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Tha layered shading system has been the standard at ILM for many years as it continues to impact the wider visual effects and animation industries.

By Lucas O. Seastrom

2026 marks Industrial Light & Magic’s 39th Scientific and Technical Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The recipient innovation “Lama” – its name derived from the first two letters of each word in the term layered materials – is the first modular, production-ready, commercially available layered shading system of its kind in the visual effects and animation industries. Recognized on the award are Lama’s lead originators, including former ILM lookdev supervisor Jonathan Moulin, and former ILM rendering engineers Vincent Dedun and Emmanuel Turquin.

The concept for Lama first emerged ten years ago as a means to solve what had become a common problem with shading and rendering computer graphics imagery. A typical layered material network helps to define how light interacts with a digital surface like metal, wood, or skin. Light can reflect off a surface, but it can also refract between multiple, differing layers. Until 2016, material systems were commonly made specifically for the types of imagery in a given production. They were rigidly designed and often difficult to share between different productions. This inflexibility made it challenging for artists to adjust their work quickly while still maintaining the realistic dimensions of their images.

“In the early days of rendering – i.e. writing shaders to make objects look like real objects that are in fact CG objects – we had purpose-built shaders,” explains principal R&D engineer André Mazzone, who has been involved with Lama since its inception and currently manages the product. “There were shaders for glass, skin, metal and everything else. It was insular and isolated. Then there was a period when we developed general purpose shaders that would combine multiple properties. In certain cases, some parts of an asset might be clear but others might be opaque. For example with an eyeball, there’s a white, cloudy area but then there’s a transition into a transparent region where the lens is focusing light onto the retina. This blending needs to be smooth, so we require an expressive shader that comprises all of these behaviors. General purpose shaders were fixed in their designs as templates. If we wanted additional behavior, we had to jump in and code it. On Rango, they needed more dirt controls, so we had to splice in new pieces of code to make upgrades. That’s how it used to work.”

To eliminate this often cumbersome process, Lama was envisioned as a modular system where materials are layered and combined without the need for customized code. It’s a simple, lean, and artist-friendly method that ensures both physical accuracy and creative flexibility.

“The way Lama decomposes material responses is akin to the historical bespoke shader solutions for different materials, but the glue is now something that an artist can apply instead of an engineer,” explains Mazzone. “The engineering job is to provide all of the building blocks that might be needed, and the artists can make new additions themselves. This is Lama’s true strength. It employs an infrastructure that conserves energy across material layers. We had experimented with this in the past, but not in a way that allowed general arbitrary layering. This commitment to automatic physically-inspired energy conservation while rearranging components is what has made this tool so flexible and useful.”

Starting as an incubator project at ILM’s London studio in 2016, by mid-2017 Lama was already being used in productions. Disney’s Aladdin (2019) was the first to receive full Lama deployment to great success, and later, Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) resulted in the tool’s deployment throughout the wider network of ILM’s studios. “Any film that includes CG elements from our main-line pipeline – hero creatures, crowds and environments – has been 100% powered by Lama since 2019,” Mazzone notes. That includes episodic series like The Mandalorian, Skeleton Crew, Andor, and many of the Marvel shows. All main-line assets at ILM now go through Lama.”

However, this was only the beginning of Lama’s impact. At the same time that ILM fully integrated the system, it began sharing Lama’s possibilities with sister companies, Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. Pixar was so taken with it that they chose to adapt the tool into their iconic RenderMan product. Lama first premiered with RenderMan 24 in 2021, and since then, studios across the industry have benefited from this ILM-grown innovation, including Laika, DNEG, and MPC, among others. Pixar’s newest feature Hoppers is just one example, wherein Lama’s workflow for hair, fur, and feathers was utilized to great success.

“Most importantly, Lama shifts the artist’s mindset,” says Mazzone. “Materials are now no longer abstract parameter blends, but substrates and layers, much closer to their real-world counterparts. They can be developed independently and combined later, improving efficiency and giving artists and engineers a clear, shared language. This balance, simplicity at the surface, and complexity through composition, makes Lama both approachable for artists and robust in production, enabling faster iteration and higher quality outcomes.”

Congratulations to Jonathan Moulin, Vincent Dedun, Emmanuel Turquin on their Scientific and Technical Award, and to everyone at ILM who has supported Lama’s continued development, including engineering lead and current product owner André Mazzone, former rendering engineer Henrik Dahlberg, rendering engineers Sam Cordingley, Alain Hostettler, Chong Deng and Khang Ngo, and lookdev supervisors Hugo Debat-Burkarth and Joseph Szokoli.

See the full list of Scientific and Technical Award Winners for 2026.

To learn more about Lama, visit RenderMan’s website.

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Lucas O. Seastrom is the editor of ILM.com and Skysound.com, as well as a contributing writer and historian for Lucasfilm.

Behind every complex shot is a network of people supporting, teaching, coordinating, and looking out for one another. Drawing on perspectives from animation, production, training, and talent management, this article looks beyond the work on-screen to explore how everyday behavior, collaboration, and care shape life inside ILM’s Vancouver studio.

By Jamie Benning

When you arrive at Industrial Light & Magic’s Vancouver office, located in a unique skyscraper known as “The Stack,” the lobby displays creatures, props, and costumes tied to the company’s history, while the view beyond the windows reveals one of the most distinctive environments in the ILM network. Glass, steel, ocean light, and mountain silhouettes frame a workspace where some of the most technically complex and creative imagery in modern filmmaking is created. The Vancouver studio is shaped by its artists, influenced by its location, and sustained by a culture built on collaboration and shared purpose.

This portrait of ILM’s Vancouver studio emerges from conversations with people working across very different roles inside the studio: senior visual effects trainer Matt Leonard; lead animator Wesley Chandler; senior talent management coordinator Riya Ramani; and visual effects production coordinator William Wu. Their perspectives are reinforced by insights from Toban Taplin, executive in charge at the Vancouver studio, whose role bridges creative leadership, operations, and long-term studio strategy. Across these conversations, a consistent theme emerges. The Vancouver studio is a place defined by people who support each other, a city that inspires them, and a culture that reflects the best of ILM’s past and present.

Leonard’s role as senior visual effects trainer places him at the center of artist support, sharing knowledge across the studio as tools, workflows, and expectations continue to evolve. As a lead animator, Chandler works directly on performance and motion, guiding teams through some of the most creatively demanding sequences on ILM’s projects. Ramani, as senior talent management coordinator, sits at the intersection of people, logistics, and wellbeing, helping ensure that crews are supported not just creatively but sustainably. From the production side, Wu’s role as visual effects production coordinator focuses on communication and continuity, tracking work as it moves between departments and making sure artists have what they need to do their jobs effectively.

People

The Vancouver team consistently describes an environment shaped by openness, humility, and care. Matt Leonard, who works across ILM’s global studios, sees this as one of the company’s defining characteristics.

“That was one of the things that really drew me to ILM. From the outset, it felt like a very humble group of people. Having been here nine years, it still feels like there are no egos at all, which is staggering when you think about the calibre of people who work here.”

That absence of ego shows up, not as a slogan, but in everyday interactions. Production staff move between desks, checking in on shot progress. Artists gather for dailies, where work is reviewed openly, with feedback offered constructively from all present. Trainers circulate through departments answering highly specific technical questions. Talent managers quietly track crew wellbeing alongside schedules and contracts. The studio functions as an interlocking system, where each role supports the other.

That sense of care is reflected not only in how people are supported during difficult moments but also in how their time and energy are respected between projects. Wesley Chandler recalls how that approach stood out to him early on.

“I really loved how artist-focused ILM tries to be. That stood out to me quite a bit. I was finishing a project, and my talent manager at the time asked me, ‘Do you want to take some time off after this?’ Then I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ Usually, in visual effects, you go from one very busy project straight to the next. The idea that people could take time off if they wanted to really stood out to me. It felt like they genuinely wanted to make sure artists were well taken care of.”

For Toban Taplin, that environment is not accidental. His own background as an effects artist continues to shape how he thinks about leadership and studio culture.

“When I look back at my time as an artist, the places where I did my best work were the ones where the environment was good, and the people around you were all pulling in the same direction. The challenges on a show don’t feel quite so daunting when you’re sitting next to people you get on with, and feel supported by. A big part of my job is helping to create that environment so people can do their best work.”

For many, that sense of support extends far beyond project deadlines and delivery schedules. Chandler joined the Vancouver team when the industry itself was undergoing significant change, and he experienced that culture at a deeply personal level. “I’m incredibly grateful for how ILM supported my family and me, including giving us time to process a loss in the family. It really felt like they cared about my well-being as a person, not just what I could produce at work.”

That feeling of being valued as a person, not just as a contributor to a shot or a sequence, echoes across departments. Riya Ramani experienced that sense of belonging so strongly that she returned to ILM after a period working abroad. “My journey through different studios eventually led me back to ILM in Vancouver, which I now consider my ohana. What brought me back wasn’t just the work, but the people and the genuine sense of community that makes this place so valuable.”

Even those at earlier stages in their ILM careers feel actively encouraged to participate, learn, and grow. Staff describe an environment where questions are welcomed and curiosity is rewarded, creating a studio culture that supports learning alongside delivery.

Across every role, from production through artists, training, and talent management, the language is consistent. People feel supported, listened to, and encouraged to ask questions. It is a culture built as much on kindness as it is on craft, where emotional intelligence is valued alongside technical mastery.

While the work on-screen often draws the public spotlight, the Vancouver studio is sustained by a much wider network of expertise. Production, talent management, training, facilities, IT, and operations all work in parallel with the artists. Schedules are shaped, careers are guided, systems are maintained, and problems are solved quietly in the background.

Taplin recalls a message forwarded to him by a manager, written by an artist after an ordinary day at work. “They talked about coming into the studio, having breakfast that morning, then later picking up their production gift, and finding hot chocolate and donuts waiting upstairs. They were working on a Star Wars project, surrounded by memorabilia, and they said it felt like they were living their best life that day. Being able to share that feedback with the teams who created that experience is really important. It helps people see that what they’re doing matters.”

Place

Vancouver’s geography is central to the experience of working here. The proximity of mountains, forest trails, and the Pacific Ocean offers people across the studio a balance that many describe as both grounding and energizing. It is a city where an intense day at the workstation can be followed by a swim, a hike, or an evening on the beach. The natural world sits unusually close to the digital one.

Matt Leonard explains the appeal of the surrounding environment. “Within 10 or 20 minutes, you can cross a bridge into the North Shore and suddenly be in the mountains, or head the other way and be on the beach.” For Chandler and his family, that access to the outdoors is part of daily life. “My wife, daughter, and I love the outdoors! There are so many trails around here. We love to do a lot of hiking and camping!”

For William Wu, the character of the city runs deeper than its landscape. Vancouver’s multicultural identity shaped his upbringing and continues to shape his experience at ILM. “For me, Vancouver is home. Growing up in an Asian household, I was never tied to just one culture or one community. I was always surrounded by different cultures, and that became normal. People here are curious about what you appreciate in your culture, what you do for holidays, what your day-to-day life looks like. There’s a real willingness to learn and be open, and people are very kind and respectful. Vancouver is incredibly rich and diverse, and it doesn’t feel like anywhere else in the world.”

Taplin’s own relationship with the city began as a short-term experiment that became something more permanent. “We moved here on a whim, thinking we’d try it for a year. What made us stay was how accessible everything is. I live on the North Shore now, and within 15 or 20 minutes, you can be on a mountain trail, skiing in the evening, or hiking above the clouds. Even on the many grey, rainy days Vancouver has, you can drive up into the mountains, and suddenly you’re above it all, in the sunshine, with snow all around you. That ability to escape so quickly is pretty amazing. You’re immersed in nature all the time, and that’s incredibly inspiring.”

Vancouver has fully embraced its identity as a production city, with everything from major studio features to independent films and television series shooting across the region. Ramani notices that industry presence almost daily. “Working full-time at the office has its perks – our window overlooks Melville Street, where my colleagues and I have had a blast watching camera crews filming outside The Stack.”

That proximity to live production and nature feeds directly into the studio’s creative energy. Forests become reference, shifting Pacific light influences how people observe color and atmosphere, and rain, mist, rock, and water subtly inform the textures seen on-screen. Vancouver is not just a place where ILM happens; it actively shapes how people here see and imagine.

Culture

ILM’s global culture is rooted in a long tradition of collaboration, problem-solving, and shared creative ownership. The Vancouver office reflects that tradition, while adding its own local energy and character.

Training plays a central role in how ILM maintains that culture. Matt Leonard introduces new artists not only to the studio’s tools and workflows, but also to its history. “We run sessions on the history of ILM where we show images from the early days and talk about the people who built the studio. It helps new artists feel part of a much bigger story.”

Access to senior artists and long-time ILM innovators is another constant. Knowledge is not hoarded. It circulates. “You can talk to almost anyone in the company and say you’re struggling or ask how something works,” Leonard says. “People genuinely want to help.”

That openness is visible every day in Vancouver. Wu recalls moments when simple questions lead to unexpected insight, even on landmark films. “I remember someone sending out a question about Jurassic Park, and people who actually worked on the film replied with real details about how those shots were done. It really shows how open the culture is.”

The studio’s hybrid work pattern provides flexibility, but in-person collaboration remains important for many. The ability to sit alongside someone, sketch an idea, or solve a problem together still carries enormous creative value.

“Working from home has brought flexibility that people really value,” Wu explains. “But what being in the studio brings to the collective is different. When senior artists sit next to someone who hasn’t been in the industry for 20 years, that exchange is invaluable. On challenging projects, there’s a real sense of camaraderie that comes from being together.”

Chandler echoes that sentiment from a personal perspective. “For my mental health, I really value being around people. Working fully remote would be difficult for me.”

Ramani sees the impact in small, everyday moments. “I love the spontaneous hallway encounters; sometimes just bumping into a colleague leads to a quick conversation that resolves a challenge on the spot.”

The social culture reinforces those connections. Staff join art clubs, volleyball groups, foodie communities, Inktober challenges, and a wide range of employee resource groups. As Ramani puts it, “The clubs at ILM are definitely a highlight for me. We have a book club, a Pride ERG, a fashion club – there’s something for everyone, and it’s a joy to watch that community expand. It’s wonderful to see our diverse interests celebrated and getting to know my teammates through the things we love outside of our day jobs.”

For Wu, those communities also create everyday moments of creative exchange. “It’s really fun seeing colleagues share their drawings every day during projects like Inktober.”

Culture at ILM Vancouver does not live in policy documents. It lives in behaviour.

Work and Innovation

Vancouver contributes to some of ILM’s most complex and ambitious projects. Artists describe an environment where technical advancement grows directly out of collaboration between departments and disciplines.

The studio is one of  ILM’s five global studios, with work frequently moving between sites as projects evolve. That kind of collaboration demands clarity, trust, and a shared technical language. Vancouver’s location on the Pacific coast places it in close alignment with west coast production while remaining deeply connected to each of the other ILM studios.

Matt Leonard offers a concise summary of the studio’s approach to problem-solving. “When a client has an impossible problem to solve, they often come to us. And I’ve never heard anyone here say, ‘We can’t do that.’”

Taplin points to a recent example where that mindset became tangible. “On Percy Jackson and the Olympians, we were being asked to move fast,” he says. “That meant building things locally, including building an ILM StageCraft LED volume and virtual production team, so the creative work could keep evolving. We were able to tap into the expertise from across ILM as a whole and create something new for our team here.”

He sees that approach as both an ILM hallmark and something the Vancouver studio has fully embraced: Drawing on the wider global company while remaining agile enough to respond quickly as new challenges emerge. That mindset plays out through repeated cycles of iteration. Shots evolve through multiple versions. Tools are reshaped and rewritten in response to real production demands. Chandler recently saw how that same approach shaped the work on Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025). “We developed several new tools that allowed us to work much faster and saved animators from having to do things manually.”

From the production side, Wu sees innovation supported by communication and trust. “My job is to make sure people feel supported and that when work moves between departments, communication is clear.”

Innovation at ILM is rarely about sudden breakthroughs. It is about a steady accumulation. Small improvements layered over time. Systems shaped by people solving real, creative problems at scale.

Belonging to a Larger Story

Artists and production staff in Vancouver describe a strong sense of belonging to something bigger than any single show. They recognize both their individual contributions and their place within ILM’s wider history.

Ramani appreciates that the studio formally recognizes the work of every department. “It’s so rewarding to see ILM include the studio support teams in the credits. It reinforces the idea that no project is the result of just one department; it takes an entire community to reach the finish line.”

Leonard notes how quickly new employees begin to feel connected to that legacy. “Very quickly you start to feel like you’re part of something bigger, something that has a real legacy behind it.”

For Taplin, that sense of continuity is essential. “When you look at all the industry pioneers that are at ILM, all of these people that everyone looks up to started as juniors. They were given opportunities, allowed to try things, allowed to fail, and to build over time. It’s important that people here know they can follow that same trajectory. That this can be a place where you build a career, not just move from project to project.”

Wu became aware of the ILM way almost immediately. “Everyone I spoke to before joining said ILM was the best place to be. And once you’re here, you really understand why.”

Careers at ILM often unfold over many years, sometimes with people leaving and returning, carrying new skills back into the studio. That flow of experience continually refreshes the culture while preserving its core identity.

Looking to the Future

The Vancouver studio is shaped by its people, influenced by its environment, and grounded in a culture of shared learning and collaboration. Artists and staff describe a studio where support is real, questions are encouraged, failure is a part of reaching success, innovation grows from teamwork, and ILM’s long history remains a living part of everyday work.

Taplin sees Vancouver playing an increasingly important role in the studio’s future. “There’s so much change happening in the industry. We need to be at the front of that. The question for us is always what Vancouver can bring to the table that serves the wider studio, while also pushing something new forward.”

He is also clear about the importance of acknowledging every department. “I want to recognize all of the teams that contribute to what we do in Vancouver. People come in every day trying to make things a little bit better, to try something new, and to put ideas forward with the wider team in mind. It’s a huge lift that everyone does, and it’s what makes this a special place to be.”

The values that shaped ILM in its earliest years are clearly still present here. Today, those values are expressed through hybrid workflows, global collaboration, and evolving technology. Looking forward, they will be carried by the next generation of artists, coordinators, trainers, and managers who will shape whatever ILM becomes next.

In a city known for its natural beauty, diverse communities, and deep connection to filmmaking, ILM’s Vancouver studio continues to expand the studio’s legacy across film, television, and emerging formats. It remains a place where people can build careers, push technology forward, and contribute to stories told around the world.

ILM’s Vancouver studio is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. We thank all First Nations who have lived and worked on these territories from time immemorial.

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Jamie Benning is a filmmaker, author, and podcaster with a lifelong passion for sci-fi and fantasy cinema. He hosts The Filmumentaries Podcast, featuring twice-monthly interviews with behind-the-scenes artists. Visit Filmumentaries.com or find him on X (@jamieswb) and @filmumentaries on Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

ILM visual effects supervisor Vincent Papaix and Nerfstudio creator Matt Tancik discuss their innovative approach to visual effects shot design.

By Lucas O. Seastrom

At this year’s HPA (Hollywood Professional Association) Awards for Technology & Innovation, Industrial Light & Magic and collaborator Nerfstudio took home a win in the Innovation in VFX, Virtual Production & Animation category. Embracing a new kind of open source toolset allowed ILM to recreate visual effects shots for Marvel’s 2025 series Ironheart at a degree of efficiency that greatly outpaced established techniques. The key was “NeRF,” or neural radiance fields, a method that allows 3D photorealistic environments to be created from a sampling of real-world 2D photography.

A Catalyst from Marvel’s Ironheart

ILM visual effects supervisor Vincent Papaix faced an interesting challenge with a handful of drone-based shots from Ironheart, wherein the series’ namesake flies over Chicago’s lakeside waterfront and river district. The fast-flying CG character had to be integrated with the live action plates shot on location. “They decided to film with the drones in a very slow way, thinking we could retime the footage,” Papaix explains to ILM.com. “Typically, you might retime at 200% or 300%, but in this case it was over 1,000%. The character’s movement needed to be very, very fast. Traffic would have to be replaced. When you’re filming at normal speed with the drone, you don’t get the sense of the micro-movement, but at high speed, you could see the high-frequency movements of the camera.”

The visual effects team needed to recreate the desired camera moves while maintaining the appropriate view of the live action background plate. Normally, they might attempt a 2D stabilization of the image, but in a case like this, the sense of depth, or parallax, made for difficulties in trying to stabilize both the foreground and the background at the same time. They considered recreating the entire world in CG, traditionally modeling, texturing, and shading every detailed aspect of the Chicago setting. But with an episodic production schedule, the necessary resources and time required would be prohibitive. 

Papaix decided to begin what he describes as a “pet project,” researching how NeRF models could be applied to visual effects work. At first there was no guarantee that his inquiries would yield results, but then he discovered Nerfstudio, an open source program that provided an end-to-end workflow for developing 3D environments from 2D photography. 

Nerfstudio creator Matt Tancik began his research in developing neural radiance fields as a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. “People wanted to experiment and see how much they could push this technology,” Tancik says. “It became obvious that there was a desire for this research to make it into the industry field. But there wasn’t an easy way to do it because it was kind of obtuse research code at the time. The Nerfstudio project was about trying to see how we could wrap it up into something that looked more like a product, and fully open source, so that other people could start playing with it. 

