Industrial Light & Magic
Industrial Light & Magic is a movie special effects studio founded by Star Wars writer/director George Lucas in May of 1975, and is currently owned by Lucas's main motion picture studio, Lucasfilm, thereby becoming a Disney company in 2012 as part of Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm. The company is known for its outstanding work in many motion pictures, including the first computer-generated imagery animation in a feature-length film, the first movie shot entirely on digital cameras, and for the development of the Pixar computer system (before they separated and were eventually bought out). The San Francisco-based company has participated in the production of over 200 movies in the past 32 years.
ILM is responsible for the majority of the CGI in the first live-action Transformers movie, and served in the same capacity for the sequels, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Transformers: The Last Knight and Bumblebee, as well as Transformers: The Ride – 3D and Transformers One.
Despite winning several awards from the Visual Effects Society for Transformers and seemingly being a shoe-in for the 2008 Oscar for "Best Visual Effects", ILM actually lost, to the shock of the visual effects industry and the assembled movie makers, to a goddamn polar bear, no less. Revenge of the Fallen wasn't even nominated for the 2010 Oscars for "Best Visual Effects". Dark of the Moon managed to get a "Best Visual Effects" nomination in 2011, but lost to Hugo, another project ILM happened to work on.
ILM staff on Transformers included:
- Charles Alleneck - Animator
- Scott Benza - Animation supervisor
- Russell Earl - Associate Visual Effects Supervisor
- Scott Farrar - Visual effects supervisor
- Alex Jaeger - Art director
- Jeff Mann - Production designer
- Keiji Yamaguchi - Technical animator
- Greg Killmaster - Creature technical director
- Laura Killmaster - Creature technical director
- Shawn Kelly - Lead Animator
