Poof! Movie Magic

The use of a firearm is frowned upon in most workplaces.

Not so at Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects firm founded by George Lucas.

In the final scene of the 1980s film Poltergeist, a suburban house that has been taken over by malevolent ghosts is swallowed into the ground. In order to create that effect, artists at ILM, in San Rafael, California, built a model house and a small yard that sat over a giant funnel. Each piece of the house was attached to a piece of monofilament that threaded down through the funnel and attached to a forklift. But when the forklift took off, time and time again, pieces of the house got jammed in the funnel's neck. "Our solution was that we got three shotguns, and when the model jammed, we opened fire on it, blowing it to pieces so it'd fit through the funnel," says Jeff Mann, who was a model maker at the time and is now ILM's vice president of creative operations.

It has been a long time since anyone at ILM picked up a shotgun. Today, high technology usually gets the nod over handmade models and brute force. The latest tools enlarge the scope of what's possible on the screen, helping filmmakers satisfy an audience that demands ever more spectacular visuals, bigger epics, and more believable animated characters. Because of ILM's software advances in creating human-looking digital skin, a viewer watching the infant star in the movie Son of the Mask (a sequel to the Jim Carrey film The Mask) is hard-pressed to tell which shots feature a human baby and which ones feature a double made of bits and bytes.

As much as the latest cinema technology has transformed what's possible for summer blockbusters, it has also opened up the field to new filmmakers working on tight budgets. Where once the standard for an ultracheap, do-it-yourself movie was Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi, which cost $7,000 in 1992, doorman-turned-moviemaker Jonathan Caouette just produced an independent-film-festival-circuit favorite, Tarnation, on his iMac for less than $250.

But technology, for all its possibility, also feeds on itself: For every boundary-pushing stunt that's now doable, a problem arises that needs to be fixed. More-realistic animated characters take more time to create, and efficiencies have to be wrung from elsewhere in production. And surefire bits of movie magic are quickly rendered obsolete. "Every year, the camera gets closer and closer to these digital doubles, and that makes it less forgiving of some of the tricks we've used in the past," says Cliff Plumer, the chief technology officer at ILM.

Hollywood doesn't want its software and supercomputers to steal the limelight--notice how the Scientific and Technical Oscars are routinely relegated to a two-minute snippet of the nearly four-hour Academy Awards telecast. And industry vets don't want to overemphasize their importance, either. "We're in the business of telling great stories," says Bob Rogers, a producer and director. "The tools are secondary."

That may be, but the tools at least merit a best supporting actor nomination. Just in time for this summer's blockbusters, Fast Company went on location to meet three cinema-tech all-stars.

Bringing Up Baby >>

The hallways, offices, and break rooms at Industrial Light & Magic are full of cinema history. There, against a wall, is Han Solo frozen in carbonite, from The Empire Strikes Back. Hanging from a ceiling is a zany green goblin from Ghostbusters. There's a bike parked in a corner of the model shop. Inside the milk crate hung from the handlebars is E.T., huddled beneath a blanket.

Founded in 1975 by George Lucas to create the special effects for Star Wars, ILM has won 14 Oscars for Best Visual Effects, and received 17 scientific and technical awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This year's crop of films include Son of the Mask, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Lemony Snicket, and Van Helsing. "What we do here hasn't really changed since day one," says ILM vice president Mann. "Every client wants something that hasn't been seen before. What has changed is that the dollars you spend on effects today get you far more sophisticated effects than you got 10 years ago."

To maintain its reputation as an innovator in cinema tech, ILM often brings in people and ideas from the world of academia. Steve Sullivan, director of research and development, came to the company after earning his PhD in electrical and computer engineering. Part of his job is "looking at the best tools out there in the market, and figuring out what we want to write ourselves and what we should buy off the shelf."