“And most notably,” Tancik adds, “people could help build upon it. A lot of the research projects that we saw coming out of NeRF acted like modules attached to NeRF to make it better along one axis or another. It made sense to try to collaborate as much as possible. The Nerfstudio project was a step towards doing that, and that’s when Vincent and ILM started playing around with it.”

The Function of “NeRFs”

But how exactly do neural radiance fields help empower artists like Papaix and his colleagues to work more efficiently? As Tancik explains, it’s a process that seeks to forego the traditional CG methods that involve the complex, often laborious craft of representing photorealistic imagery as meshes and triangles with applied textures and lighting. “All of that takes a significant amount of effort to make it photoreal, and in some cases, it’s almost impossible,” says Tancik. “That’s not for the lack of people trying to make these methods easier and easier. The goal of NeRF was to essentially see if we could use machine learning to accomplish the same thing. Instead of manually placing these triangles, can we have an algorithm construct these things from photos? So then the work becomes capturing many photos of a scene and converting them into a 3D representation.”

The result is a new approach to storing the corresponding data. Instead of triangles mapped within the CG model, NeRF uses individual points in space, each assigned a specific color. “When you look out into space, you’re shooting out into the scene and seeing what points you hit, and you’re noting which direction you’re hitting that point of space,” Tancik notes. “A single point in space, whether I’m looking at it one way or another, might look a little different. By describing the scene like this, it fits really nicely into optimization techniques that we can use to fit that to an image.”

ILM’s Practical Application

Working with former ILM research engineer Sirak Ghebremusse and former ILM pipeline technical director Kevin Rakes, Papaix oversaw the effort to adapt Nerfstudio’s functionality for visual effects. Both a new encoder and decoder were required to help translate information between Nerfstudio and ILM’s other tools, which ensured the team’s ability to maintain a certain amount of precision with color and image range. 

Similarly, the team needed to process the environments into real-world imagery that could be measured in feet, so Tancik himself created a new file format to aid the transition. That also required the development of new “gizmos” – a group of various nodes of information – within the compositing software Nuke, which allowed the artists to move seamlessly back and forth between the Nerfstudio render and the final effects work. 

“We can work with standard layout and animation in feet, then go into NeRF, import any camera we want, render it through Nerfstudio, and bring that camera move back with us into the Maya or Zeno file,” Papaix notes. “It was key to have that ability.”

As the process evolved, ILM was able to apply these new capabilities in multiple ways. They could stitch a seamless transition between two separate camera views over the water, one captured by a drone and another from a boat, all without the need to create a new CG environment. Entire objects, such as street traffic on a bridge, could be removed. And because they were able to maintain parity between their visual effects environment and the Nerfstudio-rendered space, they could develop entirely new camera paths at the request of the filmmakers.

“We could create a new smooth camera move, basically art direct the exact move that we wanted, and then show that to the director,” Papaix says. “They were very happy. They didn’t think it was possible to change a camera move using an original plate, but we did. They said it was like magic to them. People were curious. Did we project the plate onto geometry? Did we model the whole city? No, there’s no modeling or anything.”

Now with Greater Accessibility

Papaix is keen to note that at the time ILM collaborated with Nerfstudio – in 2022 and ‘23 – these methods were still considered experimental. “Very few people were putting this kind of stuff into production. There was a lot of research taking place, but Matt showed how this could be useful, and ILM took it and made it production-ready.”

Tancik himself adds that “I’ve always been interested in the visual side of things, and hoped to get to that point, but didn’t know if the concept would ever actually make it there. It was not an easy thing to run. You needed a lot of computing power and GPUs. It didn’t feel like it was there yet to be useful in industry or productions. So watching Vincent and ILM put it into practice was really fun.”

Today, the use of neural radiance fields, as well as another similar outgrowth method known as Gaussian splat, is continually on the rise with increasing efficiency in computing power. “This was a science paper a few years ago, and now it’s making its way into all of the software that we use,” Papaix says.

“With the move to Gaussian splat, if I had to do those shots today, I could probably do it from start to finish in only a few days, compared to the months that it took before,” Papaix concludes. “At the time, it took about six months because it was more of a research project off and on, a side project. Now that we understand the tech, we can optimize things, and we can do things much faster. The tech improves so fast. We’re still in the early days of learning how these techniques will be applied.”

Watch the full demonstration reel:

Click here to read more about Nerfstudio.

See the full list of winners from the HPA Awards for Innovation & Technology.

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Lucas O. Seastrom is the editor of ILM.com and Skysound.com, as well as a contributing writer and historian for Lucasfilm.

Visual effects artists from across Industrial Light & Magic are recognized for their work.

At the 4th Annual Children’s & Family Emmy Awards on March 2, 2026, Industrial Light & Magic’s team from Star Wars: Skeleton Crew won Outstanding Visual Effects for a Live Action Program. Additionally, ILM senior animator James Saunders was recognized for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation for Ultraman: Rising.

The recipients for Skeleton Crew included production visual effects supervisor John Knoll, production visual effects producers Abbigail Keller and Pablo Molles, animation supervisor Shawn Kelly, visual effects producer Nicole Matteson, virtual production supervisor Christopher Balog, and visual effects supervisors Jeff Capogreco, Bobo Skipper, Andy Walker, Joseph Kasparian, and Eddie Pasquarello.

ILM’s team joined fellow Skeleton Crew recipients from across Lucasfilm, including wins for Outstanding Young Teen Series, Outstanding Editing for a Young Teen Live Action Program, and Outstanding Sound Mixing and Sound Editing for a Live Action Program.

Congratulations to all of our Emmy winners! Read the full list here.

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Read more about Star Wars: Skeleton Crew and Ultraman: Rising here on ILM.com:

‘Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’: ILM’s Visual Effects Treasure Chest, From At Attin to Starport Borgo

‘Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’: ILM’s Visual Effects Adventure from the Observatory Moon to Lanupa and back to At Attin

Real-Time Visual Effects: Behind-the-Scenes of ILM’s Cutting-Edge Contributions to ‘Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’

Netflix’s ‘Ultraman: Rising’: Building new worlds for the ultimate icon

ILM Evolutions: Animation, ‘Ultraman: Rising’ and ‘Transformers One’

Visual effects supervisors Charmaine Chan, Andrew Roberts, and Simone Coco share their experiences working together on the Oscar-nominated Jurassic World Rebirth.

By Amy Richau

Bringing dinosaurs to the screen for Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) required a true team effort with multiple ILM visual effects supervisors collaborating in teams around the world. While some films only require one visual effects supervisor to see the production through from start to finish, other films are just – bigger. Backing up production visual effects supervisor David Vickery, who recently talked about his work on Rebirth with ILM, were multiple visual effects supervisors from ILM, as well as others from partner studios like Midas VFX and ILP.

Charmaine Chan, Andrew Roberts, and Simone Coco talked with ILM.com about wrangling a herd of dinosaurs (both familiar and new to audiences), coordinating their individual teams’ work into one cohesive film, and the pressure of working on such a legendary franchise.

Getting the call

Working on an installment in the Jurassic film series was a full-circle moment for Chan, Roberts, and Coco, who all pointed to the original Jurassic Park (1993) as a moment that kick-started their careers in visual effects.

In the 1990s, while still working in the games industry, Roberts attended a talk from Jurassic Park’s CG supervisor Stefen Fangmeier in London. Hearing Fangmeier break down the work on Jurassic helped Roberts make the connection from his current work to a potential future in visual effects. “Seeing the same techniques of modeling, animation, and compositing that we were using in the games industry was the initial spark,” Roberts tells ILM.com. “That was an inflection point for me, where I started to pursue working in TV and film. The movie, as well as understanding the work that went into it, completely changed my life and my career and was the reason that I started to pursue computer graphics.”

The scene that stood out to Coco the most from the original film involved the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex. “It was so real and scary,” he notes. “I remember the T. rex screaming in the rain and shaking the glass and everything in the car.” The realism of that scene inspired Coco to better understand how the visual effects were created in other scenes in the film, eventually leading to his work at ILM, starting with projects like Napoleon (2023) and Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One (2023).

Chan was growing up in Hawaii, close to where Jurassic Park was filmed, when it was released. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, dinosaurs could be there.’ I was a kid, and it just felt so real to me.” After joining ILM, Chan worked on Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), The Mandalorian (2019-23), and The Creator (2023) before joining the Rebirth crew, where she attended a special ILM screening of Jurassic Park. “It still stands up,” notes Chan, “that sense of awe and amazement and seeing the dinosaurs for the first time. And for me, it’s about wanting to recreate that feeling.”

While Rebirth was Roberts’s first Jurassic project, he had recently worked closely with director Gareth Edwards on The Creator. But even with that experience, Rebirth provided a “pinch-me” moment for him. “It was a little daunting, just seeing the quality of work and the deep history that ILM has with this franchise,” remembers Roberts. “So it was daunting, but very exciting. And I was definitely up for the challenge.”

Supervisor 101

The role of a visual effects supervisor can vary from film to film. Chan describes the role as that of both a mediator and translator, as well as the person to whom crew members come to with questions. “You see the big picture of everything and have such a huge overview of what’s going on that you can basically connect the dots that are needed for each department and each person within your team,” says Chan.

Coco points to being on set as an important part of the journey to reaching this role. “You start to see how the set works and how things develop from script to bidding to how we’re going to shoot this once getting on set.”

“In some ways, we’re here to facilitate the visual direction,” notes Chan. “Whether that be from the director or from our production visual effects supervisor, we make sure everyone is on the same page of what that visual need is. A lot of it is just working with people on a daily basis, reviewing their work and seeing that everyone’s moving in the same direction.”

The large number of visual effects shots in Rebirth (over 1,200) required splitting up the work throughout production and postproduction. Pulling off that many shots required constant communication between multiple departments and the visual effects supervisors, the latter of whom kept their focus on being creative problem solvers.

Designing the Dinosaurs

Chan was the first of the supervisors to join Rebirth in April of 2024, after dinosaur development at ILM had already begun. Figuring out how the dinosaurs would look and move on screen was a challenge they embraced through to the very last shot of the film. “We were constantly trying to make them the scariest, coolest, most fun dinosaurs we could,” says Chan. “We wanted something different from the previous worlds that we’d seen, something that honored some of the original Jurassic Park dinosaurs. But also, Gareth gave his own twist and turn to the design of them.”

Roberts, who joined Rebirth’s team last September, notes the jump between seeing skeletons of a dinosaur in a museum to thinking about how the creature’s joints would move in different environments. Before joining the film, he rewatched previous Jurassic films to get “familiar with the quality of work in all of them, how some of the creatures moved, and conveying the sense of weight for some of the bigger creatures.”

Gareth Edwards was heavily involved throughout the process of deciding how the dinosaurs would look in the film. “I think at one point we had a two-hour live session with Gareth trying to figure out what the Mutadon was going to look like,” remembers Chan, where one of the team’s modelers would try putting different pieces of real dinosaurs onto a Mutadon sculpture to piece it together. “I think that was vital to the process of making sure that our dinosaurs, from their basic stance, without even being in a shot, could stand by themselves and look cool. Once they were at the state that both David and Gareth were happy with, we would place them into a shot.”

Finding real-world animal references for each dinosaur was a key part of making the movements of dinosaurs in Rebirth appear believable and anchored in reality. To create Dolores, the small Aquilops dinosaur that Isabella Delgado (Audrina Miranda) adopts as her pet, an ILM team, led by animation supervisor Delio Tramontozzi, used videos of themselves interacting with their own pet dogs and cats. “They would have multiple takes of the way their pets were responding to a laser light or picking them up in a way that allowed them to snuggle into the crook of an arm or drape over a shoulder,” says Roberts. The reference videos were submitted with animation of Dolores or other dinosaurs so Roberts and other team members could see how those real-life moments translated to animated shots in Rebirth.

As Vickery was usually the only effects supervisor on set, he made sure to communicate what he and Edwards were looking for as far as dinosaur movements and behavior in different scenes. For the scenes in the tunnels when the Mutadon dinosaur pursued several characters from the film, Vickery took on the role of a dinosaur squeezing into the tunnel and picking itself up after landing on the floor. “There’s a moment where it plants its hands on the floor, leans forward with real weight, and roars before charging,” remembers Roberts. “And for a lot of that, David or [animation supervisor] Steve [Aplin] would act out to really convey the emotion they wanted. I think we really benefited from that. We’re all very comfortable with each other and locked in and just really enthusiastic about getting that character into the creatures.”

For another scene near the beginning of the film where a hybrid dinosaur almost caresses a lab worker with its claw before killing him, an animator was filmed holding a water bottle, looking at it, sniffing it, giving it a quick touch, and then snatching it. Notes Roberts, “that was a wonderful, fun performance from our animators, where they were able to get a bit more emotion into the scene from their own performance, which then was applied to some of the hybrid creatures.”

Dividing and Conquering

Different ILM supervisors took lead roles for each major sequence in the film. Chan’s team took on many of the water-heavy sequences featuring the Mosasaurus and the Spinosaurus, as well as the team that developed the Distortus Rex. Coco worked on the Mutadon sequences in the market and the tunnels as well as the T-rex chase sequence on the river, while Roberts tackled the beginning and ending of the film, as well as the cliff sequence featuring the Quetzalcoatlus.

Coco noted that splitting up the work into sections was helpful to their teams, so animators or compositors could go to one supervisor to ask a question, instead of having to approach multiple people to get the information they needed. Daily communication between supervisors and their teams of artists was also key throughout the production, as the team involved hundreds of people working in London, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Mumbai.

“It was very important for us all to hear what Gareth’s feedback was,” says Chan. “Because some feedback given on one dinosaur would also apply to another dinosaur in another sequence. And even though we were different teams, it was vital for us to still be sharing information about how we approach winged creatures or creatures in water — there were a lot of tips and tricks that we shared with one another.”

A library of shared assets documenting the workflow, along with an internal website, allowed everyone to understand what visual effects setups were established and ready to use and what they would need to create from scratch. This was especially helpful to Roberts and Coco, who joined the production after Chan. “A big part is sharing the tools up front to be on the same page about how we’re going to tackle things,” notes Roberts. “And then we have a number of chat groups for supervisors, as well as weekly meetings for each sequence and discipline.” Coco adds, “It was good to see what Gareth was looking for in a shot, or what was important for him in a particular environment, so I could follow that line.”

In one case, Roberts referenced the texture and amount of light in the sky in a night sequence at a gas station that the ILM team in London had worked on. That helped him to prepare a night scene his team had coming up. “We inherited that established look as a mood board of London’s work, allowing our team to match it seamlessly from the start,” notes Roberts, “so that when our team came on, we could say ‘we’re matching that.’ This is something that Gareth has already established. He likes this language for night, so we didn’t have to rediscover or explore that too much. So, without ego, just sharing and following, taking London’s lead where they were ahead, and then we also presented some of our work when we were ahead, or when it was on us to sort of establish a look. Very open communication made it a success and made it feel like it’s one team doing all the work together.”

Chat groups would also give supervisors an easy way to ask each other questions about how they might solve similar problems, especially in sequences where there was a bit of overlap between supervisors. To help with the time difference between London and San Francisco, Roberts and his team started their day early to increase the time the two teams were actively working.Another vital piece of the ILM crew on Rebirth was the production team – visual effects producers and production managers – who made sure supervisor teams were properly staffed, flagged important deadlines, and blocked off time for teams who needed to develop a new technique or tool.

Putting it All Together

The challenges Jurassic World Rebirth presented for its visual effects supervisors were varied, ranging from dinosaurs interacting with simulated water, designing environments from multiple elements, and satisfying a director well-versed in visual effects.

Coco’s team tackled the effects-heavy, intense action sequence where the Delgado family is chased by a just-awakened T-rex. While the river in the film is on a tropical island near the equator, these scenes were filmed at a British Olympic river course. “The T-rex interacting with the water, the digitally simulated water, and the family. It was a big, big moment,” notes Coco. “I don’t think a couple of years ago we would be able to do it because of the turnaround time needed. We had amazing effects artists who turned around the simulated water effects in record time.”

The Quetzalcoatlus sequence, when Zora Bennett (Scarlet Johansson) and other members of her team climb down a cliff to retrieve a sample from an egg, had its own unique challenges – and not all dinosaur-related. The cliff and cave environment was put together from a mix of elements, including footage shot at the cave set at Shepperton Studios in England, footage shot at Jog Falls in India, and millions of gallons of digitally simulated water. Mixing footage shot on location, wider shots that were fully CG, and digital extensions on top of drone work became a bit of a puzzle for Roberts’s team to make into one coherent environment. Another important part of this process was getting the right balance, wherein the background isn’t pulling too much focus from the actors. “Even though it’s multiple elements and different sections, you want to create a continuous environment where the audience truly believes the actors are immersed in that backdrop.”

Other shots not involving dinosaurs also occasionally proved tricky to get Edward’s sign-off on, in part because of his knowledge and appreciation of visual effects.

“Gareth has such a particular eye for blue screens that he can tell when a shot is a blue screen shot,” says Chan, “and for him, it’s successful when he can’t tell it’s a blue screen shot. So we are constantly trying to blend in, change lighting, include more atmospheric lens details, just so many little details that most people, when you think of just green screen or blue screen shots, wouldn’t even consider. Because Gareth wanted to make sure it never felt like a blue screen shot.”

Landing on the right scale for the dinosaurs was also an ongoing process for the visual effects supervisors and Edwards. “We’ve created these dinosaurs at a certain height and size,” notes Chan. “We put them in the shots the way they should naturally be at that size and height. And Gareth would look at some shots and say, ‘No, it doesn’t feel big enough.’ So we played this constant game of make it bigger, make it bigger, okay, that’s too big.

“One thing that Gareth just absolutely excelled at is scale and suspense,” Chan continues. “He knows how to compose every shot and frame to give you that sense. So to him, it’s less about the continuity and making sure things physically and scientifically look correct. It’s more about what makes the audience sit and look at something and feel that suspense. And so we worked with our animation team through many, many iterations of trying to figure out compositionally, what is the scale that works best for these shots?”

After months of hard work from teams across the world, the final product came together for the film’s release in July of 2025, giving both audiences and Rebirth’s crew an adventure to remember. “I think, every person who worked on the movie, and everyone that I talked to, they always said it’s been a dream to work on it, because it is such an iconic movie,” says Coco. “And in many cases, they started in visual effects because of Jurassic, so they don’t do it just because of the work, but because they love it. And working on such a big and iconic movie, they put their heart into it.”

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Amy Richau is a freelance writer and editor with a background in film preservation. She’s the author of several pop culture reference books including Star Wars Timelines, LEGO Marvel Visual Dictionary, and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace: A Visual Archive. She is also the founder of the 365 Star Wars Women Project – that includes over 90 interviews with women who have worked on Star Wars productions. Find her on Bluesky or Instagram.

Teams from Andor, Sinners, and Avatar: Fire and Ash were recognized at the ceremony in Los Angeles.

The 24th annual awards ceremony for the Visual Effects Society was held on February 25 at the Beverly Hilton in Southern California, and teams from Industrial Light & Magic have earned three wins.

Avatar: Fire and Ash won Outstanding Environment in a Photoreal Feature for the Bridgehead Industrial City. ILM’s winners included Gianluca Pizzaia, Steve Bevins, Dziga Kaiser, and Zsolt Máté.

ILM’s John O’Connell, Falk Boje, Hasan Ilhan, and Kevin George won for Outstanding Environment in an Episodic, Commercial, Game Cinematic, or Real-time Project for the Senate District in the episode “Welcome to the Rebellion” from Andor Season 2.

The feature film Sinners was recognized for Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature, and ILM’s Nick Marshall joined fellow winners Michael Ralla, James Alexander, Espen Nordahl, and Donnie Dean.

Congratulations to all of our ILM VES Awards winners, as well as to our Lucasfilm colleagues, who also took home the win for Outstanding Special (Practical) Effects in a Photoreal Project for their work on Andor.

Read the full list of winners.

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Read more about Andor and Sinners here on ILM.com:

Snakes, Trains, and Automobiles: ILM’s Nick Marshall Sheds Light on the Visual Effects of ‘Sinners’

“Like Eating an Elephant One Bite at a Time”: TJ Falls and Mohen Leo on the Visual Effects of ‘Andor’ Season 2

“Let the Experts Be the Experts”: TJ Falls and Mohen Leo on the Visual Effects of ‘Andor’ Season 2

Assembling a Starfighter: Exploring ILM’s Role in Creating the TIE Avenger from ‘Andor’

ILM artists Ian Milham and Shannon Thomas take us behind the scenes of in the second of a two-part story about the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris and 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan.

By Lucas O. Seastrom

Read Part 1 of this story here on ILM.com.

After ILM successfully created a landmark mobile deployment of its StageCraft virtual production system for the 2024 Paris Olympics coverage, it was only natural to up the ante for the next round. As a continuing partnership with NBC, the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics in Italy presented a batch of creative challenges that introduced a new level of dynamic presentation to ILM’s imagery. This included everything from shooting with a real ice rink in the foreground to simulating continuous motion on the volume’s LED wall.

“It was like the band got back together with this one,” notes virtual art department (VAD) supervisor Shannon Thomas. “It was the same crew on the client side. This time the process was less educational in terms of how we interacted with the client or explained how best to use the LED volume. They now understood how it would work, so this was about executing the same kind of creative process but with all new sets. Right from the start, we were able to get down to the specifics of what they wanted to achieve.”

