentioned. They worked with Star Trek, a whole... bunch because they were that good. Did some of the Mission Impossibles. Most of the, again, most of the Jurassic Parks, they actually did. Sleepy Hollow, Green Mile, Galaxy Quest. So, I mean, all the Marvel movies, anything that, like I said, it kind of feels like

the NASA of the film industry. Transformers movies, they did all of those. Well, there's also. they don't just get by on their past. Like their pedigree doesn't keep them, it sounds like relevant. It sounds like they are just continuously. Yeah.

And I think eventually, once you hit a certain point of like progress, you start to slow because then you're slowed by the technology at the time. You run into the same thing that that director ran into. And so that's where it gives opportunity for other companies to catch up. But it also gives other opportunities for companies

to come in that have different ideas. on how to do stuff. AI is going to be the big thing going forward. I'm sure ILM has their... I know, I know that face. You've used it, though. But, yeah, I just... I like to do this topic because

I fucking love the Star Wars universe, but this is a company that has such a far-reaching impact for... I don't like the term cinephile because there are certain words... There's certain words that end in file that regards of what you put in front of them. It doesn't make it sound. good.

Like a bibliophile? No, I just like movies. Okay. But this is a company that in so many different ways shape the imagination of so many different people. And different aspects of it have gone out to do different things. Like we just talked about Photoshop, there was editing software, the Lucas created that's been used on like other movies and music and things like that.

There's no other company that I could think of in a space like this that's that versatile. Yeah. they're in every genre the Harry and the Henderson's thing obviously because I'm partial to it I would have never guessed I love the fact that that's the one when I saw that one I was like this is the one he's going to pick

well there's that I mean the Jim Carrey mask makes total sense because you have to be able to have that ability to have the transformation of putting on the mask they were talking about how big of a pain of the ass it was when he went to go put on the mask and then we take it off, all that green glitter cloud would come off. They're like, designing that stuff is just the craziest shit like you can think of.

Yeah. But I love the fact that this company was kind of just a weird, and I keep using the term, but an island of misfit toys of people that in any other field are just like, that's a stupid hobby. When are you going to grow up? I'm going to leave it with this last bit. One of the guys, it was the Phil Dippet guy, he was talking. And he says one time when my daughter was like nine years old, she came and got me and she took me up to her room.

She's like, I'm really sad. And he's like, why you said? She's like, I know that I'm getting to the age where I'm going to have to stop playing with toys and things like that. And he looked at her and he's like, if you work in the movies and you work in film, you never have to stop playing for the rest of your life. And I think that's kind of the part I like most about it is I feel like that with the stuff that I like, the stuff that I'm into. obviously by some of the episodes that I've done on this podcast, you can tell. But regardless of how old you are, you never have to stop playing. Yeah.

Play on player. We do this podcast surrounded by wrestling masks and action figures and all of those things that... Definitely not dolls. No, action figures. Action figures. Figures of action. You don't have to lose that. I think that there's always this feeling of needing to grow up

and to be more professional in that type of. of deal, but to know that there's still fields out there where you can just continue to do what you love all the time is so cool. All right, everyone. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed this deep dive into the world, the magical world of cinema. We'll catch you next week. Peace. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode.

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