Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American Academy Award-winning motion picture visual effects company that was founded in May 1975 by George Lucas. It is a division of the film production company, Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when Lucas began production of the film Star Wars. ILM originated in Van Nuys, California, then later moved to San Rafael in 1978, and since 2005 it has been based at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio of
San Francisco. Lynwen
Brennan, who joined the company in 1999, currently serves as ILM'
s President and General Manager. In
2012, The Walt Disney Company acquired ILM as part of its purchase of Lucasfilm.
Lucas wanted his 1977 film Star Wars to include visual effects that had never been seen on film before. After discovering that the in-
house effects department at 20th Century
Fox was no longer operational, Lucas approached Douglas Trumbull, famous for the effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull declined as he was already committed to working on Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but suggested his assistant John Dykstra to Lucas. Dykstra brought together a small team of college students, artists and engineers, and set them up in a warehouse in Van Nuys, California. Lucas named the group Industrial Light & Magic, who became the
Special Visual Effects department on Star Wars. Alongside Dykstra, other leading members of the original ILM team were
Ken Ralston, Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren,
Joe Johnston,
Phil Tippett, Steve Gawley, Lorne Peterson and
Paul Huston.