Milan Cortina: The Brief

As with Paris, ILM’s task was to create a series of LED volume loads that acted as backdrops for athletes from the United States Olympic team. Footage of the athletes striking poses and performing actions in each setting would be utilized for any number of promotional needs before and during the Games. NBC brought six ideas for locations to the ILM team, and together they brought new layers of complexity to the job of realizing each of them.

A majority of the settings featured natural, snowy landscapes of the Italian Dolomites, including a mountain top, a frozen pond in a small valley, a ski lodge that looks out across an alpine vista, and a “moving” chairlift up a mountainside. Additionally, two Milan locations incorporated local landmarks, the Piazza del Duomo with its namesake cathedral and lustrous Galleria, and the interior of Teatro alla Scala, Milan’s 18th century opera house, which included an ice rink on the stage.

Initial challenges included the need to accommodate a massive scale of mountain landscapes within the visible scope of an LED volume wall. There was also the active motion of the athletes, a key difference from Paris. Ice skaters and hockey players would actually be moving across the small ice rinks built as practical sets in front of the volume wall. Not only did ILM’s technology need to coexist alongside the ice, but the camera needed to track effectively with the talent’s movements while also maintaining the appropriate sense of depth with the background.

As with Paris, the stylistic brief was to create a sense of hyperrealism, with accentuated lighting and staging. But the natural settings required a new level of realism to feel believable, compared to the Paris sets which were more idealistic. ILM artist Giles Hancock joined the NBC team on a location visit to Italy in early 2025. “Giles captured a ton of photo and video reference plus LIDAR scans of the actual locations,” says ILM virtual production supervisor Ian Milham. “We could then use that as the basis for the content that we made for the wall. That involved someone staging a camera tripod in different spaces, and even riding a chairlift, as well as some data from a helicopter flight.”

Setting the Scene

Both ILM’s past experience and its established relationship with NBC empowered the team’s ability to begin planning from a very early stage. “We did quite a bit of animated previsualization,” says Milham. “The athletes were actually performing their sport, and there were concerns about space and safety, of course, but we also needed to make sure that we could follow and track them in a way that did justice to their real movements.”

Understanding the parameters for the shoot, what Milham calls “the edges of what’s possible,” ensures that the ILM team can deliver everything that could potentially be needed on the day. The client is likewise empowered to envision whatever they can within those set parameters, as well as plan the practical foreground elements. And, of course, there are times when both the client and ILM work to push the established boundaries and see how much more they can do.

For the digital backgrounds, individual settings required their own distinct finessing, in particular the Piazza del Duomo. “Lead hard surface modeler Masa Narita modeled all of the buildings for that entire city square from Giles’ scans, and texture artist Maria Cifuentes textured that entire set as it looked in real life in Milan,” Thomas explains, “and I then lit the real time set based on our digital sky select, and incorporated where the practical ice rink would have to live inside the volume. I then had the new challenge of determining where you would have to physically be, if you were in front of a camera in the real Piazza square, in order to also see the top of the Duomo’s tallest spire. We quickly realized that even with a wide focal length we needed to pivot in order to ensure we could see the whole building.”

Because the Duomo’s cathedral is over 600 years old and such an important national landmark, it was necessary to make sure that the building’s recognizable shape could be seen in its entirety. This resulted in a slight increase in the size of the LED volume from what we used for Paris. ILM’s R&D engineers and technical teams designed a virtual LED volume tool which allowed Thomas and his team to instantly add more rows or columns of panels, all adjustable in real time to ensure that the physical LED volume built on the day would capture the full height and beauty of the Duomo.

For the opera house interior, Hancock’s photogrammetry data provided a useful foundation. Narita and Cifuentes again created a photoreal CG asset for the space, which Thomas and lead virtual production technical director Rey Reynolds then staged in appropriately gold-tinged warm light, including the illustrious digital chandelier. On the set, practical red curtains, some 30 feet tall, augmented the background. “They could open them like real stage curtains in camera to reveal our LED content,” Thomas explains, “so that it felt like you were on a real stage, and behind it was the virtual opera house, an ice skater on real ice, fake snow, and real movie lighting. It was so cool. It looked like magic. It’s a great example of using the tool exactly how it should be used, not forcing it.”

The ice itself was roughly 20 feet long by some 40 feet wide. A refrigeration unit was specially designed into the space. A fair amount of research and planning was involved in determining the necessary space required for the athletes to get up to speed and perform. “Hollywood is crazy in terms of what they can do onsite,” says Milham. “You have to keep the room cold, of course. It’s all internally cooled like a hockey arena. It’s logistically difficult in terms of how things are built. You have to install the wall first, then build the rink, then leave the rink for a couple days so it freezes.” Practical snow was also used on multiple sets, which, as Milham notes, “adds the magic of it falling onto people or the sense of depth as they travel through it.”

The most elaborate practical foreground set was for the patio deck at the ski lodge, which included an actual fire pit, furniture, stringlights, a surrounding fenceline, and even a small tree that needed to match with ILM’s CG counterparts. The effects team initially decided to create the background as a standard 2D matte element, but when the client planned more dynamic camera movements for the scene, ILM pivoted to an elaborate 3D environment. Senior VAD artist Nate Prop led its creation, which allowed the team to make specific changes to the mountain view as needed. And Thomas notes, “[VAD supervisor] Christy Page even added little cars driving in the town, so you could actually see little headlights moving out there. The lights flicker in the town as well.

“There’s enough of the practical elements to tie you into the background,” Thomas continues. “The way they shot it works really well with the real fire pit and cabin structure, fence, trees, etc. Though if you move the camera just a couple feet to the left or right, you see all of the structural wood boards of the practical set build, like it’s a high school play. But in-camera, the shot works, it looks like they’re really there.” Actor Scarlett Johansson and Olympian Lindsay Vonn would be among those to shoot on the lodge set.

Adjusting the Frame Rate

A significant technical change for the Winter Olympics production was to capture footage at 48 frames per second (fps). The additional frame rate would allow the client to modify the imagery to varying speeds as needed, and in particular with athletes zipping about on the ice.

“The difficulty with that is when shooting with a StageCraft LED screen, you need very exact synchronization between your camera, the content, and the wall,” Milham explains. “So with a higher frame rate, that’s orders of magnitude harder because you have to sync to 1/48th of a second instead of 1/24th of a second. Your content needs to do all of its transformation in half the time and everything else with it.”

Without the proper synchronization, a number of issues can arise, including a flicker effect visible on the LED volume, as well as on the foreground subjects and elements because the wall acts as both a background and a light source. On the previous Summer Olympics production, the cameras ran at 48fps but the wall content projected at 24fps, which meant there were limitations to how the final footage could be adjusted after the fact. By request of NBC, Milan Cortina became ILM’s first all-48fps volume shoot.

ILM imaging supervisor J Schulte and principal engineer and architect Nick Rasmussen coordinated weeks of rigorous testing for the chosen Alexa 35 camera system. The results provided much greater flexibility, especially with the demands of the Winter Olympics settings in mind. “It’s important to have if you’re really flying the camera around, like a push-in or a big crane move,” says Milham, “and we did some gigantic crane moves on this project.”

As they had with the Paris shoot, ILM ran three separate renderers to allow for quick changes between scenes. But in this case, two projected to the LED wall at 48fps, while the third projected at 24fps for set-ups that involved audio capture. Interviews and related scenes with dialogue would not require dramatic adjustments in speed.

Just Like the Old Days

Perhaps the most distinctive of the volume loads for the Winter Olympics involved a chairlift that appeared to be moving through the Dolomites. The scene was initially planned as a standard interview set-up, with three locked-off cameras positioned to cover two or three subjects in the chairlift. This would require a moving background on the LED wall that ran for an extended time.

“NBC didn’t want to cut, because they might intercut the footage with other material, and then cut back to it,” Thomas recalls. “They wanted to just roll and let the people talk and get comfortable. They might only use a piece of it three or four minutes in. That means you need to run a lot of footage, and it has to loop at about eight-minute intervals. When you think of a Star Wars movie or something like that, you might have around 2,000 shots that a team of hundreds executes over months or years. Most of those shots are a few seconds to maybe 20 seconds long. We had to render eight minutes of a straight looping footage in a fraction of the time with one or two artists. It was a ton of work and data to maintain.”

Nate Propp again took the lead, visualizing a system that placed two opposite rows of mountain landscape moving in parallel on either side of the talent, not unlike a conveyor belt. “It didn’t matter if the mountains weren’t the exact layout of the Dolomites. We used all of Giles’ scans to piece together a long track of digital mountains that felt like the Dolomites versus having this specific mountain peak perfectly line up to that one. Our earlier Paris Olympics set work aided us here, so as long as we captured the essence of the Dolomites, it worked,” Thomas notes. “The conversation with the talent was the real focus. So Nate laid it out and duplicated a mountain landscape like railroad tracks, that could loop, basically to infinity. We could then place the ski lift in with the camera and ride this imaginary track for as long as they wanted.”

It required a great deal of experimenting to then determine the best means to render such a lengthy scene at 4K without overloading the machines. Additionally, there were concerns about maintaining consistent lighting. “What can break that set-up is not necessarily the background, but rather the feeling that the people aren’t actually moving through it,” Milham says, “and that’s usually because the lighting on them isn’t changing enough.” Coordination with the on-set, practical lighting team allowed them to find the appropriate balance. The volume itself can be equipped to synchronize directly with a traditional lighting grid.

The chairlift set-up became even more elaborate when it was decided to actually move the formerly stationary cameras during the scene. This required ILM to create additional pieces of the landscape on the fly to fill in previously unseen gaps. “It’s all our system and our artists,” Milham notes, “so we’re able to do that at the last minute.” That included associate virtual production supervisor Brad Watkins, who partnered with Milham in directing the team on the stage.

The final results, as Thomas points out with a smile, “are the same as Alfred Hitchcock’s background of Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest. It’s the same magic trick they pulled off in 1959. But now you can move the camera and get parallax.”

The Art of Collaboration

During pre-production, the ILM crew demonstrated their various plans for the set-ups to NBC. They showed the chairlift scene last. “We had the initial presentation that showed what you’d actually see from each camera,” Thomas explains, “and then we showed what the footage was actually doing on the site, this incline into infinity. Ian is pitching it and explaining what can be accomplished. And one of the folks from NBC turns to his colleagues and says, ‘Guys, this is it! This is going to work!’ We were so happy that they liked it, in particular, because we knew how important this specific set was for their vision. “I’ve learned through the years that, with any client, you want to really listen in to what is important to them, and then hit that specific note to reinforce that you are a team working together to achieve a shared goal, this is what builds confidence with your client.”

Throughout these Olympics collaborations, the key for ILM has been an equal mix of flexibility and adaptability to meet the client’s needs. The continuous, energetic shooting style only further demonstrated the versatility of ILM Stagecraft, and likewise ILM’s ability to meet the needs of any client.

“There are ‘unlocks’ here in terms of what is possible with last-minute scenarios, or in-demand talent, in terms of pulling off an ambition that otherwise would not be possible,” Milham concludes. “It doesn’t have to be Star Wars. You can use this technology to make sets appear very, very fast, and to take advantage of a small window of time with talent, all without limitations, and we can do it anywhere.”

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Lucas O. Seastrom is the editor of ILM.com and Skysound.com, as well as a contributing writer and historian for Lucasfilm.

ILM artists Ian Milham and Shannon Thomas take us behind the scenes of a breakthrough virtual production shoot in the first of a two-part story about the 2024 Summer Olympics and 2026 Winter Olympics.

By Lucas O. Seastrom

American viewers of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics on NBC and Peacock have experienced a number of striking visual effects created by Industrial Light & Magic, whether they realize it or not.

Dynamic, promotional footage of American athletes in snowy Italian landscapes and on the ground in Milan are in fact all shot in front of an ILM StageCraft virtual production volume. The achievement is part of a continuing story of ILM’s work to broaden the applicability of its virtual production toolset. These latest Olympic games are in fact the second to be showcased in such a way. ILM also partnered with NBC for the earlier 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, an undertaking that won multiple Emmy Awards.

Paris: The Brief

The story of ILM and NBC’s collaboration for the Olympics actually begins in 2021 with a distinctly American sport: football. “As people were hearing about our virtual production work on The Mandalorian, we talked with lots of different groups and did some work with them, including with NBC Sports for Sunday Night Football,” recalls ILM virtual production supervisor Ian Milham.

With the need to capture singer Carrie Underwood performing in multiple environments and in quick succession, ILM deployed a version of its StageCraft volume, which provided greater flexibility than a traditional blue screen. It proved a meaningful exercise in developing a different kind of story for a client with different needs than a feature filmmaker. “The following year, NBC was exploring ways to level up their work,” Milham explains, “and they reached out and asked if these tools could be put to further use.”

What NBC proposed for the Summer Olympics in Paris was far more ambitious than the Sunday Night Football production. Dozens of athletes – from swimmers to gymnasts to javelin throwers – would be captured in multiple Paris locales at twilight: a street, a riverside, a rooftop, a fashion show-eqsue runway at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, and a virtual trip down the Seine River during the event’s opening ceremonies. The resulting footage would be adapted into short form clips used for promotional spots before and during the Games.

“NBC’s goal was to get a lot of footage in different contexts of all these athletes looking amazing in a world that is aesthetically heightened,” says Milham. “Along with that, the DP/director [Scott Duncan] wanted to continuously run the camera in order to keep things improvisational with the athletes. You have to shoot all the time and capture lots of different things. It’s not like a feature where you’re going to board and previs everything in advance. That was our biggest challenge to deliver on. The director wanted no rules in terms of flexibility with shooting and NBC wanted a large amount of usable footage.”

A Different Kind of Volume

The Summer Olympics production was the debut of a new variation of ILM StageCraft. “We had invented this really cool thing that people wanted to use, but Star Wars was always using it,” says Milham. “So we needed to make another version that wasn’t limited to one place. It would be a huge advantage to bring StageCraft to the client. So we created a mobile system, which was deployed for the first time with the Paris Olympics.”

The volume itself can be adapted to any size, its “tiles” – LED panels – adjusted to the needed shape of a given set. Created by ILM’s virtual production team based in San Francisco, the entire infrastructure is built to move, “like a set-up for a rock concert,” as Milham puts it. For the Paris Olympics, a roughly 180-degree curved wall was constructed to a height of approximately 25 feet. This specific production involved the extensive use of foreground set pieces that needed to blend seamlessly with the virtual background, as did the elaborate practical lighting set-ups.

“StageCraft isn’t just one thing,” Milham adds. “It’s a lot of different tools and techniques. Sometimes we use a little of it or a lot of it, whatever is needed.”

Putting the City of Lights on the Screen

Starting some nine months ahead of the actual shoot in November of 2023 was virtual art department (VAD) supervisor Shannon Thomas and a team of artists responsible for creating the settings visible on the volume’s tiles. A four-year ILM veteran with 20 years across the industry, Thomas brings experience from a number of different effects houses, including Rhythm & Hues and Weta FX.

He “came here for Star Wars,” as he puts it, reflecting on recent projects he contributed to like Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (2024-25) and The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026). “I came here to work on the volume and be involved in real-time virtual production, future-tech projects, and to get back into film work.” But Thomas admits with a smile that he is also a big Olympics fan and was happily surprised to join the team for Paris, it being his favorite city to boot.

NBC’s brief for the City of Lights was different from a usual feature film in that realistic accuracy was not essential. The ILM artists would not be required to match the layout or appearance of a specific location in Paris, but rather capture “the idea of Paris,” as Thomas notes. “That goes all the way down to what kind of chair we need to have in front of a café. If it feels like Paris, then we have it. It allowed us to work faster as well.”

“We’re not going with photo-realism,” Milham adds. “It’s in a style that’s more like a glamorous photo shoot, a larger than life situation.”

The team spent considerable time determining the best digital skies, ultimately landing on the right blend of pinks and blues during magic hour for each set. For the street setting, former senior VAD artist David Flamburis took ownership and, rather than evoke a specific neighborhood, they created a fictitious location full of Parisian charm, and with fantastical views of the Eiffel Tower. The iconic structure itself was also a subject of considerable study, in particular how best to light it. Existing Eiffel Tower assets from earlier ILM productions were useful for reference. Along the Seine River, ILM changed the water’s width and depth as their artistic needs demanded.

Initially developed with commercial real-time software, the environments were then ported to ILM’s proprietary Helios renderer for volume projection. New advancements allowed for enhanced rippling, refraction, and reflection in the river water, which was sometimes augmented on the live action set by practical techniques, including a small tub of water with shards of glass. It was all in service of what the team dubbed “hyper-realism.”

According to Thomas, the opening ceremony load was probably the most challenging to create. “Everyone knew this would involve various boats per each country’s team going down the Seine, which was a very cool idea. The big challenge was the crowds, which is always a tricky thing in real time. We had to figure out the logistics of how many boats, how many people, and those types of things. We had tight resources throughout the project so we had to work very closely together to determine how things needed to be depicted.

“Senior VAD artist Nate Propp came up with a very clever solution for this process here that allowed us to color coordinate the crowds, per country color in sections, as if they were fans per country peppered around the set,” Thomas continues. “The digital crowd also had controls for how much they would cheer, including waving flags, holding signs, etc. For the distance we’d see them from camera and we knew the trick would work.”

ILM created a roughly half-mile stretch of river that was necessarily fictitious in layout. To determine the best speed, Thomas actually contacted a Parisian Bateaux Mouches boat tour company to gather research. “I told them that my parents were planning this trip to Paris, and they wanted to go for a ride on the Seine, but they get really seasick,” he notes with a laugh. “How fast do they go? Is there a lot of motion? And the company wrote me back! About nine to 12 knots was the average speed. Then we could design the movement of the boats that way and it worked really well, as it’s always best to work from reality and adjust from there.”

How to Shoot with Lots of People in Many Places Very Quickly

Compared to a typical day on the StageCraft volume set of The Mandalorian, ILM’s crew for the Summer Olympics had to capture roughly four times the amount of live footage. During a massive production that involved dozens of athletes moving between six different locations on the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood, ILM’s volume stage welcomed 58 individuals over a six-day shoot. Some athletes were only on hand for a matter of minutes, requiring an unprecedented level of flexibility to make quick changes. The ILM crew executed over 120 scene changes on the volume’s wall without any waiting time required.

“The on-set grips were the real heroes with all of those changes,” Milham notes. “They had to move physical sets in and out 120 times. The practical art department worked with us throughout that process.”

The key to ILM’s flexibility was dividing its rendering power into subgroups. Whereas a cinematic-scale production like Star Wars would utilize all of its rendering capacity into one volume load that would be utilized for hours at a time, the rapid pace of the Olympics shoot led the crew to devise a new solution. Three separate renderers, each with its ability to power the entire LED wall, were loaded with distinct settings. When the client requested a scene change, all the ILM team had to do was switch the feed over instantaneously.

“Scott Duncan is an amazing and inspiring person to work, with who films shows like Survivor,” Thomas says about the production’s combined director and cinematographer. “He’d make changes live on the set, and would just pick up the camera and want to shoot something. The stage team would have to keep up. It was a quick, iterative process, very freestyle, like indie filmmaking, which I love. They’d shoot and just keep the camera rolling. Where in a feature film you’re focusing on getting a whole take or a specific scene, in this case they’re looking for just a few seconds of something amazing that they can use to then stitch into their longer marketing narrative.”

Real Time Revisions

Not only could ILM make rapid changes between entire set-ups, but they could even make live alterations with the CG background itself. When the lighting team incorporated the tub of water with shards of glass in the Seine River locale, the stylized, caustic light initially felt jarring, more like a swimming pool. So to help balance the effect, the ILM artists plussed the scene with additional lighting along the riverside.

“We added some bright white lights along the river in the background, just like the lights along the side of a pool,” says Milham. “It helped to fit the swimmer in the scene because you could imagine that one of those lights was right next to her. Do we really care that the Seine doesn’t have those lights? Not in this situation. We’re just trying to make it look awesome. That’s the artifice of it. It’s okay if it looks like a dream.”

Incorporating these details within the Helios environment would have taken a matter of minutes, and all while the scene was still loaded on the volume wall. “The moment is over if it takes hours, so we have to do it right there,” Milham adds. “I’ll be there on the radio calling in the changes and adjustments as the shoot is taking place.”

A Special Guest Introduction

“I had gone up to the stage during the shoot, and everyone seemed really happy with how things were going,” remembers Thomas. “Then our producer, Shivani Jhaveri, just mentioned, ‘Oh, Steven was here yesterday and he loved it.’ I said, ‘Steven?’ and she’s like, ‘Spielberg!’ What?! Laughing, ‘How?’ It was an unexpected surprise to hear he was pleased with the work, what a blessing to have him involved.”

Not long before the shoot was set to begin. NBC arranged for director Steven Spielberg to film a special introduction for the Olympics on ILM’s volume set. The special moment required yet another new way of presenting a scene on the LED wall. Spielberg would walk on from the side, with the blank wall and its surroundings visible behind him, and then as he came to center stage, the Parisian riverside location would load.

“We had just shot The Fabelmans with him, and he understood the process, so I think he trusted that it would work well,” says Milham. “And because this clip involves Steven Spielberg, the ‘filmmaking’ of it all can be part of the story. So Steven began walking outside the volume, as if he were on a movie set, because he was, of course, and then we turned the environment on. It was a relatively unique use of the technology.”

