MVFF 49: Inside Industrial Light & Magic w/ John Knoll + Landis Fields

For the fourth year in a row, iodyne proudly sponsored the Mill Valley Film Festival. This year’s Film Technology Panel brought two of Industrial Light & Magic’s most influential creatives to the stage: John Knoll, Academy Award–winning Executive Creative Director at ILM and co-creator of Photoshop, and Landis Fields, Emmy Award–winning Real-Time Principal Creative at ILM.

The session was hosted by Martin Christien, iodyne’s Head of Hardware Engineering, and co-sponsored by our friends at Perception Grid.

The roots of film technology in Northern California trace back to ILM’s origins, when George Lucas moved his new special effects company north in the late 1970s to work on the ongoing Star Wars original trilogy. Joining our distinguished panelists at this year’s technology event were honored guests including Jacqui Lopez, VP of Franchise Production, Lucasfilm; Greg Grusby, Director of Publicity and Communications, ILM; and legendary ILM artist and Academy member Jean Bolte.

Over the conversation, John and Landis kept returning to one ILM principle: use the right tool for the job, from the oldest techniques to the newest. They explained how a virtual art department and real-time AR previews let filmmakers walk through a set and settle scale and staging before anything is built.

They also showed how virtual cameras let a director with a handheld, documentary style find shots inside fully digital scenes. John told the story of building a 3D-printed miniature and a motion-control rig in his home garage to bring practical spaceship shots back to a galaxy far, far away. He also described a 300-shot ocean maelstrom that took three attempts and a whiteboard crisis meeting to solve. Landis talked about the care that goes into bringing a beloved character back to the screen, including watching the original actor coach his younger digital self on set. They closed on what makes it all work: no matter how impossible a shot seems, a room full of people who trust each other, tackling one problem at a time, has yet to be stumped.

Perception Grid is an AI content intelligence platform that organizes and correlates data to create a single source of truth. Go to their website.

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