Hi Subscriber First Name,

So, Cynthia and I just finished watching Light & Magic, a documentary series available on Disney+. If you’re half the geek I am, you’ve probably guessed it’s about Industrial Light & Magic, the company founded by George Lucas to—initially— produce visual effects for the original Star Wars movie. ILM is associated with almost every major innovation in the special effects industry, with a list of classic movies to its name that reads like a Hollywood blockbuster top 100: Close Encounters, Indiana Jones, Tron, ET, Terminator II Judgment Day, Poltergeist, The Abyss...and on and on.

It’s also where Ed Catmull created the PIXAR computer. Yes, that PIXAR.

But what’s most fascinating about the series is how it takes us behind the scenes, using tons of archival footage from each era. We basically live with the ILM crew, from 1976 onward. We see them invent new tools on the fly, solving problems, building new types of cameras, rigs, film compositing machines, watch the beginnings of motion capture…it’s astounding, and humbling.

But it also weaves a tale of cruel upheaval.

Did you know Jurassic Park was meant to be a stop-motion masterpiece? I didn’t. CG existed at the time, but it was still considered an extra: good for effects, but not an option for anything extensive, or meant to look “real”. So for this movie, the CG department (we’re talking two young guys in a tiny basement office) had been tasked with assisting the stop-motion team, adding blur to make the final shots look more fluid. Model building and filming were already well underway, Spielberg was overseeing the results and he was happy; everything was going swimmingly according to plan, with everyone on board.

Except for those two guys in the basement. 

They’d decided, in secret, that their technology had come of age. That it could do much more than just assist. So, they built a T. rex—a walking, breathing, and roaring T. rex…

Within two years ILM’s famed model shop had closed, and the entire movie industry had been transformed. Artisans, painters, people with decades of experience, either adapted or were left in the dust.

The story is incredibly sad, and yet incredibly inspiring as well. 

...

I used to record music on Tascam Portastudios. I wish I’d kept them because they now sell for way more than they’re worth. One day, I visited a friend who was working with an app called Deck, on a Macintosh computer. It was a Portastudio look-alike, true and true, but in digital form—the future in a box. I still remember my excitement. I can picture the computer screen, the faders, even the living room where we were sitting. 

I knew there and then that eventually, anything would be possible.