Milham describes the required process as “relatively easy,” an extension of their existing multiload capacity. They simply closed the video feed for the riverside scene to make the wall appear blank, and then turned it on again at the right moment.

Spielberg himself likened the grand show that is the Olympic Games to a great story, something that felt close to home for the ILM team, as Shivani Jhaveri notes. “The theme that Spielberg talks about in his opening is so relevant to StageCraft,” she explains. “There’s a connection in that StageCraft is all about telling a story. It was all about telling the athlete’s stories, where they’ve come from, where they are now, and it was really special to see all that.”

“If something new is needed, we’ll invent it.”

The success of ILM’s work on the Paris Olympics project was thanks to a relatively small team, especially compared to a feature film or episodic series. Along with Milham, Thomas, and Jhaveri, some of the other leading crew members included lead virtual production technical director Rey Reynolds, CG supervisor Sam Wirch, capture supervisor Ted O’Brien, and lead operator Kelly Fan.

“One of the reasons that ILM has been around for 50 years is that we’re not married to the way things are,” says Milham. “If something new is needed, we’ll invent it. If something we’ve been doing forever needs to change, we’ll change it. We will adapt. Even in the short amount of time that this method of shooting has existed, we’ve completely transformed it. One of my favorite things has been working with all sorts of different filmmakers, storytellers, and clients who tell us, ‘That’s great, but it needs to do this…’ or ‘Have you ever thought about trying this?’ And we try it. That happens on every show.”

ILM’s Olympics story continues with the 2026 Winter Games in Milan, Italy. Watch ILM.com for a behind-the-scenes look at this production, which included brand-new innovations.

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Lucas O. Seastrom is the editor of ILM.com and Skysound.com, as well as a contributing writer and historian for Lucasfilm.

ILM.com is showcasing artwork specially chosen by members of the ILM Art Department. In this installment of a continuing series, three artists from the San Francisco studio share insights about their work on the 2025 mixed reality playset from ILM and Lucasfilm, Star Wars: Beyond Victory.

Art Director Stephen Zavala

Beyond Victory required a hub where our characters would live and roam. That’s how the garage was born as an idea. It served as an HQ where the player could come back after starting and finishing every quest. Like all concept work, one needs to find their footing, and this is done by providing several ideas for a particular story beat or design need. Challenges arise once we see the space in VR, since spaces have a tendency to look smaller or larger than we originally imagined. Once we see the space on a virtual space it’s all about adjusting the space to a scale we’re comfortable with.

The director, Jose Perez III, really wanted a place in the middle of nowhere. I tried to capture that, but it was also important to make sure it didn’t look abandoned. It’s isolated, but lots of activity happens inside the garage as well as the surrounding areas. I always liked the idea that it was a hub where all kinds of visitors would come and go, either to fuel up or repair their speeders, and bringing with them all kinds of cool stories.

I wanted to design a place with a sense that it’s been lived in for quite some time. It wasn’t meant to be in disrepair, but instead have that sense of daily life and how it can be messier than we’d like to admit when it comes to managing our spaces. It certainly was satisfying how the garage slowly grew into that exact idea.

All art pieces come with challenges. When in doubt you reference, step back or subject your designs to peer review. A brief pause often provides time for introspection on how to adjust the course.

Senior Concept Artist Casey Straka

Volo is our main/player character, and there were a few different physical traits they had to have, storywise; mainly, they had to be on the smaller side for podracing prowess, and have four arms for some specific game mechanics they wanted to incorporate. Besides that, it was a very open brief. 

We considered multiple different species for Volo at first, lots of mulling over, lots of options that didn’t feel quite right. I proposed a Nikto, since they are such a varied species in the galaxy and have different subspecies and evolutionary traits depending on where they’re from. Maybe one subspecies evolved an extra pair of arms, which was a trait we needed. We landed there, but I don’t think we stayed there in the end, so I think Volo is something new altogether. I mostly took inspiration from previous Star Wars heroes! I wanted Volo to be very appealing, like you’d want to be their friend after you spend enough time following their story. I did a lot of additional drawings of Volo to find their mannerisms and expressions, the little things that make them, them. 

Volo’s outfit was fun to do, I love a good Star Wars jacket. They also have flexible spines on their head, and how those move according to emotions ended up being inspired by cats; they flatten to their head when scared, flare out when angry, droop a little when sad. 

In a very technical sense, a goal I set for myself was to hit a new benchmark in terms of skill; I learned a lot about my own process on this project. But one goal I always set for myself is to make a character people can get attached to. That’s always the most important part to me. I think all designs have their struggle points, some more than others. If something isn’t budging I try to take a walk. Concept art is a lot of problem solving, and getting distance from it to work something out can help.

Senior Concept Artist Evan Whitefield

The design draws inspiration from components of several different TIE fighters. Both engines are based on the TIE Bomber’s twin ion engine thrusters (ordnance pods), with TIE Interceptor wings mounted on each engine to give the vehicle a more aggressive silhouette. 

The cockpit functions as the control pod and was cut down and reworked to feel more dangerous, almost chariot-like in form. Additional elements, including the energy binder plates, rear thrusters, steel control cables, and air intakes, were carefully integrated to create a seamless fusion of podracer and TIE fighter design language.

This vehicle wasn’t originally planned. It emerged naturally as a concept I thought would be fun to play in-game. Early on, I imagined the original owner as a former Imperial who went rogue and turned to podracing, scavenging parts from Imperial fighters to construct what became known as the TIE Bolt. As the concept evolved, the final story became that the TIE Bolt was a custom podracer created as a gift for Imperial Admiral Rellen by Grakkus Jahibaki Tingi.

Star Wars: Beyond Victory – A Mixed Reality Playset is currently on sale on Meta Quest 3 and 3S headsets.

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See the complete gallery of concept art and a design case study from Star Wars: Beyond Victory here on ILM.com.

Read more about Star Wars: Beyond Victory:

‘Star Wars: Beyond Victory’ Now Available and Director Jose Perez III Takes Us Behind the Scenes

Bobby Moynihan Takes Us Behind the Scenes of ‘Star Wars: Beyond Victory’

ILM’s innovative approach leads the way for more than 1,700 visual effects shots, helping bring Wright’s dystopian action thriller to life.

By Clayton Sandell

When director Edgar Wright was gearing up to make The Running Man (2025) and considered the extensive visual effects the story would require, he turned to a fellow filmmaker for advice.

“I’m friends with Gareth Edwards, and I was really taken with the work on The Creator,” Wright says in an interview with ILM.com. “Especially the idea of shooting on location and then designing the environments after the fact. I was really impressed by how the visual effects work was put into more naturalistic, grounded camerawork. I wanted to pick his brain about how exactly it was done.”

In The Running Man, a science-fiction thriller set in a near-future dystopian America, blue-collar worker Ben Richards (Glen Powell) desperately needs money to buy medicine for his baby daughter. He signs up with a TV network, hoping to compete on one of their game shows. He is picked for the most dangerous one: where contestants try to evade capture for 30 days in exchange for $1 billion.

After chatting with Edwards, Wright decided The Running Man should utilize the same unconventional approach that ILM brought to The Creator, winner of multiple awards for best visual effects, including from the Visual Effects Society.

Shooting on The Running Man began in early November 2024. With a release date rapidly approaching just a year later, the pressure to meet deadlines was on every department, including visual effects. Wright says he was happy the project reunited him with Academy Award-winning production visual effects supervisor Andrew Whitehurst. The two worked together on Wright’s 2010 film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. “I remembered very fondly working with Andrew, so that was just an amazing, fortuitous bit of kismet,” Wright says.

The filmmaker credits Whitehurst and visual effects producer Sona Pak for preproduction planning, which kept everything on track. “Andrew and Sona were very clear on how to make this work, and how it would even be possible to turn around something this quickly with so many visual effects shots,” Wright recalls. “They had a very clear idea of what we were trying to achieve before we started shooting. What was really good was making decisions early on and sticking to them. I think where things can go awry – especially on a compressed schedule – is if you’re still working out what you want to do after you’ve finished filming.

“I’m frankly really amazed that we managed to do everything we did in time,” Wright adds.

Ben Richards’ 30-day fight to survive begins in Co-Op City, with the journey taking him to New York and Boston. Exterior scenes were shot mostly in real locations in London, England and Glasgow, Scotland, as well as on practical and backlot locations in Sofia, Bulgaria.

“Most of the initial meetings and discussions were centered around the places we were thinking of shooting, and the things we were thinking of building,” Whitehurst explains. “When that started to solidify, it became much clearer who was actually going to do what, and what was physically buildable, and what wasn’t.”

Fans of Andor (2022-25) may notice that the Canary Wharf section of London makes an appearance in The Running Man, disguised by a number of digital enhancements. “We did have nicely filmed places where the majority was real, which is always a great starting point,” says ILM visual effects supervisor Dave Zaretti. “Then you’re extending upwards into the distance. You can change the sky a little bit, but it was based on truth and reality, and nicely chosen locations. The team had a blast.”

Another shot set outside the fictional network headquarters begins at the real entrance steps leading to Wembley Stadium, but then transitions to a completely CG skyscraper as the camera tilts up. “It’s very funny to me to take one of London’s most famous landmarks and digitally erase it from the movie,” Wright laughs. “That’s an example where we’re starting with a real shot of Glen Powell and all the extras walking up the steps, and then the camera just keeps going and going. That was really the methodology throughout. It was about keeping it grounded, because the perspective of the story is that you’re very much seeing it from Ben Richards’s viewpoint.”

Visual effects contributed significant digital building extensions, crowds, street signs, lampposts, traffic lights, and even flying mailboxes. Cars from the 1980s era were digitally augmented with designs that more closely fit the story’s futuristic aesthetic. “James Mohan and Ashley Pay deserve huge credit for taking on the lion’s share of world-building, from city extensions to augmented traffic lights, road markings, and uptown car augmentation,” Zaretti says.

For a rooftop sequence where Richards tries to escape from a Boston hotel, full CG city recreations were combined with live-action footage shot on a partial set against a green screen. Another scene that appears to be a single take is actually three, completed with digital seams. In Boston, Richards runs out of an apartment and down a hallway – dodging gunfire and heroically sliding into an elevator – before reappearing to smash the lens of a pursuing rover camera.

“That was three separate takes that we had to marry together,” says Whitehurst, revealing that Powell appears in the first and last parts of the shot, while a stunt performer completed the floor slide in the middle. “That stuff is pure invisible effects. You need to get them all into position and use CG where you need to. We had a CG digi-double take over between the different poses that weren’t quite matching across the takes. It was a fun shot.

Digital doubles and extensive face replacements were used during chases and a pivotal moment where Richards narrowly escapes an explosive head-on collision, plunging from a bridge into the river below. The film’s finale features a completely CG V-Wing airplane, digital explosions, and spherical roving cameras capturing the action.

“Most of the time they’re hanging around like vultures,” Wright says, “and in some sequences there are three of them buzzing around. And in those cases, we had to constantly work out the choreography of where they were.”

The roving cameras provide live coverage for the audience watching the show on TV. But they also presented a visual effects challenge whenever a rover-eye view was simultaneously displayed on an in-world monitor. To maintain continuity, artists had to make sure that the angle seen in the rover’s video feed properly matched its constantly changing position.

“Steve Hardy deserves a medal,” notes Dave Zaretti, “for not only looking after the big exterior shots of the V-Wing, but also the hundreds of shots inside of it – keeping track of which rover cams should be seen where, not only in the main plates but also in the TV inserts.”

All of it adds up to a film jam-packed with tons of action and more than 1,700 visual effects shots.

“The effects work is huge, and subtle at the same time,” says Wright. “There’s a shot where Glen is in a New York hotel and gets into an elevator, and in the background is Times Square. But because the focus is on Glen the entire time, this amazing futuristic Times Square vista, with all of the screens, is completely out of focus. It’s a show where I feel there’s an enormous amount of work in the background, but out of focus. I think it’s really cool.”

A short sequence depicting Richards saving the life of a fellow oil-rig worker is only four shots, but is described by network executive Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) as “the most thrilling 10 seconds of video I’ve seen all year.” “We were very much beholden to deliver the most exciting 10 seconds of footage,” Whitehurst quips. “No half measures.”

The oil rig, crashing waves, lightning, and rain were fully digital elements. The actors were shot against a green screen. “We had two very dry actors dangling from a string,” adds Zaretti. “So we had to try and integrate them into the scene. But I think those shots worked really well.”

Work on The Running Man was hubbed out of ILM’s London studio, with further contributions from ILM artists based in Mumbai. Rodeo FX and Untold Studios completed additional shots. The key to a great end result, Wright believes, is all departments working together in sync.

“There’s incredible work by Andrew and ILM in the movie,” Wright says. “But it’s always in conjunction with something else – whether it’s the camera, an amazing location, what production design has done, what physical effects are doing. And the thing I’m really proud of in the movie is that all of this is people working together out of mutual respect.

“There are very few entirely green screen shots,” continues Wright. “And I think what people misunderstand about great visual effects is, they say, ‘It’s all CG.’ But of course, the best work is where it’s actually a collaboration.”

Whitehurst and Zaretti believe Wright’s style and approach to directing help bring the best ideas to life. “There was creative wiggle room,” Zaretti says. “And that’s nice, because you don’t always have that creative breathing space. So enjoy it and let the artists shine.”

“Absolutely,” concurs Whitehurst. “Edgar is definitely somebody who is very open to being shown something he was not expecting. It’s great seeing his enthusiasm when we show him stuff for the first time, and seeing him relax and go, ‘Oh, it’s going to be okay.’”

Wright says he’s most impressed by the world-building in the film, full of details that may only appear for a few seconds but make a lasting impression on the audience. “I wonder whether we set a dangerous precedent for ourselves by actually delivering in under a year,” the director laughs. “I’m really, really proud of the work, and I think some of the shots are just exceptionally beautiful and rich and detailed. What I also like about it is, it doesn’t feel like a lot of the effects are grandstanding.”

At the end of the day, Whitehurst says he is continually impressed by the ILM team’s innovative spirit that brought The Running Man over the finish line.

“ILM is a very refreshing place to work because there is so much experience, but it’s always in the service of making beautiful pictures that help tell the story,” he says. “I’m agnostic about what technology we use. I just want to use the right pencil for the job. But ILM has all of the pencils, and more importantly, the people who know how to use all of those pencils.”

Pre-order The Running Man Limited Edition Steelbook now.

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Clayton Sandell is a Star Wars author and enthusiast, Celebration stage host, and a longtime fan of the creative people who keep Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound on the leading edge of visual effects and sound design. Follow him on Instagram (@claytonsandell), Bluesky (@claytonsandell.com), or X (@Clayton_Sandell).

One of the biggest days in American sports is equally renowned for its iconic commercial spots.

The artists from Industrial Light & Magic have contributed visual effects to two original commercials as part of the broadcast of Super Bowl LX, the celebrated championship game of America’s National Football League.

Lucasfilm’s newest feature film from the Star Wars galaxy, The Mandalorian and Grogu, is set to premiere on May 22, 2026, and the original spot directed by Jon Favreau, “A New Journey Begins,” provided audiences with a touching moment between the production’s namesakes. ILM’s contributions include bringing the icy world of Hoth, along with a group of tauntaun creatures, to the screen alongside the beloved characters.

For another spot, ILM returned to one of its most iconic visual effects achievements with Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). For the new commercial directed by Taika Waititi in partnership with Xfinity, ILM created a Tyrannosaurus rex, Dilophosaurus, and a herd of Gallimimus, all inspired by the company’s work on the classic film.

Watch “A New Journey Begins”:

Watch “Jurassic Park…Works”:

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Read more about the latest artistry and innovation from Industrial Light & Magic here on ILM.com.

The visual effects supervisor discusses ILM’s contributions to director Ryan Coogler’s supernatural sensation, which is nominated for “Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature” at the VES Awards.

By Jay Stobie

Helmed by writer/director Ryan Coogler, Warner Bros.’ Sinners (2025) defies the boundaries of traditional genres, telling the story of Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan) as they return home to establish their own juke joint. Forced to deal with the cruel inequalities of 1930s Mississippi and a ravenous vampire named Remmick (Jack O’Connell), the twin brothers’ exploits are paired with an exhilarating blues soundtrack and live performances. ILM visual effects supervisor Nick Marshall (The Last of Us [2023], Dune: Part Two [2024]) joined ILM.com to outline Industrial Light & Magic’s visual effects contributions to the film, which included a near-fatal encounter with a symbolic rattlesnake and a train’s entrance into a bustling station.

A Bewildering Briefing

“As the ILM visual effects supervisor on the film, I looked after a small body of work, by ILM’s standards, as we handled just under 100 shots covering two different sequences,” Marshall explains to ILM.com. ILM’s work on Sinners took place at ILM’s Vancouver studio, and Marshall recounts how the first story overview he received left him slightly perplexed.

“Early on, people were quite tight-lipped over what this movie was. We had an excellent collaboration with the filmmakers in terms of the technical understanding of the visual effects we were going to do, but the bigger picture was kept close to the chest. Sinners was outlined to us as a period movie with a gangster element to it, and racial segregation was also an important plot point. At the same time, it’s got a big supernatural element, and Michael B. Jordan is playing twins. And, as all of this is going on, the heart of the movie is about blues music.

“When we got this initial brief, we thought it was a bit bizarre but sounded very interesting,” Marshall continues. “There were so many elements to the story that it got to the point where I asked the client if it was going to be a comedy [laughs]. They said, ‘No, it’s actually a serious horror movie.’ As we progressed with our work, the plot unfolded, and we understood a lot more. Even though we didn’t necessarily know exactly what the movie was about until a long way into production, there was such a passion from everyone going into it. We could tell we were working on a pretty special project with a clear vision behind it.”

Rumble with a Rattlesnake

The first ILM sequence to appear in the film centered upon the twins discovering a rattlesnake concealed in their truck bed, leading Smoke to stab the snake with a knife and toss its bleeding body onto the ground. “Ryan described this moment as foreshadowing, as it echoes the moment when Smoke has a standoff with Cornbread [Omar Benson Miller] outside of the juke joint later in the movie. The snake scene is the first time you get a sense that there’s something off and maybe even supernatural about this world that they’re in, so we went deep into trying to give that meaning. The idea of familiars foreshadowing bad events repeats often in Sinners – there are ravens, crows, and vultures which appear throughout the film and establish that there’s a tension building.”

In terms of the snake itself, the ILM team had plenty of information to base their visual effects on, as Marshall notes, “Ryan Coogler is an avid snake collector and knows a lot about them, so we were going to have to do justice to the real thing. Ryan told us how snakes that are shedding their skin get more aggressive – they’re in a heightened state because they’re weakened by it – and that they get a layer of skin that creates a cloudy-eyed look, which ties in nicely to the tapetum lucidum effect that the vampires’ eyes have in Sinners. Production shot a real timber rattlesnake in the back of the truckbed for us as reference, and the one place where we deliberately made a creative change which differed from the real snake, was to give the eyes that shedding-skin appearance. [Animation lead] Agata Matuszak sat down for weeks looking through internet references to find every perfect snake attack shot that she could locate – snakes striking into the camera, at a mouse, or toward balloons and seeing how quickly they move. She became a brilliant source on snake locomotion.”

The scope of ILM’s contributions to the snake sequence changed over time as the edit continued to evolve, with Marshall declaring, “The reference served us well as far as providing a snake to visually match to, but we were originally only supposed to do a single shot of the snake. They were going to capture the snake being uncovered, waking up, and all of that practically, and we would take over when the snake had to be stabbed. However, they couldn’t get a performance out of the real snake on the day of – it was happily toodling around in the truck bed – so we took over and delivered around 10 shots of the snake. Not all of those shots made it into the movie, because they were still experimenting with ideas for what actions they wanted from the snake.”

The ‘Pool Noodle’ Process

ILM’s approach to the snake sequence needed to factor in the reality that Smoke would be interacting directly with the knife and the animal itself. Marshall relays, “For lighting purposes, we had to make sure that the knife was blocked accurately when Smoke brought it down over the top of the snake’s head. We did a basic digital double version of Smoke and reprojected some of the plate back onto that so – if you ever saw anything in a reflection – it had the correct texture of his hands and suit. We kept the knife as practical as we could but eventually took it over because the knife very visibly enters the snake’s head. We reconstructed the knife prop and used that for the reflections of our CG assets and blood interaction.”

Turning to the blood that pours from the rattlesnake, Marshall says, “Our effects team did amazing blood simulations for the blood spatter, and when you see all of the interaction with the knife. When the knife pins the snake’s head, you get blood leaking out from underneath and spreading across the truck bed, as well. Our effects team totally nailed it. The lone aspect we came in to touch up was the blood pumping out of its neck wound when it’s tossed into the long grass. You get a few shots of it writhing around as it’s dying. That ended up being a combination – the effects simulations for the blood spatter as it hits the ground, and we also did a practical blood element shoot at the last minute to sell the sense of the viscous blood pooling on the surface and trickling down the sides.”

This impromptu ILM shoot involved an unexpected tool, as Marshall shares, “We shot it in my backgarden, where it was a construction using a pool noodle that had been hacked apart to represent the snake. We rigged up blood packs to pump blood out of an artificial wound that we had cut into the pool noodle. Our comp team, under the supervision of Okan Ataman, made the best of it and pulled it together using the most successful elements from our effects simulation and our practical shoot. That combination got us over the line, and the client was extremely happy with it.”

