ILM's Workaday Wizardry

Two Lucasfilm tech wizards reveal how they make Hulk just the right shade of green and why directors love tidal waves with personality

by Brian Hindo

The artists, engineers, and technicians at San Francisco-based Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) are a crucial drivewheel of innovation in the movie business. They number as many as 900 during peak production time in advance of the summer blockbuster season, making ILM the largest unit of Star Wars creator George Lucas' Lucasfilm.

Over its 30 years, ILM has laid claim to such innovations as the first completely computer-generated movie sequence (in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 1982) and the first fully computer-generated character (the "stained-glass man" in Young Sherlock Holmes, 1985).

WHITE HOUSE HONORS.

It's also responsible for a list of ever-increasingly realistic computer-created depictions of humans on screen (The Mummy, The Hulk, and all of the recent Star Wars releases).

For its body of work, ILM won the "nation's highest award for innovation," the National Medal of Technology, from the Commerce Dept., announced Nov. 15. The award presentation will take place at the White House on Feb. 13.

In the wake of the news, BusinessWeek Corporate Strategies Editor Brian Hindo chatted by phone with Cliff Plumer, Lucasfilm's chief technology officer, and Tim Alexander, a visual-effects supervisor at ILM, about the company's innovation process.

Plumer oversees all research and development and info-tech functions across Lucasfilm's three divisions (ILM, video-games unit LucasArts, and Lucasfilm Animation, among others). At ILM, visual-effects supervisors, along with a producer, direct film projects. Following are edited excerpts of Hindo's conversation with Plumer and Alexander:

Most of the work done at ILM is structured around movie projects, or "shows." How are the teams selected?

Alexander: A lot of negotiation [laughs]. You try to start with a core group of people you think are going to be experienced in that area. For The Perfect Storm, we picked people who had previous water-particle experience. Typically, ILM will have more than one show in-house, so it's a matter of looking at all the resources and trying to put them on the right show -- that either they'll be good at technically or artistically, or even sometimes because of their personalities.

A visual-effects supervisor and a producer usually oversee each project. How big do the teams get, and how are they organized?

Alexander: It's actually quite a range. I've been on small shows where we've had only about six people working on a show -- something like The Majestic. And then shows like Star Wars: Episode III can get up to 150 to 200 people. The average show is maybe about 50 to 60 artists. On most projects, we'll start small and then grow big. So the initial setup might only be about 10 to 15 people, but then as you get into a full-shot production, you'll get larger and get up to 50 or 60.

Sometimes the production teams will be the same across projects. But more recently we've been trying to mix that up. It used to be that one team would do three or four movies together, and that's become less prevalent recently.

Why?

Alexander: We try to do different things on every show. We're given the flexibility to try different organizational structures. And I think we've found that, with teams that stick together, if there are problems, those problems will persist. Sometimes we get into a rut on how we think about projects -- both socially and technologically. I think it's good to get different perspectives.

Plumer: Also, sometimes it's really driven by our clients and the marketplace. In the past year, we had Star Wars: Episode III, War of the Worlds, The Island, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire -- five very large projects, all in production at the same time.

We're finding a lot more that these films' production schedules are getting much shorter.