Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Innovation

Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Innovation is an extensively illustrated oral history of the multiple-Academy-Award®-winning visual effects company founded by George Lucas in 1975. Its tale begins with a small team of craftspeople, engineers, and artists who pioneered analog effects that had never before been attempted or realized on the screen for Star Wars. Industrial Light & Magic continues their story through the effects facility’s mind-bending work, over the following three decades, on more than three hundred films—from optical printing to the digital and computer-generated-effects era. A behind-the-scenes record of the state-of-the-art innovations that have driven moviemaking magic, the book features candid stories from the filmmakers, artists, and technicians who were there, breaking barriers and changing the history of cinema with their early work on cultural landmarks, such as the Star Wars saga, the Indiana Jones series, E.T., Terminator 2, and Jurassic Park.

Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Innovation is the first and only book to focus on the company’s work during the last sixteen years, detailing its creative and technological innovations on dozens of blockbuster films. Through firsthand accounts of the problem solving that has pushed the art form of visual effects to its limits and created visual experiences that could only have been dreamed of in the past, the book features extensive commentary by George Lucas, Dennis Muren, John Knoll, Scott Farrar, Roger Guyett, Ben Snow, Rob Coleman, Lorne Peterson, and many others. Their accounts are supplemented by more than 400 images from many of ILM’s breakthrough movies, such as the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Transformers, Iron Man, and the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, offering a crash course on the most groundbreaking visual effects created today. 

Praise for Industrial Light & Magic:

“If you loved the movies, chances are good you’ll love this book.” —Georgia Times-Union