Locomotive Magic

The second sequence ILM presided over focused on a train arriving at a Mississippi station. “We did a lot of photorealistic reconstructions of the Clarksdale train station,” Marshall begins. “When we started discussing it, production was going to have a real locomotive come into the station. We were just going to do environment extensions. As it turned out, they struggled to make it work with the timing and location, so we took over the train component too. That became a big deal for us, because we had assumed the practical train would block a lot of our environment throughout the sequence.

“The train wound up being full CG itself, and we were shooting directly into the green screen – which is daunting with visual effects because it can telegraph itself,” Marshall divulges. “Fortunately, production assisted us by building the green screen to the exact height of the train so we’d get correct shadows. Since the train was green as well – which is true to the period – a small amount of green spill contaminating the environment wasn’t necessarily the worst thing. Normally, that would be bad for us, but here it served as a fantastic reference for where the top of the train should sit. It gave us the correct shadow and lighting for what came over the top of the train once we put the train in to replace the green screen. This allowed us to have wonderful light interaction with the characters.”

Real-world references are essential to visual effects work, particularly when dealing with such a distinct time period. “We had tremendous art department concepts that production designer Hannah Beachler put together in collaboration with our production visual effects supervisor, Michael Ralla. Those served as the basis for the broader design of the streets, the kind of signage we would get, and other specifics like that. We supplemented them with our own research for period details about the streetlighting and electronics you’d expect around the trains. At that point, they were going through the transition from steam locomotives to electricity. [Environment supervisor] Anton Borisov pored over old photographs to see what Clarksdale really looked like in the 1930s. We went into an extensive research period to figure out the mechanisms that were active on the rail at that point and how the carriages looked, right down to the numbers you see on the side,” Marshall reveals.

The film’s setting had an impact on ILM’s responsibilities, as Marshall elaborates, “In collaboration with the client, we ensured there was a sense of racial segregation to the environment, so you could see a clear delineation between the side of the tracks reserved for whites and the side that was designated for Black people. It was a key plot point for the movie, and we wanted to do justice to it. Beyond that, our goal was to make everything look as photoreal as possible. The client wanted our work to blend seamlessly so no one would notice that they occasionally relied heavily on visual effects. In certain cases, the visual effects took over the majority of the frame, but it always had to disappear and be completely invisible.”

Buildings, Automobiles, and Bystanders

Although production built a full-scale physical train station to be used on the set, ILM nevertheless offered support in post-production. “We did a bit of repair work on the train station itself, which they did shoot practically. Production put significant time and effort into the building with the understanding we’d handle the majority of the environment extensions. There were a few places where tiles were missing and shingles fell off, and we did the train tracks that the train rolls in on,” Marshall adds.

Research and reference entered play once again when it came time to outfit the environment with traffic and pedestrians. “As far as the cars you see, we sought to add life to the background,” Marshall remarks. “We didn’t want the set extension to feel static, so we researched Ford automobiles from around that time. Cars were fairly limited in their color palette in that era, as you’d tend to mostly have black paint, so we didn’t have to do too much variance in colors for the automobiles.

“Our CG supervisor, Anthony Zwartouw, gathered reference photography and basic assets, then we pieced together the design of the vehicles,” Marshall continues. “Then, we went about building them, and our animation team did a phenomenal job of making the cars seem as if they were trundling over uneven ground. Our compositing team led by Michael Ranalletta, was outstanding too – they went in and fleshed out the background with 2D sprites of people. Production shot a ton of 2D elements of people milling around, holding luggage, talking, and walking about. We used those to populate the backgrounds and achieve the busy, lived-in environment that they wanted.”

“Invisible” Involvement

Marshall indicates that Sinners was shot on large format film, and the shots which ILM worked on were shot on System 65, “a super-wide format that’s been used on movies like The Hateful Eight [2015]. Since film is shot infrequently these days, we had to rebuild and relearn certain parts of the pipeline to be able to cope with that. What might’ve been simple requests in a digital workflow, such as additional takes of a particular shot or extending a frame range, became quite complex and expensive. They had to order those frames to be re-scanned, and there aren’t many people who do it anymore. Certain points were tricky, as it can be difficult to naturally ingest physical film into our digital pipelines. [Color scientist] Matthias Scharfenberg did remarkable work to give us a color process that allowed us to progress with the movie.”

“Along with that, there’s a physical quality to the way Sinners was shot that we needed to emulate too. [Director of photography] Autumn Durald Arkapaw shoots on deliberately de-tuned lenses, and she’ll send them off to have little abnormalities and subtle effects appear in the lenses because she wanted them to have character. Where a lens might customarily be uniform across its surface, hers had slight shape changes. Our compositing team with [comp supervisor] Okan Ataman and [comp lead] Michael Ranalletta did some significant lens profiling work, because things would warp in strange ways and go in and out of focus in places you wouldn’t expect.”

“[Digital artist] Florian Sanchez literally sat for over a month just profiling our lenses to see if we could set the tooling internally, which took a perfect CG render and added those subtle changes. When we’d get our perfect CG renders to come out, we then applied all these effects that were – in many cases – degrading the actual image. However, that made it feel exactly like it was this real film format that could’ve been used to shoot this movie 40 years ago. We’d add tons of grain and noise over the top, plus small dust hits here and there. We wanted our work to not look digital in what was otherwise a sort of analog movie, so we had to reapply those details to our CG.”

Other less-obvious contributions which ILM made to their assigned sequences tied in to the director of photography’s preferred approach to lighting shots, as Marshall conveys, “Autumn shoots with a lot of negative fill – she’ll put up huge black flags and canopies just out of camera to block light and create shaping on the characters’ faces. It’s a more natural way of working, but it meant that the 360-degree high-dynamic range images we’d usually use to light our scenes had massive black canopies in them. When they filmed at the station, they didn’t have a representation of the train when they shot it for real, so when we put the train in, we started getting reflections of those canopies. [CG supervisor] Anthony Zwartouw made sure the lighting across the sequence was solid. Anthony helped us come up with a good system for lighting these shots in a way that let us do a big pass at taking that stuff out digitally and projecting the results onto a low resolution LiDAR scan of the location, so we had a clean digital set which we could use to light our assets.”

Motion Picture Partners

Marshall’s effusive praise for his ILM team extends to the client-side filmmakers, as the visual effects supervisor beams, “My direct contacts on Sinners were Michael Ralla and visual effects producer James Alexander. Not far into our work, I understood that they had a super collaborative team who valued our input. Michael made regular efforts to stop us from referring to ourselves as a vendor. Michael said, ‘You aren’t a vendor, you’re a partner in this process, so let’s scrap that word from the playbook right now.’ To their credit, they walked the walk. When they were out on set, they’d call us to consult on critical decisions. ‘We’ve hit this problem, so do you want us to put a green screen here or there?’ They wouldn’t be able to do both because of budget or time constraints, but they’d involve us in those conversations.”

These discussions benefited ILM’s workflow immensely, as Marshall asserts, “We weren’t waiting to receive plates and unaware of what we’d be getting to work with. We were incorporated into the decision-making and could plan what we had to do.” Marshall attributes the collaborative spirit that permeated the production’s departments to the director, observing, “Ryan’s a collaborative filmmaker, and he’s always present – he’s engaged and drives the film. There was so much respect between the departments, and we each tried to resolve issues you may not even think about.”

Marshall credits the members of his ILM production team for keeping them on schedule and adapting to editorial needs. “Ryan was making adjustments to the timing of the cut as it’s the first time Smoke and Stack separate from each other in the movie, so we built our process to be flexible and allow Ryan the freedom in the edit room.. Our producer Alan Cummins, [project manager] Kaisha Williams, and the production team worked tirelessly to guarantee that we were left with enough time to fit in everything that we needed to do, which enabled the filmmakers to continue making those last-minute changes.”

Valuing Visual Effects

Marshall emphasizes Ryan Coogler’s appreciation for visual effects, professing, “In recent years, you’ve seen a continued trend toward pretending there’s no visual effects involvement in films. Ryan bucks that trend. Ryan shot as much as he could for real on Sinners, but he’s a huge proponent for visual effects being a part of the process. For Ryan, visual effects are absolutely indispensable to the team. It’s nice when a director goes out of their way to give credit to the visual effects companies as another department that brings their vision to life. We never felt as if our contributions were being downplayed.”

Speaking to the role of visual effects in filmmaking as a whole, Marshall says, “All visual effects artists and supervisors want to do is deliver the best work and help people tell interesting stories. Keeping visual effects as part of the conversation is something to be championed, and Sinners definitely did it right. The more that those conversations happen out in the open, the better. When we wrapped our last shot, Ryan sent us a video to thank the team and recognize us for our work. Sinners was a special show to be on in that way.”

The thoughtfulness displayed by Coogler and the entire Sinners crew made the experience of working on the project an exceptional one for Marshall, who concludes by offering his perspective on the completed film, affirming, “Ultimately, there’s so much symbolism in Sinners that I hope people can keep digging back into it and watch the movie again and again. There are so many intriguing parallels and nods to later scenes scattered throughout, and a great deal of history and culture that are crucial to the movie. So much thought went into every frame, and every shot has a purpose and a meaning. Because of that, and because ILM was brought into the loop to aid in making it that way, I hope Sinners will be one of those movies that stands the test of time. In 10 to 20 years, people can rewatch it and say, ‘I’ve never caught that moment even though I’ve already seen it five times. That’s a really nice detail!’”

Watch an ILM exclusive deleted scene from Sinners:

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Jay Stobie (he/him) is a writer, author, and consultant who has contributed articles to ILM.com, Skysound.com, Star Wars Insider, StarWars.com, Star Trek Explorer, Star Trek Magazine, and StarTrek.com. Jay loves sci-fi, fantasy, and film, and you can learn more about him by visiting JayStobie.com or finding him on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms at @StobiesGalaxy.

ILM artists share their insights about this distinct installation now on view at Somerset House in London.

By Jamie Benning

The first thing visitors encounter inside Wayne McGregor: Infinite Bodies at London’s Somerset House is darkness. A vast LED screen fills the room, its shifting light reflected across the faces of those watching. The space is quiet at first, then sound begins to breathe into the room. Two figures slowly emerge. Their bodies twist, merge, and reform, suspended in a deep digital expanse that feels both intimate and endless. It is OMNI, a collaboration between choreographer Wayne McGregor and Industrial Light & Magic, and it sets the emotional, thematic, and sensory tone for everything that follows.

As an entry point, OMNI does not explain itself in conventional terms. It does not offer narrative, character, or spectacle in a familiar cinematic sense. Instead, it presents presence. Motion without edges. Energy without beginning or end. Viewers gather instinctively. Some stand for seconds. Others for many minutes. The work opens and closes in cycles, dissolving into darkness before returning again, as if inhaling and exhaling. It is an installation that encourages stillness before it encourages movement.

Reuniting McGregor with the creative teams and technologists at ILM for the first time since their work together on ABBA Voyage in 2022, OMNI invites viewers into what McGregor calls “a choreographic exploration of the infinite potential of human connection.” Using ILM’s performance capture and simulation technologies, dancers Rebecca Bassett-Graham and Salvatore De Simone perform an unending duet of energies. Their movement is captured, transformed, and re-presented inside a boundless digital plane, a place where the distinction between human and virtual becomes beautifully uncertain.

You do not see the performers themselves, but ghost-like representations and shadows of their digital footprint. Luminous networks of the skeletal and nervous systems glow and decay in cycles of light. Around them, murmuration-like particles drift and swirl, sometimes responding to the dancers’ movements, and at other moments seeming to lead them, creating a shifting dialogue between motion and environment. Form appears, dissolves, reforms. It is at once biological and architectural, organic and synthetic.

The installation was created with ILM visual effects artists Matt Rank, Xavier Martin Ramirez, Edward Randolph, Arnaud Mavoka-Tama, Mike Long, Julien Ducoin, Oscar Dahlén, Alessandro Pieri, and Bimpe Alliu, with generous support from ROE Visual and Studio Wayne McGregor. Positioned deliberately as the first work visitors encounter, the piece anchors the exhibition and mirrors Somerset House’s broader mission to explore the intersection of art, technology, and society.

Conceptualizing Motion

Concept artist Bimpe Alliu was brought onto the project at a very early stage to help shape those initial visual directions. “I was going through the ideas with Matt [visual effects supervisor Matt Rank], and learning more about what the project was going to entail,” she said. “I was playing around with storyboarding a lot of potential movement ideas.”

Rather than beginning with dancers as recognizable figures, the creative team quickly gravitated toward abstraction. For Alliu, the use of murmurations became central to expressing motion without relying on literal anatomy. “It is a beautiful way of capturing movement while still existing as a solid form. There is all this motion and synergy happening at the same time,” she explained. “It also allows for a lot of natural push and pull, which is really exciting when you are thinking about animation.”

Her design process embraced freedom over prescription. “It is fun because it is nice to do something that is a little more abstract. It gets the brain thinking in different ways and allows you to deconstruct form and how to portray it,” she said. “You can tap into other references and use them in different ways. You might think, ‘I can approach this in a completely different way from how I usually would.’ You have a wider park to play within. There is no wrong idea. They are just ideas, and either they land, or they do not.”

Although OMNI was always destined for a monumental screen, Alliu said it was vital not to let format dictate imagination. “You start big, knowing it is going to be on a screen, but you do not let that stop you,” she said. “There was never a point where it felt like, because it is on the screen, you cannot do this or that. It was very much ‘blue sky’ thinking.”

Somerset House and the Culture of Collaboration

Introducing the exhibition, Somerset House director Jonathan Reekie described Infinite Bodies as a perfect embodiment of the institution’s ethos. “Wayne McGregor and Infinite Bodies, in so many ways, encapsulates what Somerset House is all about. Most visibly, Somerset House has been about reimagining the historic building for the future. We developed a cultural program that sits between different art forms, the intersection of culture, technology, and society at large. We are conscious that we are in an ever-changing creative landscape, and therefore, artists are changing and working in different ways all the time. We need to create a space for that.”

Reekie also pointed to the importance of community in shaping new ideas. Somerset House is home to a creative community of nearly 3,000 artists, makers, and entrepreneurs, and collaboration sits at the core of its identity. “We don’t believe great ideas always come from an individual working on their own in a room. They come from community, from groups of people coming together and making great things,” he said. “That’s the way Wayne works.”

For McGregor, this collaborative model has defined his career. His studio, based in East London’s Olympic Park, has long operated as a laboratory for experimentation with scientists, technologists, and other artists. Infinite Bodies brings together more than three decades of his interdisciplinary works and investigations into the subtleties of movement, both human and non-human. Each work within the exhibition operates as an experiment, a proposition about the body’s potential and how technology might allow us to perceive it differently.

Dr. Cliff Lauson, director of exhibitions at Somerset House and co-curator of Infinite Bodies, recalled that McGregor’s polymathic approach was one of the defining reasons he wanted to collaborate. “It was several years ago, and that impulse that I felt about Wayne’s work, and what might make for an interesting exhibition at Somerset House, now has been so gratifying to see after so many years,” he said. “Interesting ideas come out during conversation and collaboration. It doesn’t help anybody to be working in silos.”

Physical Intelligence

When Wayne McGregor took the microphone at the exhibition launch, he spoke with warmth and generosity about the complex process of translating live choreographic practice into a gallery environment. “I want to say thank you to Somerset House and to Cliff and Jonathan and to all my team at Studio Wayne McGregor because it’s been a huge challenge,” he said. “I’m used to making. I’ve made something like 200 pieces at this stage. That’s been a huge passion for my kind of choreographic practice. But I’ve always had a parallel practice, and that parallel practice has been in research and testing ideas around the notion of physical thinking.”

At the heart of Infinite Bodies is McGregor’s long-standing interest in what he describes as physical intelligence. The exhibition invites visitors to reconsider their own physical awareness and their relationship to technology. “Technology is not outside of ourselves,” McGregor said. “The body is the most technologically advanced thing we’re looking at. I’ve not seen any form of technology that surpasses the living body, its ability to create, to respond, to be spontaneous, to feel.”

This tension between embodiment and computation, between instinct and algorithm, runs through OMNI in particular. It reframes dance through light and motion while still preserving the physical presence and emotional weight of performance.

From Film to Immersive Space

For ILM, OMNI provided a rare opportunity to apply cinematic tools to an environment that does not behave like cinema. “I’ve spent my career digitising the real world, real people, real environments, and turning that into assets that we can use in CG,” said Matt Rank, ILM’s visual effects supervisor on the project. “My role has taken me full circle. Now we’re taking computer graphic content and displaying it back in the real world.”

Rank’s work sits at the intersection between traditional visual effects, virtual production, and emerging immersive media. “What we found from ABBA Voyage and with Infinite Bodies is that shared experience, people coming together is what matters,” he said. “That’s where we’re pushing our content and technology, a shared, meditative experience that people can have together.”

Working with McGregor offered a fundamentally different creative starting point. “We’re used to working with studios and directors who have very specific briefs on where they want the creative to be led. Working with Wayne was a blank canvas. We spent a lot of time understanding what this piece should be, and maybe more time understanding what it shouldn’t be,” Rank said. “He didn’t necessarily want to see the form or the shape of his performers, but how their movement reflected through the body. That became the first aesthetic for the piece. From his feedback, we then started work with our own art department, bringing these ideas and concepts to life to present back to Wayne in more unique visual forms that would set the tone of the final piece.”

Rank described OMNI as “… an abstract piece, but it is quality, it feels photographic. Even though there’s real-world elements about it, it kind of sits within your psyche. It doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable either.” He also pointed to natural phenomena as key influences. “There is a nod to how birds flock and dance in the sky, and how plankton can emit light when it is disturbed by movement, and these carried through into the final piece, represented by the murmurations seen across the two looks.”

ILM Beyond the Frame

Reflecting on ILM’s wider creative mission, Rank said, “We’re all storytellers. We love collaborating with directors, but doing that in new forms and new mediums is incredibly exciting. Our world is becoming ever more interconnected, and we’re keen to explore what we can do in those spaces. With a smaller team, you can be really agile and get to results faster.”

For Alliu, projects like OMNI underline the breadth of what ILM represents today. “It showcases to people that want to work with companies like ILM that there are so many different kinds of projects we create,” she said. “People do not just think of ILM as one kind of thing anymore. They start to see that there is a much broader range of work.”

Seeing the completed exhibition in sequence gave Alliu a new perspective on how OMNI functions within the wider narrative of Infinite Bodies. “Coming straight out of seeing the work that we did and then going into everything else, it suddenly felt like being grounded back in the physical space again,” she said. “It was really nice seeing all the different interpretations of movement and communication, the role digital plays in that, and the fact that it still very much needs the physical. It still very much needs the body, the person, and the movement.”

She also sees that visibility as vital to the industry’s future. “It gives people the understanding and the option to think, ‘This is something I could do,’ and they start to think about careers in this space,” she said. “We still need that human input. You still need that eye, that instinct, and that creativity behind it all.

“Art and science have always co-existed on many levels, and technology is also a part of that, especially as a lens by which we’re able to understand, explore and conceptualise both,” Alliu added. 

As Reekie observed, Somerset House’s role is to provide artists with the space to imagine new futures. “It’s up to the artists to tell us what the future might look like because they’re the best people to help us navigate it,” he said.

Infinite Bodies offers one such vision. A space where choreography, light, and digital craft meet. A reminder that innovation is not just about machines, but about the bodies, instincts, and creative impulses that continue to drive them. ILM continues to explore how those instincts and tools translate beyond film and into shared physical spaces.

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Jamie Benning is a filmmaker, author, and podcaster with a lifelong passion for sci-fi and fantasy cinema. He hosts The Filmumentaries Podcast, featuring twice-monthly interviews with behind-the-scenes artists. Visit Filmumentaries.com or find him on X (@jamieswb) and @filmumentaries on Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Frankenstein and The Lost Bus are recognized while ILM also contributes to two other nominated films.

The BAFTA Film Awards announced their 2026 nominees today, and artists from Industrial Light & Magic have earned two nominations in Outstanding Visual Effects for their work on Frankenstein and The Lost Bus.

ILM visual effects supervisor Ivan Busquets joins fellow visual effects supervisors Dennis Berardi and Ayo Burgess and model effects supervisor José Granell for director Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.

And for The Lost Bus from director Paul Greengrass, ILM visual effects supervisor David Zaretti joins production visual effects supervisor Charlie Noble and special effects coordinator Brandon K. McLaughlin.

Additionally, ILM contributed to other Outstanding Visual Effects nominees Avatar: Fire and Ash and F1.

Congratulations to our ILM nominees! The 2026 BAFTA Film Awards will be held on February 22 in London. Read the full list of nominations here.

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Read more about The Lost Bus here on ILM.com:

Rendering a Rescue: ILM’s Dave Zaretti on the Visual Effects of ‘The Lost Bus’

ILM artists for Jurassic World Rebirth and The Lost Bus earn nominations.

Nominations for the 98th Oscars were announced today in Los Angeles, and Industrial Light & Magic contributed to all five nominees in the Best Visual Effects category: Avatar: Fire and Ash, F1, Jurassic World Rebirth, The Lost Bus, and Sinners.

Artists from Industrial Light & Magic earned two nominations in the category.

For Jurassic World Rebirth, our ILM nominees include production visual effects supervisor David Vickery, animation supervisor Stephen Aplin, and ILM visual effects supervisor Charmaine Chan, along with special effects supervisor Neil Corbould.

