Yesterday I ended with George Lucas and the Star Wars films. Well, the research has been done, and I found out a little bit about the technology and the genius behind the movies. Industrial Light and Magic was founded by Lucas and has been in full swing since 1975. The original site for the production company was in San Rafael, California, but is now based in San Francisco. According to their website, since its founding, "ILM has been associated with fourteen movies which have earned the Oscar for Best Visual Effects and has been awarded seventeen technical achievement awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences." That is certainly quite the list of achievements! Perhaps more exciting however, is that Industrial Light & Magic was very recently rewarded the 2004 National Medal of Technology. This award is most certainly the culmination of the company so far. In addition, ILM does not work on film alone, but music videos, commercials, etc. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find a specific program that they used so far, but I will continue my search and list the program on this blog when I do find it. It is common knowledge that George Lucas was responsible for the digital effects in the Star Wars movies, however, ILM works with Dreamworks, Warner Bros., and several other companies as well. In fact, ILM did the effects for the Harry Potter (Warner Bros.) films, Pirates of the Caribbean II (Disney), and Jarhead (Universal) to name a few. I imagine that creating effects in post production for movies filmed by other companies must be a pretty lucrative business. I am unaware if ILM has a monopoly in this area, I will post what I discover.