“Still wrapping my head around the Oscar nomination for visual effects on Jurassic World Rebirth,” Vickery tells ILM.com. “I’m immensely proud of the work. Thank you to everyone who voted for us, but above all – well done to everyone who poured their hearts, souls, and creativity into this special project. You all deserve this!!!”

Aplin adds that “this nomination is such a fantastic reflection on the hard work and dedication the entire ILM team has contributed to the visual effects of Jurassic World Rebirth. Personally, my passion for this craft was jump-started after watching the original Jurassic Park when it first came out in theaters, so getting to play in that world and receive such a fabulous honor is a dream come true. Thank you, and congratulations to all nominated in this category.”

“To be nominated for our visual effects on Jurassic World Rebirth is an absolute honor,” says Chan. “Like so many in this industry, the original Jurassic Park was the film that made me believe the impossible is possible. That motto rang true across our global ILM teams as they passionately created stunning imagery to bring Gareth Edwards’ vision to life. ​I am incredibly proud of what we accomplished together and thank the Academy for this recognition.”

For The Lost Bus, ILM visual effects supervisor David Zaretti has been nominated along with production visual effects supervisor Charlie Noble, beloFX visual effects supervisor Russell Bowen, and special effects coordinator Brandon K. McLaughlin.

“Wow! What an honor to be recognised by the Academy for the work we did retelling the story of Paradise,” Zaretti tells ILM.com. “I’m so proud of the whole team for their hard work and creativity. It was a great experience to work with Paul Greengrass, helping him do what he does best. Given the quality of the visual effects across the board this year, it feels extra special to make it this far.”

Congratulations to all of our ILM teams for their work on this year’s nominated films, and best of luck to our ILM nominees!

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Read more about Jurassic World Rebirth and The Lost Bus here on ILM.com:

“What Do We Have To Do To Make it an 11 out of 10?”: Visual Effects Supervisor David Vickery on ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’

Rendering a Rescue: ILM’s Dave Zaretti on the Visual Effects of ‘The Lost Bus’

Cutting-edge digital artistry, modern inspiration, and retro callbacks help launch the latest Tron adventure from the cyber world into reality.

By Clayton Sandell

Light Cycles, Super Recognizers, and Programs roar off the Grid and into the real world for the first time in Tron: Ares (2025), a four-decades-in-the-making moment that challenged Industrial Light & Magic to deploy a full creative arsenal to make the impossible real.

ILM’s David Seager served as the production visual effects supervisor for the third entry in a franchise that began with the original 1982 film Tron and continued with 2010’s Tron: Legacy. The first Tron movie follows the adventures of software engineer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), who is trapped inside a neon digital realm where computer programs appear as human avatars.

Then-nine-year-old Seager became an instant Tron devotee. “I was very excited when this opportunity came along, so I definitely jumped at it,” he tells ILM.com. “Tron, for me, was right up there with the Star Wars franchise and many of those types of films.”

Directed by Joachim Rønning, Tron: Ares stars Jared Leto as the titular hero, a sophisticated Master Control Program reporting to Dillinger Systems executive Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters). Ares is billed as the ultimate soldier and the first artificial intelligence being – or construct – to appear in the real world. But outside of the Grid, Ares can only live for 29 minutes, sending Dillinger and rival company ENCOM on a quest to find Flynn’s long-lost Permanence Code that will extend a construct’s lifespan. When ENCOM CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee) discovers the code first, Dillinger dispatches Ares and his second-in-command, Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), to track her down and steal it.

Inspired by Modern Tech

Inside a massive Dillinger complex hangar, Ares and Athena– along with their Light Cycles – are brought into physical form by an array of rapid-firing red particle lasers attached to robotic arms.

“Using lasers to get to and from the Grid has been part of Tron since the beginning,” Seager explains. “So we knew there was going to be a laser component to it. But also, I thought it was a great opportunity to show that the Dillinger company isn’t making games anymore. They’re more a part of the military-industrial complex, so it was always important that it had an industrial feel.”

During preproduction, design inspiration came from a 3D printer purring away in the art department. “It was in one of our meetings where we just happened to look over, and there was a print in progress,” recalls Seager. “And it had the support structure surrounding it, this kind of ‘jig’ structure, as we called it.”

Incorporating the concept of 3D printing helped ground the sequence in a visual language people are familiar with, Seager explains. There’s even an added storytelling flourish when the mass of rough, excess jig pieces builds up and suddenly collapses, exposing the object underneath. “We wanted it to feel messy, and then it just falls away, and there’s the creation. It was one of those happy accidents,” Seager says. “It became a really great reveal.”

Cycles and Walls of Light

Riding their Light Cycles at high speed through nighttime city streets and across bridges, Ares and Athena pursue Eve in a sequence largely shot on location in Vancouver, Canada. “It became very evident that we all wanted to go shoot as much as possible on location,” Seager recalls. “You get a million little things that happen organically.”

On set, modified Harley Davidson electric motorcycles stood in as proxies for the Light Cycles, outfitted with practical lighting to cast realistic reflections and glow onto the wet pavement. “It became our job in visual effects to go in and replace the proxies that we created for the Light Cycles,” says Seager. “We had to replace 100% of them.” The special effects department also built hero versions of the Light Cycles for shooting close-ups of the actors, either against a blue screen or an LED screen.

During the chase, the Light Cycles emit a signature Tron element in their wake: lethal ribbons of reddish, semi-transparent light. The challenge, Seager explains, was making the light walls work visually in a non-Grid environment.

“That was more traditional look development work – adjusting the amount of refraction, reflection, and brightness and those types of things,” according to Seager. “There’s a little bit of heat distortion. We want it to feel hot. And because it was very easy for it to feel glassy, and there’s a certain brittleness that comes with glass, you’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t want that.’”

In one of the film’s most memorable shots, a light wall slices a police cruiser into perfect halves, an effect that uses a combination of practical and digital techniques.

“That was a real car,” Seager reveals. “The special effects team was like, ‘Oh, we could build this!’ So they took a car and chopped it right down the middle lengthwise. It was a repeatable stunt, and there was limited steering they could do after the split. We ended up having to shoot it a couple of times, but the vast majority of what you see is the stunt that we shot. And then we have to go in and make the edges seem glowing hot – like it just got cut – and add steam and those types of things coming out.

“Light Cycles are to Tron like lightsabers are to Star Wars,” Seager adds with a smile. “I’m so proud of what we achieved in the Light Cycle chase.”

One of Seager’s favorite moments in the sequence is a Light Cycle sideways slide that pays homage to an iconic shot in the landmark 1988 anime action film, Akira. “I’m a lifelong anime fan and fell in love with Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga of Akira and was one of the first kids in town to obtain a VHS copy of the anime,” Seager says. “Needless to say, it is very rare to be able to work on a project that combines two influential films from your childhood.”

A climactic street battle between Ares’s and Athena’s armed Dillinger sentries features a weapon that proved to be one of the more challenging effects to pull off: the Light Staff.

“It’s the fun new weapon that was introduced in our film. The idea is a staff that you could fight with, and the ends emit a white ribbon four or five inches wide,” Seager explains. “We came up with the idea that you’d have this almost dial-up lifespan, so the light ribbon could last a second, or two seconds, or five. We knew Joachim always wanted them as long as possible, but there were times when they had to go away.”

The Light Staff fight required complex coordination between the actors and stunt performers on set, but the frenetic pace of the action sometimes created unavoidable visual conflicts. “I’d be sitting there going, ‘Wait a second, if they swipe like this and then they run forward, their head just hit the thing,’” remembers Seager. “You have to almost think in terms of, ‘Oh, I need to duck under this.’ I think everyone did a great job of trying to choreograph the fights.

“We got as close as we could during shooting,” Seager continues. “And then in postproduction, we went in there and started tracking the staff and emitting the beam from it. We just started going, ‘Oh, there’s a problem there.’ And you just have to go try other things.”

Seager says some fun and unexpected ideas also popped up during shooting. “The stunt team came up with the idea of characters making a light ribbon and using it to jump off of,” he says. “So there are cool moments where Ares basically creates terrain for himself.”

Another visual quandary came with the Super Recognizer, a massive flying security transport that Athena pilots into the city as she searches for Eve. “The design work was beautiful. I think our biggest challenge was how big it was,” Seager says. “We had our LiDAR and survey data of real Vancouver streets, and when we put those two together for the first time, we’re like, ‘Okay, the Recognizer doesn’t fit into any street.’

“There’s a fair amount of digital surgery where we had to kind of wipe the city away because if you make the Recognizer too small, the threat goes away,” continues Seager. “So we were trying to find that balance. But the main work we did there was trying to find ways to make it fit.”

Enter the Grid(s)

Much of the look of the ENCOM and Dillinger Grids is inspired by designs established in Tron: Legacy by production designer Darren Gilford, who returned for Ares.

“The Dillinger Grid – the red one – definitely followed the aesthetic of Tron: Legacy with a dark, shiny, almost wet look to it. It’s atmospheric, and it has a stormy feeling,” says Seager. “Darren always talked to me about that Grid being inspired by circuit boards.”

For both Grids, the production built a combination of complete and partial sets on a Vancouver soundstage. “Most of the big sets that we built were for the Dillinger Grid,” Seager says. “There were two major red rooms. One we called the ‘extraction’ room, which is where Eve is printed into the Grid and where Ares later escapes. And then there was what we call the ‘regeneration’ room.”

Seager credits the production art department for crafting beautiful, practical sets that, in many cases, only needed minimal digital enhancement, like adding ceilings or extending walls. “Early on in the show, I took some pictures as we were building the set and doing walkthroughs, and I sent them to one of my fellow ILM supervisors because they were very pretty. And they were like, ‘Oh, that’s great looking concept art.’ I was like, ‘That’s not concept art!’” Seager laughs.

For a sequence in which Ares and his team infiltrate the blue-tinted ENCOM Grid, ILM took on extensive digital world-building. “That was a little more traditional blue screen work,” says Seager. “We built minimal floors and then expanded from there because the characters had to cover a great distance. We built the staircase that we could shoot against, but in post, we did the rest of the environments.”

Seager explains that the ENCOM Grid also offered a chance to break from a traditional nighttime look to portray a more daylight setting. “We just wanted it to feel thematically brighter,” he says. “It’s the sunny, good-guy Grid. It’s still overcast, but it’s not quite darkness. That has its own challenges because light lines look great when it’s dark out, but if you turn the lights up and also have a competing bright scene, now you’re trying to make the bright light lines work.”

Still hunting for the Permanence Code, Ares is transported inside Flynn’s original server,

providing audiences a nostalgic visit to the relatively primitive digital landscapes of the 1982 classic. “It was a lot of fun, and I actually consider it one of the more challenging developments on the show,” explains Seager. “ ‘Challenging’ usually means ‘big, big, big.’ And this one was challenging going the other way. It’s stripping away, it’s simplified.”

Executing the retro look of the Flynn Grid fell to the team at Distillery Visual Effects in Vancouver, which worked to incorporate updated versions of the distinctive visual artifacts from the 1982 film, like flickering faces, desaturated skin tones, and backgrounds marked by noticeable “frozen grain.”

“In visual effects, if you have frozen grain, your shot is broken,” Seager notes. “In our shots, we intentionally added frozen grain to the background to try to make it look that way. The light suits built by WETA Workshop were immaculate, but we actually made them kind of flicker and the edges kind of wobble because we wanted to have a little bit of a hand-rotoscoped feel.”

Seager says the Flynn Grid is loaded with Easter eggs – including an appearance by the binary guide known as Bit – that he hopes fans will pick up on. One of his favorite throwbacks can be seen as Ares takes control of a classic yellow Light Cycle and follows Bit off the Game Grid through the same jagged hole used by Flynn and his companions to make an escape back in 1982.

“We went in, and we looked at that exact break pattern. True fans hopefully can see that it’s the one they made 40 years ago,” Seager says.

Opening the Complete ILM Toolbox

ILM Stagecraft’s LED volume technology proved invaluable for scenes set in very different exterior and interior environments. Assembled on a soundstage at Mammoth Studios near Vancouver, the volume completed the snowy landscape around a remote mountain station in Alaska, where Eve and her partner, Seth Flores (Arturo Castro), use the Permanence Code to assemble an orange tree in the real world.

“There were also two offices. Dillinger’s office, which overlooks the transfer bay, was built maybe 16 feet up, then we hung LED screens outside the windows. And the scene out there was a fully realized 3D version of the transfer bay,” Seager says. “The ENCOM office set also had an LED cityscape when you looked out the windows.”

The production employed the same volume ILM used for season one of the Disney+ series Percy Jackson and the Olympians (2023-present). Scenes inside the Grid featuring Ares speaking with Julian Dillinger’s digital visage utilized MEDUSA, the Academy Award-winning facial capture system developed by ILM and Disney Research Studios. For action scenes, ILM FaceSwap tools were used extensively to put an actor’s likeness onto a stunt double.

The Home Team Advantage

Work on Tron: Ares was primarily divided between ILM’s Vancouver and Sydney studios, with additional contributions from Distillery Visual Effects, Lola Visual Effects, Image Engine, Prologue, GMUNK, Imaginary Forces, and OPSIS. Seager, who lives in Vancouver, says having Tron: Ares shoot in his home city provided a rare opportunity for the ILM team to observe the production process up close.

“For the artists, it’s huge,” Seager insists, “because it’s really hard to get experience on set for up-and-coming talent. We had a great relationship with the production team, so I was able to bring a lot of the folks out to get their first-ever on-set exposure. We tried to take advantage of that as much as possible.”

Seager adds one more Vancouver factoid: When an F-35 fighter plane slams into the Super Recognizer, the massive craft crash-lands in front of a building that in real life is only half a block from ILM’s Vancouver studio.

Now You See Him, Now You Don’t

Tron: Ares contains just over 2,100 visual effects shots, but Seager says there’s one illusion the audience will never notice. Early in the film, Dillinger introduces Ares to a group of shareholders. Appearing for the first time inside a Dillinger Systems Amphibious Rapid Response Tank, or DART, he wears a black Light Suit with glowing red accents and a highly reflective helmet hiding his face.

But when the scene was first shot, Jared Leto was not wearing a helmet at all.

“An idea came in postproduction to have him be this faceless automaton that reveals at the right moment,” Seager says, explaining that it was up to digital artists to craft a highly reflective CG helmet from scratch, matching it perfectly with the Light Suit and practical environment. Adding to the challenge: Leto had long hair that needed to be painted out of every shot.

“I don’t think people will ever know the work we did,” remarks Seager. “The camera is inches from his face in some of the shots where we had to track the helmet in there. In that entire scene, those helmets are all digitally added shot-by-shot.”

End of Line

Seager has much praise for the hundreds of artists and collaborators who made working in the Tron universe such a rewarding challenge, and especially director Joachim Rønning.

“Paramount to Joachim’s vision was that he never wanted this to feel bigger than life. It’s really easy to toss a lot of gimmicks at something set in the real world, and all of a sudden it starts to not feel as grounded. So it was trying to find that sweet spot where it felt like you could believe you’re watching from the street corner.”

Instead of watching from a distance, however, Seager found himself at the creative center of the Tron universe, drawing on 40-plus years of fandom to help bring the latest chapter to the big screen. “It was a dream come true,” he says.

Read more about Tron: Ares here on ILM.com:

ILM’s Jeff Capogreco and Jhon Alvarado Take Us Into the Grid of ‘Tron: Ares’

Inside the ILM Art Department: ‘Tron: Ares’

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Clayton Sandell is a Star Wars author and enthusiast, Celebration stage host, and a longtime fan of the creative people who keep Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound on the leading edge of visual effects and sound design. Follow him on Instagram (@claytonsandell), Bluesky (@claytonsandell.com), or X (@Clayton_Sandell).

As Kathleen Kennedy steps down from Lucasfilm leadership to return to producing, Dave Filoni will lead the studio as President and Chief Creative Officer alongside Lynwen Brennan as Co-President.

Lucasfilm announced today that after 14 years of leading the studio, President Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down from her role. Kennedy will return to full-time producing, including the studio’s upcoming feature films The Mandalorian and Grogu and Star Wars: Starfighter. 

Dave Filoni, who worked closely with creator George Lucas to build the Lucasfilm animation department on Star Wars: The Clone Wars and helped launch Star Wars live-action series alongside Jon Favreau on The Mandalorian, will take on creative leadership of the company as President and Chief Creative Officer and Lynwen Brennan will serve as Co-President. 

Their close collaboration and more than 30 years of combined senior executive experience will carry Lucasfilm into its next chapter of storytelling, with a strong foundation of creative vision and operational leadership guiding the studio forward.

To read the full announcement, visit StarWars.com.

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Visual effects supervisor Eric Leven takes us behind the scenes of the high-speed film from director Joseph Kosinski.

By Jamie Benning

There is a moment early in F1: The Movie (2025) when the film quietly makes a promise to its audience. Before we have settled into the present-day story, and before we have learned the rhythms of the modern races, we are pulled back into the past, into the memory of a catastrophic crash that defines Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) long before we meet him. It is a short sequence, but it carries the same burden as the first dinosaur reveal in Jurassic Park (1993). If the audience does not believe this moment, everything that follows becomes harder to land.

That opening crash is not simply exposition. It is the film’s tonal contract, shaped quietly by Industrial Light & Magic, with more than a little help from the real-life, near-fatal crash of racing driver Martin Donnelly at Jerez in 1990.

ILM visual effects supervisor Eric Leven described the challenge in clear terms. “Motorsport fans have watched countless hours of real racing footage, so they instinctively know when something feels wrong. A film, however, cannot simply document reality. It has to reshape it into something emotional and cinematic. Accuracy alone is never enough.”

I have worked in Formula One television production for more than twenty-five seasons, and when the Donnelly sequence began as I watched the movie, I recognized the real-world imagery within a second. Almost immediately, that recognition dissolved, and I found myself inside Sonny’s memories. I wanted to understand how ILM helped achieve that transition and set the tone for the entire movie.

Dreaming in VHS

The conceit of the opening sequence is simple and effective. Sonny dreams in VHS. Editorial had mocked up an early version of the look, but everyone knew how unforgiving that format could be.

“Everyone knows exactly what real VHS looks like,” says Leven. “And if it is just a tiny bit off, you can tell that it was done in post or that it is not real VHS.”

Rather than rely on digital simulations, ILM turned to genuine analogue artefacts. Leven had digitized old family VHS tapes, complete with dropouts, noise, and tracking errors. Those became the foundation of the sequence.

“We were able to lift glitches from real VHS tapes,” Leven explains. “Our compositing supervisor, Heath Kranak, put that material together and mimicked the rest of the VHS look with the color desaturation and low fidelity and it matched perfectly. It was a really, really fun sequence to work on.”

The result does not feel stylised. It feels remembered and slightly damaged. The fragility it imparts is central to the emotional impact of the moment.

Rebuilding History, Donnelly, Senna, and the 1990s

Texture is only one part of the illusion. Many of the elements that appear in the Sonny Hayes crash exist because ILM reconstructed them digitally. The sequence blends archive racing footage of Martin Donnelly with new photography shot at the F1 legacy circuit Brands Hatch. Crucially, the archive was not something to be polished. It was the aim.

“The archive footage was the target look we were going for,” Leven says. “That became our roadmap for what the other footage needed to look like.”

The new material had to bend toward the old. Stand-in cars did not match the shapes and proportions of early 1990s Formula One vehicles, so ILM made significant changes. “To me it looked like a Formula One car from the 1990s,” Leven notes. “But people said, no, the air scoop is different, and the tires are a little bit fatter. So we ended up replacing Senna’s car in its entirety.”

Branding needed the same attention. Logos removed on set were later reinstated for reasons of authenticity. “At that time they had Marlboro advertising,” Leven recalls. “So we added those logos onto Senna’s car and on some of the billboards.”

Playing With Recognition

For viewers who know the real Martin Donnelly crash at Jerez in 1990, there is an immediate flicker of recognition when the sequence begins. The angles, trackside details, and violence of the moment feel unmistakably familiar. Yet within seconds, that certainty slips.

The yellow car remains, but the driver is no longer Donnelly. The incident has been reframed as Sonny Hayes’s defining memory, and from that point on, the sequence belongs to the character rather than history. ILM is not inserting new material into archival reference. It is reconstructing a memory, taking an incident that fans may hold vividly in their minds and reshaping it so the audience feels both recognition and unease.

That approach extends beyond the car itself. Although the sequence was shot at Brands Hatch, ILM removed contemporary details, replaced the environment, added period-appropriate crowds, and regraded the landscape to resemble the Spanish circuit of the early 1990s. For seasoned Formula One fans, this is where the spell takes hold. They recognize the shape of what they are seeing, but begin to question its ownership.

The Crash That Is Not There

One of the most dramatic shots in the sequence, the car losing control and heading toward the guardrail, appears to be captured entirely in camera. In reality, it is almost fully digital.

“The crash was shot as the camera car was driving normally around a curve,” Leven says. “At a certain point, we took over. It basically became a full CG shot because we needed to replace the entire background and make it look like it was crashing into the guardrail.”

Once ILM replaced the environment, the car needed work too. “We needed to vibrate the wheels and make it look like he is going off the road,” Leven explains. “One of the wheels goes askew. Maybe 90 percent of the car was replaced.”

Even the driver’s hands on the steering wheel were animated later to make his struggle more believable. The goal was never pure spectacle. It was to make the audience feel the loss of control while subtly layering in the foundations of Sonny Hayes’s early racing story.

Daytona Nights

If the opening crash sequence sets the emotional foundation, the Daytona material sets the film’s visual rhythm. Once again, the work begins with practical filmmaking. “Joseph Kosinski was all about shooting as much as possible for real,” Leven says. “Let visual effects help only where you cannot get exactly what you want.”

Units captured a wealth of footage and reference, from headlight sweeps to subtle brake behavior. This allowed ILM to integrate story beats seamlessly into authentic environments.

When the narrative required Sonny to be surrounded by several cars as he exited the pits, ILM added those cars. When positional indicators on the sides of vehicles needed to reflect a different moment in the story, ILM updated them.

“It is great to be at ILM where you can say, ‘Absolutely, we can do that, and it will look seamless.’ We had a lot of fun adding all kinds of little details,” Leven says.

When the script asked for Sonny’s competitors to have mechanical failures, the same principle was followed. ILM kept real sparks and flame bars where possible, added smoke and oil when required, and extended practical effects only where the story demanded it.

In some cases, that meant going far beyond enhancement. Entire vehicles were replaced or rebuilt in visual effects when the practical footage could not deliver what the story required. Stand-in cars became different models. Background vehicles were added wholesale. In certain shots, only fragments of the original plate remained once the work was complete. It was not about spectacle, but precision. The cars had to behave correctly, brake at the right moment, shimmy under deceleration, and sit convincingly within the real racing environment.

Fire, Fabric, and Pixels

ILM’s work also appears in some of the film’s most intense moments, including the crash that engulfs Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), the rival driver to Pitt’s Sonny Hayes. “There is a shot where you see his whole back,” Leven says. “On the day, it was just a bright white driving suit. We made it look burned and added ash.”

It is painstaking but important work, and most of it is invisible to the audience. But it matters because tire compound colors carry meaning. In Formula One, the colour markings on a tire indicate the compound being used, which in turn signals grip level, durability, and race strategy. For fans who understand the language of racing, those colors instantly communicate how hard a driver can push and how vulnerable they might be at that moment. If the color is wrong, the story beat is wrong, even if it only occupies a couple of pixels on screen.

The Myth of “No Visual Effects”

There is a recent marketing trend proclaiming that certain movies use very little or even no visual effects. Leven finds this both complimentary and misleading. For him, visual effects are simply one of many tools that support the filmmaking process.

“Obviously, we are using visual effects, and obviously we try to make them as seamless as possible, and that is what makes it amazing,” Leven says. “Though I would not mind if people could talk about how scenes were shot for real, but also used visual effects, and actors, and props, and sets. It’s all part of the filmmaking process.

“It is great when people watch the movie without noticing any visual effects. Ideally, nothing takes them out of the moment,” he adds.

Why Filmmakers Come to ILM

Leven is clear about what ILM offers when filmmakers come to the studio. “We have such a rich history,” he says. “When filmmakers come to ILM, we want them to be comfortable knowing we share their vision. We are all filmmakers here, and we want to push the boundaries on every project to create incredible imagery.” 

The production of F1: The Movie was notably smooth from ILM’s perspective. “There were no problem shots,” Leven says. “It was just executing a plan.”

The work was shared between the San Francisco and Mumbai teams, with each location taking ownership of full shots from start to finish. This created a genuine around-the-clock workflow that supported the film’s editorial pace.

The Tone Is Already Locked In

By the time we leave Daytona, the film no longer needs to ask for the audience’s trust. The visual language has been established and proven. The speed feels credible. The danger feels earned. The emotional weight of the story is already in place.

That trust is built on work the audience will rarely notice. VHS glitches lifted from real tapes. Crowds added to empty grandstands. Tire markings adjusted by only a couple of pixels. A racing suit digitally burned to reflect the impact of a crash. Cars are rebuilt so subtly that the original plate becomes almost invisible. All of it supports the story without ever interrupting it.

The tone, the thing that convinces us this world is real and worth investing in, is established quietly by artists whose success is measured not just by what the audience sees, but by what they never question.

–

Jamie Benning is a filmmaker, author, and podcaster with a lifelong passion for sci-fi and fantasy cinema. He hosts The Filmumentaries Podcast, featuring twice-monthly interviews with behind-the-scenes artists. Visit Filmumentaries.com or find him on X (@jamieswb) and @filmumentaries on Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

The 24th annual presentation by the Visual Effects Society will take place on February 25, 2026.

The Visual Effects Society announced the nominations for their 24th annual awards ceremony, and the creative teams from Industrial Light & Magic earned 16 in all. These include overall nominations for Jurassic World: Rebirth and The Lost Bus in Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature, Sinners in Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature, and Andor in Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Episode.

ILM’s work was celebrated across a wide range of categories, with ten individual productions recognized, including Andor, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Jurassic World: Rebirth, Lilo & Stitch, Severance, Sinners, Superman, The Lost Bus, Tron: Ares, and Wicked: For Good.

The VES Awards gala will be held on February 25, 2026 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.

Congratulations to all of our ILM nominees!

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Read more about these productions on ILM.com:

“Like Eating an Elephant One Bite at a Time”: TJ Falls and Mohen Leo on the Visual Effects of ‘Andor’ Season 2

“Let the Experts Be the Experts”: TJ Falls and Mohen Leo on the Visual Effects of ‘Andor’ Season 2

Assembling a Starfighter: Exploring ILM’s Role in Creating the TIE Avenger from ‘Andor’

“What Do We Have To Do To Make it an 11 out of 10?”: Visual Effects Supervisor David Vickery on ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’

Inside the ILM Art Department: ‘Lilo & Stitch’

The Invisible Visual Effects Secrets of ‘Severance’ with ILM’s Eric Leven

How ILM Helped James Gunn’s ‘Superman’ Soar with High-Flying Visual Effects

Inside the ILM Art Department: ‘Superman’

Rendering a Rescue: ILM’s Dave Zaretti on the Visual Effects of ‘The Lost Bus

ILM’s Jeff Capogreco and Jhon Alvarado Take Us Into the Grid of ‘Tron: Ares’

Inside the ILM Art Department: ‘Tron: Ares’

Artists from ILM’s Sydney studio take us into the Grid to discuss their part in the cult classic’s latest chapter.

By Jay Stobie

Directed by Joachim Rønning, Disney’s Tron: Ares (2025) breaks the barrier between the physical and digital realms, as the Master Control Program known as Ares (Jared Leto) rebels against his creator, Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), and seeks the Permanence Code that would allow him to achieve a lasting existence in the real world. Ares finds an ally in Dillinger’s corporate rival, Encom executive Eve Kim (Greta Lee), whose empathetic nature is a stark contrast to the ruthless disposition of the Dillinger Systems leader. From the Grid’s luminous avenues to their concrete counterparts in our physical reality, Tron: Ares brims with astonishing visual effects that support its characters on their tumultuous journeys.

With Industrial Light & Magic’s own David Seager serving as the production’s overall visual effects supervisor, ILM proved uniquely suited to spread the visual effects work across its global studio sites in Sydney and Vancouver. Operating from the Sydney studio, ILM visual effects supervisor Jeff Capogreco (Jurassic World [2015]; Avengers: Infinity War [2018]; The Mandalorian [2019-23] and ILM animation supervisor Jhon Alvarado (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves [2023]; Alien: Romulus [2024]; Star Wars: Skeleton Crew [2024-25]) sat down with ILM.com to discuss their behind-the-scenes insights into all things Tron: Ares.

Tron’s Legacy

“On TRON: Ares, I was the visual effects supervisor for ILM’s Sydney studio, and my partner in crime was ILM associate visual effects supervisor, Alex Popescu,” Jeff Capogreco shares with ILM.com. “Early on, we made a conscious decision to have two technical camps going at one time, and each of us took on different roles and responsibilities. As the ‘grandpa’ supervisor, or ‘Papa Jeff,’ I worked with Alex to make sure things ran smoothly. The Sydney studio did just over 800 shots, which I believe was the biggest show to date that our studio had delivered, so it was a proud milestone.”

Capogreco’s love for the Tron franchise stretches back to its initial cinematic installment. “I’m old enough to say that Tron (1982) was one of the first movies I ever watched on VHS. My father was really into technology, and having a VHS player was a status symbol in Canada in the 1980s,” Capogreco beams. “I was probably six or seven and didn’t fully understand what was happening in the movie, but it was spellbinding. I was fascinated by Tron, and that led me to want to do visual effects. What Tron did to me, I hope Tron: Ares does to other people.”

ILM animation supervisor Jhon Alvarado’s own affinity for Tron took off with the release of its sequel, Tron: Legacy (2010). “For me, Tron hit home when Legacy came out, primarily because of the visuals and the soundtrack,” Alvarado remarks. “I loved the marriage of the two elements and how well they came together. When Tron: Ares came up for ILM, I knew I had to be on it. We’re here for movies that take us into these awesome worlds, and Legacy delivered with its sound, music, and visuals. When Tron comes in, you know it’s Tron. It has an aesthetic that you can’t get in any other film.”

An Animation Approach

Turning to his tenure on Tron: Ares, Alvarado supplies an overview of what his duties entailed. “As the ILM animation supervisor, my work on the show covered quite a bit. I was involved in shot design and creating shots for the film. We’d receive sequences with a rough previs of what the idea would be, but once the previs was put into the cut, I’d occasionally get blank frames with descriptions of what was supposed to happen. My job became interpreting them, taking the shots that the director had in mind, and Tron-ifying them while making it all feel believable and realistic. I had to think like a cinematographer so that, even when the shots were full CG, they appeared as if they were filmed for real.

“I developed several vehicle animations, as well,” Alvarado continues. “For the light skimmer chase sequence, I partnered with our ILM animators to figure out the style and movement of how these vehicles skim through the water. We examined speedboat references so we could get the water spray right.” Alvarado’s mission extended to the laser printers that enabled Grid-based vehicles to be constructed in the real world. “We designed how the laser moved and collaborated with the rigging and effects departments to choreograph the printing. We had rigs which let us play with how the laser looked, its size, and where it was pointing.”

Alvarado selects a brawl between Ares and an army of Encom’s own Programs as another pivotal scene for his animation team. “We created digital doubles during the fight sequence where you see Ares being attacked by soldiers. At ILM, we have tools that permit us to get motion capture data integrated quickly, so we choreographed the movement alongside our animators and internal mo-cap team. I believe the filmmakers originally had a stunt performer do it, but he was only fighting maybe two or three guys, and the rest was air-fighting.” Along with adding in flying discs that caused the deresolution of Ares’s opponents, Alvarado’s team had a hand in mapping out the timing of each character’s ‘derez.’“

Scene management was important on Tron: Ares, especially for the light walls,” Alvarado notes. “In terms of animation, my role varied. People often associate animation with characters and creatures, but we’re also figuring out the timing, the choreography, and the cinematography so that we deliver a nice flow of the sequence to the director. Once that’s established, we pass it on to Jeff and all the other departments to use as a base to build upon.”

Going Into the Grid

Designing the Dillinger Systems Grid proved to be a monumental task for ILM’s Sydney studio. “We had a fantastic production model given to us from the client side that was visualized in real time with a neat flythrough,” Capogreco states. “That provided the basis of what we called the Motherboard, or the main facility that overlooked the whole Dillinger Grid. Once we started getting the Grid into shots, we realized it wasn’t nearly big enough for what Joachim wanted. We did a test where our layout folks put the characters on a light skimmer and drove them from one end of the Grid to the next. It turned out to be about four times too small, because they’re moving so fast. We ended up increasing the original size by a factor of two-and-a-half. It’s massive!”

Seeking to furnish the Grid with “scale and purpose,” Capogreco researched ports and military facilities as a way to subtly infuse features that would cause audiences to recognize distinct areas, such as factories and military zones, within the Dillinger Grid.

ILM relied on its expertise to know when it had to dial back the intricacy to fit the film’s setting. “Tron has a design language that’s all about shape and form – it’s not about being very busy. What I mean by that is, when you’re down at the water level, there’s an incredible amount of complexity that’s put into each shot. Every shot, to a degree, had to be designed,” Capogreco outlines. “We needed to translate what people see in the real world into Tron-like assets. What does a buoy look like in Tron? What about a crane or a shipping container?”

While the appropriate level of detail was required for scale at the surface perspective, Capogreco relays that “when we were up high, it became too busy and noisy, with many moving dots. So, we actually built two Grids. One sufficed for the wider views and was a more simplified version. Our team went in and hid much of the noise, guaranteeing the audience would at least see the shapes and silhouettes. When you’re down at water level, the geometric resolution needs to increase. Every section of the environment was fairly unique and required a huge design process to support the narrative.”

The Face of a Foe

Another key Grid-related component deals with the holographic avatar that Julian Dillinger projects to communicate with Ares within the Dillinger Grid. “They filmed Evan Peters saying Julian’s lines, and then we used ILM’s MEDUSA tool to generate a perfect match of Evan’s performance to incorporate into our asset,” Alvarado remembers. “Joachim and Dave asked us to experiment,” adds Capogreco, “so we tried making the eyes brighter, having no eyes at all, playing with the wireframe, and evaluating how much we wanted to see of Evan versus seeing the avatar of Evan.”

After numerous creative back-and-forths, ILM opted to stick closer to the original concept art that inspired the face’s depiction. Speaking to the experimental process, Capogreco notes, “We eventually did a cross-blend between a human skull and Evan’s face, which was important to the director. We wanted the mouth, nose, and brows to be genuinely Evan, but we also wanted to bring the creepy, evil avatar side out.” Alvarado adds, “I analyzed Evan’s eyebrows so the avatar would resemble him. Evan has a very specific and strong brow shape, but because the hologram didn’t have any eyebrows, we had to manipulate the model to make the shape of the brow a little more like Evan’s.”

The Vaunted Vehicles

The production built a life-sized light cycle that helped define that particular vehicle’s mechanics, but other assets – such as the light skimmer, jump jet, and drones – left room for ILM artists to rely upon their imaginations. “We studied speedboat footage for the light skimmer in an effort to get its rooster tail to match the reference,” Capogreco explains. “Finding something you can anchor to is a terrific starting point for visual effects, and then it evolves. What can we do to make this weird? I welcomed ‘weird’ in dailies. The weirder the comments, the better. It was fun to experiment in that playground. If you pause on frames in the movie, you’ll see that the flares actually have texture – they have Grid patterns. Usually, when water is on a lens they’re circular, but one of our ideas played with the notion that – when the splash hits the lens – we actually refracted cubes onto the lens.”

“The light skimmer scene was heavily influenced by older Star Wars cinematography, especially the speeder bike sequence and the Millennium Falcon exiting the Death Star as it exploded,” Alvarado notes, in reference to Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983). “We used ILM’s work on Return of the Jedi as a reference and evaluated what made those scenes so special. You may notice that Skywalker Sound even added some of the speeder bikesque sound effects to the light skimmer in some of the shots [laughs]. There’s a lot of ILM’s DNA in Tron.” 

Although director Joachim Rønning wished to ground the drones that pursued the light skimmer in realism, he enjoyed Alvarado’s suggestion to have them rotate. “In the real world, the drones wouldn’t spin, but when Joachim saw them in the chase, he thought it looked great. It’s all about making everything fun for the audience.”The jump jet flown by Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) opened another creative door for the team. “

The jump jet design was never a practical build so it wasn’t as defined as the light cycle, so we were left to figure out how it would take off and fly. At first, the pieces didn’t move in an aesthetically pleasing way – it was too mechanical and simple. The director wanted the movement to be realistic, but he trusted us to make it look cool. So, we utilized tools we had originally developed for the Transformers films that let us dynamically move pieces around. When Athena gets in the jump jet, she presses a button and the pieces are sort of Transformer-y,” Alvarado professes. “Joachim loved it. If you analyze it, the movement of the pieces doesn’t necessarily make sense, but there is an element of believability to it.”

Assisting Ares

From the Grid to the jump jets and beyond, ILM delivered a visual effects extravaganza to Tron: Ares. However, while the vehicle assets and other prominent action sequences tend to receive the bulk of the audience’s praise, a significant portion of ILM’s assignment revolved around visual effects that are virtually invisible in the final cut. One example of this centers on Ares’s appearance throughout the beginning of the film. “For the entire Dillinger board presentation, Jared Leto was filmed without a helmet on. We were tasked with creating the visor that went over top of him. The decision to add a helmet onto Ares served the story and led to his big reveal moment,” Capogreco conveys.

The actor’s hair turned out to be a slight obstacle for ILM’s Sydney studio, as the team sought ways to cover up the parts that would have stuck out from under a helmet. “Jared had long hair that came over his costume, so we augmented parts of his collar and costume to tuck that hair back in,” Capogreco asserts. Alvarado concurs, recounting, “It also aided us in the early battle sequence, because that too was meant to be Jared Leto with no helmet. When the choice was made to use a helmet, we were able to go full CG with the character. When Ares stands up and walks over is Jared’s performance, but I don’t think people are able to tell that the other parts are full CG. Hopefully, they believe it’s a photographed suit!”

As with Julian Dillinger’s avatar, the filmmakers ensured that the Ares actor’s performance remained. “We wanted to keep Jared’s nuances in the close-up shots, but the digital double freed up Jhon for the wide and action shots,” Capogreco affirms.

A World of Work

As a global studio with multiple sites around the world, ILM spread its Tron: Ares responsibilities across its Sydney and Vancouver locations. “[ILM visual effects supervisor] Vincent Papaix and [ILM associate visual effects supervisor] Falk Boje at ILM’s Vancouver studio were wonderful collaborators, and Jhon often touched base with [ILM animation supervisor] Mike Beaulieu,” Capogreco underscores. “The wonderful thing about Tron: Ares is that the workflow was intended to be fairly autonomous, where we could do our own thing but still share our vehicle assets and digital doubles. Each studio took on different aspects of the film. It was nicely split out in a way that we could complement each other’s work.

“The deresolution – or the black sand effect – in the real world was an excellent example of that,” Capogreco continues. “Vancouver handled most of the end battle sequences, and they pioneered Ares’s time-out effect inside the Dillinger facility when we first see a Program turn to ash after 29 minutes. Subsequently, we handled the shots that were closer to Athena’s face by using the Vancouver team’s shot setups and adapting them to what they needed to be for the close-up.” The same held true for assets, which Vancouver required, that had been designed by ILM’s Sydney studio, such as the jump jet used for a shot where two guards land just before Athena and Ares square off towards the end of the film.

Capogreco broadly summarizes the delegation between sites, stating, “Vancouver covered the bluer and sleeker Encom Grid, and they owned the light cycle chase and the majority of the city work. On the other hand, in terms of the real world, Sydney had the mountain test site and the printing of the orange tree, as well as a substantial number of shots coming and going from the Grids. ILM’s Sydney studio was also involved with everything around the Dillinger Grid, even the on-set segment where partial sets were built. To film, they had to poke lights into the set, so we’d go in to top up the shots by augmenting roofs, set extensions, and other small cosmetic fixes here and there.”

“The biggest elements that the two studios collaborated on directly were the light walls and the tools to generate them,” Alvarado adds. “Even when we were dealing with different assets, we all needed to have light walls for the vehicles, drones, and staff weapons.” Capogreco delivers an additional shout-out to ILM StageCraft, saying, “ILM StageCraft was used for shots where you’re up in Dillinger’s office peering out. Sections of the office were built and filmed, so that’s all in-camera work. That and the mountain test site, which they shot on an ILM StageCraft volume before we went in and did extensions on top of that.”

Taking Pride in the Project

Reflecting on the project as a whole, Capogreco notes, “Without hesitation, I would say that Tron: Ares was one of the hardest shows I’ve done. Not just because it is such a crazy technical achievement, but because it pushed our creativity to the limit. Joachim Rønning and Dave Seager weren’t necessarily aiming for formulated shots. They were open to ideas from Jhon, Alex, and I. That’s what made Tron: Ares extra special – we went on a journey together to find the best possible shots. Joachim had a good eye for motion, and he challenged the ILM teams in Sydney and Vancouver. He kept us honest about having designs be as realistic as possible without sacrificing the ‘weird.’ He emphasized that, when you’re in the Grid, it’s okay to allow some stuff that’s strange.”

When asked for his thoughts on the film, Alvarado replies, “Although Tron: Ares looks real and we were going for realism, there is a large amount of it that is computer graphics. For example, the city that Vancouver built for the light-cycle chase and the fighter-jet flight seems so realistic that I don’t think people realize a ton of it is computer graphics. It demonstrates the artistry at ILM, and the love and care we put into the details to make Ares as believable as possible. Every pixel, every camera, and every full-CG shot had to live in that world. Everyone gave it their best, and it looks fantastic. There were so many full-CG shots, and they are as good as the live-action photography. It’s a testament to the team.”

In a year where visual effects-heavy releases have been plentiful, Capogreco considers Tron: Ares to be a standout, concluding, “Tron: Ares is so different and out there. It’s not something you can say you’ve seen much of before, and I think that’s a feat for ILM to be proud of as a studio. I’ve been catching up on movies, and they all seem to have similar themes. That’s what’s quite cool about this one – it’s bananas. Celebrate it!”

Read more about the ILM Art Department’s work on Tron: Ares here on ILM.com.

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Jay Stobie (he/him) is a writer, author, and consultant who has contributed articles to ILM.com, Skysound.com, Star Wars Insider, StarWars.com, Star Trek Explorer, Star Trek Magazine, and StarTrek.com. Jay loves sci-fi, fantasy, and film, and you can learn more about him by visiting JayStobie.com or finding him on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms at @StobiesGalaxy.

ILM.com is showcasing artwork specially chosen by members of the ILM Art Department. In this installment of a continuing series, four artists from the San Francisco, Vancouver, London, and Sydney studios share insights about their work on the 2025 Disney production, Tron: Ares.

Senior Visual Effects Art Director Alex Jaeger

For this piece the goal was to portray the Encom data hub fortress, but also give it a brighter almost daytime look. The challenge was to figure out what the sky looked like and the overall details and forms in both the surroinding fortress and the distant background and “waterfalls,” etc.

I looked at some of the landscapes created for Tron: Legacy [2010], combined with some looks developed for Tron: Uprising [2012-13] and combined them with more complex details for the foreground structures and more simplified forms for the distant structures. One main goal was to develop a brighter look to the Encom Grid, so there was a bit of a nicer and brighter difference between this and the Dillinger Grid. 

One specific detail that had not been worked out yet was how to portray the sky and clouds in this brighter world. I came up with several looks, including this one, where there is a grid in the sky that the clouds intersect and mingle around, giving it some sense of depth, and providing a cool lighting effect where the grid lines light up the clouds where they touched, and they also aided in showing some movement into the sky.

Supervising Art Director Jason Horley

The idea for this piece was to show a virtual vehicle being physically printed in the real world. When I was creating different versions of this image there were several that came before this final concept, all balancing how dense the 3D printing support structures were, and how not to reveal too much of the tank that was being printed. Because the tank is a large heavy vehicle, I also had to make sure the support structures looked strong enough to hold such a heavy vehicle. Earlier concepts were much lighter and you could see the tank through the supports, but it didn’t look like they would physically work. 

Once I received the brief, I researched current 3D printing technology to see what the physical process is like, and then scaled it up and added the printing lasers to include an interesting light source that would help add an extra layer of visual interest. 

I found it interesting that when looking at 3D printing, normally the 3D print is the actual point of interest, but in this case, the interest was actually the 3D-printed supports that normally get thrown away. That informed the design decisions. So there is a beauty in those formations that usually get overlooked.

Art Director Igor Staritsin

This was a design exploration for a ship in the style of classic Tron world from the 1980s. My task was to keep it fairly simple and in the language of the rest of the environment. I did multiple versions of the ship design, exploring ideas and shapes that would best fit the brief. Besides the development of the overall shape, I needed to design it in a positive and negative look in its color, as it would change shape while responding.

I am a firm believer that, more often than not, “less is more.” There is a term in traditional art that I like to use “complex simplicity”, meaning you don’t really want to make it so simple that it looks boring, but you also don’t want to make it too complex so that it looks chaotic. It is a balancing act to find the sweet spot. In this case, it was relatively easy to follow it.

It was certainly interesting to try to play, and mix different low polygon shapes, and sometimes come up with unexpected results. Nowadays, sometimes there is a tendency to give too much control to “play aspect,” with all the modern tech available. I believe whether you come up with a good idea by accident or intentionally, a good artistic judgement is necessary either way.

Art Director Cody Gramstad

This image was designed to illustrate the process of transformation from the past’s aesthetic to the modern world’s. This was achieved using a gradient across the scene, transitioning from screen left to right, which defines layers of change between the original Tron aesthetic and its contemporary counterpart.  

The process involved taking a modern office space available on location and simplifying all its assets to align with the technical limitations of the 1980s. Subsequently, those key assets were replaced and blended using Tron lines until they evolved into the high-fidelity assets of the real world. High-frequency cubes and digital detail were used to help smooth the transition in complexity between the two states.

The image’s development involved a two-stage iteration process. The initial stage focused on integrating 1980s Tron world design details. The challenge was to clearly introduce these features without compromising the overall compositional goals. For the Tron design, we concentrated on achieving a level of detail that felt appropriately simple yet visually distinct for the space. The second stage addressed the compositional design, which was initially too complex. The combined visual information from both visible worlds and the particle laser effects created an overly complicated scene. We resolved this by employing several techniques: gradating all secondary information out of the Grid space, reducing reflection clarity, and ensuring the lines retained sufficient value contrast for clear reading. Finally, we used this same gradation effect to soften the right side of the frame, allowing Ares to be seen as clearly as possible.

The most rewarding part of designing this image was managing the sheer chaos. With such a busy scene, the challenge lay in simplifying and ordering the elements, essentially solving a complex visual puzzle to bring structure to the multitude of details.

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See the complete gallery of concept art from Tron: Ares here on ILM.com.

Learn more about the ILM Art Department.

Take an extensive deep dive into ILM’s creation of the original X-wing fighter miniatures for Star Wars: A New Hope.

By Jason Eaton

50 years ago, in an industrial park far, far away, an unassuming team of young artists and craftspeople created something that would capture the hearts and imaginations of an entire generation, becoming an icon for decades to come: the X-wing fighter. 

Seemingly against all odds, these men and women would work in what was initially a bare-bones environment. It was a warehouse with no air conditioning in a lackluster part of town. It would bake in the summer with little shade. There were hardly any trees, just taco stands and aviation supply shops. Cinderblock buildings with no labs, institutes, or studios nearby. And yet, with no fanfare, and against all odds, magic was made. 

A roughly two-foot miniature made of acrylic, styrene, metal, and resin, the X-wing was the on-screen vessel that carried heroes to triumph. It moved impossibly before our eyes against surreal pinwheeling star fields, giving a sense of desperate energy. For myself, a child at the time, it would become a totem for my imagination, never really leaving my brain, to one day push my curiosity as an adult: What exactly were the models made from, and how did they come to be?

I collected various die-cast and plastic toys and built the model kit of the X-wing. I was captured by a design that was both rugged and sleek. Building that first model of the X-wing was not only an enjoyable pastime, but it also began the building of skill sets, and it was a way to imagine myself as an ILM modelmaker. I found incredible joy in building impossibly realistic-looking ships that inadvertently created our modern Star Wars mythology and redefined a multigenerational, visual science fiction “style guide.”

The onset of the internet facilitated a fan community with a shared curiosity about ILM and its creations. I found my tribe through gatherings, parties, and, eventually, ILM artisans’ living rooms. My curiosity transformed into a personal mission to preserve and record the nuanced details behind these Star Wars miniatures – specifically the processes, dimensions, and stories that inspired me as an artist. The X-wing was not just a focus, but an artistic and intellectual obsession.

Origins: Colin Cantwell

Memory alone is understandably an unreliable narrator, and over the last 50 years, the storied history of the X-wing has been both apocryphal and often contradictory. Focusing on period photographs, paired with the recollections from people who were there for production, we can establish a more comprehensive understanding of the X-wing’s history. I always value the time and generosity of those helping me on my journey. Sadly, many of the artists and incredible people who were part of the production’s journey are no longer with us, and my sense of urgency about this “mission” has only grown stronger. The photographic record is a window into this incredible time, when no one realized how they were changing the world of entertainment. Each photo contains little glimpses of magic being made in an extraordinarily unassuming environment.

Colin Cantwell was the first to put glue to model kit, creating a series of prototype designs very early in 1975 from George Lucas’s thumbnails and descriptions. It was fascinating to talk with Colin about the X-wing, as his mind saw objects and concepts in uniquely creative ways. His model was built from the body of a Jeb Allen’s “Praying Mantis” top fuel dragster model kit, with wings hinged at the center rear of the fuselage that would spring open in an “X” shape. He said he imagined it as a fast craft and as a Wild West gunslinger. The “X” was analogous to the quick draw of a pistol at high noon.

The Cantwell concept models were unsuitable for filming, however, as internal armatures were not included for support or mounting to production equipment, and the details were too fine for the blue screen compositing system being developed by ILM at the time.

Refining the X-wing Design

What was the launch point for the iconic ILM X-wing fighter design that we know today? Enter art director Joe Johnston, who worked with the modelmakers and technicians to bring what was internally dubbed “Project 504” to life, with the first unfinished “hero” example being completed in December 1975. “Hero” meaning a filming miniature that would have the best fit, finish, and all of the adornments needed for specific shots, as opposed to a “pyro,” which was a simpler construction built for pyrotechnic detonation. But before we talk about blowing up models, let’s back up a little to the early fall in that industrial park in Van Nuys.

From a series of photographs and an internal document tracking the progress of each project with names assigned to tasks, David Beasley carved the X-wing fuselage as a “buck” from wood. This first prototype fuselage appears to be made from a top and bottom shell, both in vacuum-formed styrene. There was an internal armature made from machined aluminum by Grant McCune, with David Grell assisting, with the wings being made from a combination of machined acrylic and sheet styrene. Motors and some, if not all, of the electrical wiring are in place.

Notable landmarks of this prototype include the half-circle engine intakes we see in Ralph McQuarrie’s paintings from the time, as well as a much sleeker underside rear fuselage. The nose was a different shape, as this build followed the idea that the midline of the body would contour slightly upwards to meet the nose, as depicted in the McQuarrie painting. Most importantly for the design process, this initial series of parts shows that the back half of the lower fuselage is cut away, as the internal armature and motors would need more room to inhabit the shells. David Jones recalled this being a running design change. A careful examination of any hero X-wing will show that quite a bit of material needed to be cut from the sides of the fuselage as well, with long slots to allow the wing brackets to travel. This is very apparent when the wings are closed, but nearly invisible when these models have their wings open. It is a quirk of the hero design that is rarely noted or seen. 

The next series of photographs shows a “proper” hero build in progress, now with a resin top shell, fully enlarged vacuum-formed lower shell, full-circle-shaped engine intakes, and the various details and engines being glued in place.

The Original Model: Blue 1

In December 1975, Lorne Peterson, Jon Erland, and Steve Gawley were working on wings and detailing three days before Christmas. Joe Johnston painted the model with Gawley. The model is Blue 1, the first X-wing ILM would build. It features a blue paint scheme instead of red, no cockpit or pilot figure, no droid, and no working electronics. But it is photographed in this state and shipped to production designer John Barry at Elstree Studios in England on December 26, to be used as reference for blueprinting and constructing the full-sized X-wing fighter set piece on a sound stage.

The images above appear to show Blue 1 and the Red Y-wing (also sent, in an incomplete state to England), along with a clay mock-up of a pilot and canopy/cockpit. This sequence of shots seems to show possible angles and focal lengths to inform the eventual build of the 1:1 cockpit sets that actors would be filmed in.

This model will be returned to ILM in the new year, and Grant McCune will finish the electrical plumbing. The model will be completed by breaking the canopy framing to allow a cockpit and a pilot to be inserted. The frame is somewhat restored with a styrene strip, and the model is redressed as the Red 2 Hero. This will go on to be the miniature that is photographed by Richard Edlund and composited with a TIE fighter behind it, featured on thousands of lunchboxes and promotional materials.

The “Hero” X-wing

So what makes a Hero X-wing a “hero”? And what is a pyro? For the sake of clarity, let’s start by focusing on miniatures made for the first film. There were four Hero X-wings made, with a fifth unfinished example that appears to have stayed with the model shop through the production of the original trilogy. The four X-wings are painted to represent Red 1, Red 2 (formerly Blue 1), Red 3, and Red 5. Each fighter model is bespoke. Detail elements were patterned using styrene, acrylic, and various pieces from model kits, which were all then molded and cast, such as the rear butt plate, top “droid strip,” nose, droid, the two-piece cockpit, pilot, and elements of the laser cannons.

The armature was round metal stock, threaded at either end. This rod ran from nose to tail with the threaded holes providing the front and back mounts. Situated underneath the astromech droid is an octagonal-shaped block with threads on the top, sides, and bottom. Set screws are always present in one of these mounts, serving to anchor the octagonal block to the main armature rod. Behind this block sits the “scissor” mechanism for the wings, which consists of brackets that hold two motors in place along the underside, with the brackets ending with “L” shaped metal that serves as the main surface to affix the wings. 

The motors each have a toothed gear that sits against a larger brass central gear parallel to the octagonal mount, and it appears that the motors, when engaged, would “crawl” along the surface of the central gear (which did not move) and this would open or close the scissor mechanism. At some point, someone added screws to the wing mounts with a rubber band stretched between them, which aided in the wings’ opening. It appears that the motors may have been underpowered to pull the wings open reliably or smoothly. Dennis Muren recalls that the motors worked smoothly when he filmed the models on stage, and agreed that the rubber band would have provided tension in the mechanism.

Plumbing made from surgical tubing was used to distribute cool air to the hot lights used at the time, and an electrical wiring loom was also created. Four sets of six wires were positioned at mount points – front, back, port, and starboard. These wires were capped with brass female pin plugs, and are very visible along the sides of the miniatures just aft of the canopy, and on the underside of the Sherman tank detail on the butt plate. These wires would provide power to the motors and the lighting to the four bulbs inside the engines at the exhaust. 

GE aircraft indicator bulbs were utilized for the engine lighting and were most likely sourced from Kasper Sales across the street on Valjean Avenue, according to Paul Huston. The bulbs are seated behind Aavid heatsinks (remember, the lights used at the time would be incandescent and would become hot), and in the center of the heatsink, a circle of hand-cut red lighting gel is glued to give the color to the engines that you see on screen. Curiously, the same bulbs are found inside the laser cannons, torpedo tubes, and, from an examination of Red 5, the cockpit. Muren doesn’t think that these lights were ultimately utilized, and the supposition for some is that they would be keys for the rotoscope artists to follow when animating things like the laser fire.

The wings on the Hero builds were constructed from machined acrylic and styrene. The outer face of the wing starts with an acrylic “box” that mounts to the armature’s “scissor” mechanism with two bolts. This box sits atop the main wing itself, which is made from 1/16th acrylic on the top and sides, and .040 styrene for the inner facing wing. This creates a hollow along the length of the wing. The wing box is dressed with a large Holgate and Reynolds HO Scale brick sheet panel, which is long out of production and prized by contemporary Star Wars model makers as it also appears in small rectangle chips elsewhere on X-wings and other filming miniatures. 

The acrylic box at the base of the wing also serves as the main mount for the engines, which are made from half of a 1/144 Saturn V rocket’s third stage and half of an engine bell (large and small sizes), 1/32nd Phantom turkey feathers and engine halves (cut up, reassembled, dressed with kit parts and in some cases molded and cast), Aurora Sealab pieces, styrene, and acrylic. The back half of this assembly has a machined metal tube with those aforementioned Aavid heatsinks inside. This metal tube is encased by the Phantom engine halves, which were patterned and cast (and curiously, in the case of Blue 1/Red 2, are uniquely patterned). This top wing ends with a mount for the laser cannons, which is a cast resin plate. 

As it turns out, no two Hero X-wings were built exactly the same, so plating details and even the Saturn V pieces will vary from wing to wing and miniature to miniature. Even the small engine bell halves inside the engine’s “intakes” will have different pieces on the same model.

Laser cannons are made from a cylindrical assembly (cast resin in at least two heros) that features unique chip/panel detailing, back caps that are recessed to varying degrees on each build, and a cannon made from telescoping brass tubing (and in one instance, machined acrylic). The tips have a small resin-and-styrene “emitter” assembly, with the smallest-diameter brass tube creating the tip. On Red 1, there is solid red acrylic inside the laser cannons. On Red 3, a length of fiber optic material pokes out slightly. Both, we assume, would be lit by the bulbs inside the laser cannons, which sit inside the two stacked Aavid heatsinks on each cannon. These cannons are mounted on the wings with 3/16th brass tubing, with the wiring from their bulbs traveling down the tube mount, and through the wing plate hollow described below.

The inner wing plate features two cutouts. Plastruct “C” channel, styrene, and model kit parts were added to suggest the idea of mechanical detail. While the wing is oriented in this position, it would be easier to see the rest of this mechanical detail sitting in the wing boxes’ hollow. There are two detail plates from the Sealab inside this box, and they seem to sit opposite each other in each wing, top to bottom. The majority of the box’s space is filled with another Phantom engine half, either a patterned casting or a section of the styrene base part that was not used elsewhere. 

Surgical tubing is visible here. It starts at the end of the metal tube inside the engine assembly up top, travels through the Saturn V’s third stage half, and emerges below into the wing box hollow, punching out of the Phantom half to become visible, and then directly into the body. Hero birds have one or two “cages” from the Sealab, adding to the idea that this is a functional engine area. Half of a Sealab’s air tank piece caps it all off and hides much of the surgical tubing and bolt heads.

Interesting, lesser-known wing features include a chamfered edge on the top of each wing’s leading edge. This has been somewhat obscured on Hero Red 1 by the reflective tape applied to these models on the leading and trailing edges of the wings. This tape shows hand-drawn pencil lines suggesting panel lines, a technique seen in some areas on these models, including the rear portions of the engines and the rear of the angled box that the engine assemblies rest on. 

In speaking with Dennis Muren and Richard Edlund about the challenges in the revolutionary blue screen and compositing process they were refining at the time, both explained that when a model moves in certain ways and creates motion blur, thinner areas are prone to disappearing as the lighting drops off. So for the X-wing, this reflective tape was an attempt to ensure enough light would define the wings to keep them from disappearing during the compositing process. Muren also recalls experiments in which they would intensify the front lighting on a model, as a more dynamic movement would be programmed into it. He said they tried many things, and then analyzed the next day during dailies. If it didn’t work, they would abandon the idea.

The top shell, as stated before, is a cast resin. An examination of a surviving unused casting features faint panel-line engravings, an indentation for the “Droid Strip” to be placed behind the cockpit, and a solid back wall. The reverse shows two thicker rectangular stand-offs on the inside-facing surface that aided in affixing the top shell to the armature, with two screws puttied over. Over time, these puttied circles have, in some cases, fallen away, revealing screw heads along the top of the fuselage. 

The wall thickness of this casting would be seen when the back wall was cut away to create a lip around the inset butt plate resin casting, as well as the wall thickness of the canopy bracing, which was made by cutting and filing material to the etched lines that described them – essentially what would be canopy glass, but in this instance, negative space. This explains why the back window on each of these models was uniquely shaped, as there was no surface etch to follow. 

The cockpit was two cast resin pieces, with a pilot made from a figure from a 1/24th Harrier model kit, modified to feature a futuristic helmet. Then arms from other 1/24th kits were used, which again makes identifying the source kits a bit of a scavenger hunt for a researcher. The pilot castings were used in both hero builds (painted in multiple colors) and Pyro builds (painted a solid dark primer grey), with the cockpits being solid dark primer grey in both versions. Neither reflected the designs of the 1:1 sets and props seen in the live-action footage.

The lower shell is a vacuum-formed piece of styrene that was hand-scribed, with the side torpedo tube openings hand-cut and located by cutting brass tubes at angles and grafting them into place. Curiously, at the ends of these tubes, you will find those small incandescent bulbs. The handmade nature of these landmarks means that every one of the hero X-wings has unique panel lines, as well as unique “chip detailing,” which are small rectangular pieces of .010 styrene placed along wing and fuselage surfaces to help catch the light on set. 

The vacuum-forming process creates a thinner-walled piece the deeper the draw is, meaning that for these lower shells, the wall thickness tapers to a very thin edge at the bottom rear of the fuselage. This is a signature look unique to the Hero X-wings. A nose cone finishes off the fuselage, which was cast in one piece and grafted into place in the front, with the gaps puttied and contoured over. Each nose was sliced in two at a slightly different spot, creating a permanently attached mount area on the body, with the separated front cone acting as the front armature mount cover. The nose cone has a proud cylinder and two brass locating pins that fit into corresponding holes on the front of the fuselage. When removed, the six power port female pin plugs can be seen encircling the hole to access the armature threads, three on each side.

Adding Detail

These models were all painted using automotive paints, Floquil enamel railroad paints, and primers from companies such as Nu Finish. Much has been said about the process over the past fifty years, and a fair amount of it can be contradictory. It wasn’t until a conversation I had with Dave Jones in the late 2010s that the proverbial light bulb clicked on, when he made an off-hand comment about how (paraphrasing) “everyone was experimenting and doing their own thing with the painting.” 

That one observation neatly explained why some were painted with black primer and some with grey primer. Some were base-coated with Hot Rod White, which is a creamy warm white, and some were base-coated with Reefer White, a brighter white comparatively. This also neatly explains why Red 1 is so bright overall, and why Red 3 was warmer, even “muddier” in places. 

Floquil made two very similar red colors, and it appears that both were used to make the stripe details. Lorne Peterson and others have described using Scotch-Brite and/or sandpaper for processes such as sanding back finishes to reveal the dark primer underneath, masking fluid applications for “chipping” detail, and varying the color on wing and body panels. Other processes included masking areas with tape and painting diluted washes; adding decals from Micromark (and other kits the shop used for miniature construction); applying dry transfers of small rectangles in black and dark grey with hand-cut frisket masks; and airbrushing misted coats and streaks.

Everything was used to varying degrees to create these unique models akin to the WWI Flying Circus. Each X-wing had recognizable painted landmarks, which deepened the “used universe” look and feel that made Star Wars as a whole feel so “real” to the viewer.

There was even an attempt to include “canopy glass” in some shots of the models on stage. Peterson remembers using slide glass, and it appears there are remnants of a tinted gel material on the surviving Hero Red 1. Some stage photos show this canopy glass, and if you look closely at any surviving X-wing, you will see remnants of adhesive or missing paint from where these panels were removed. It is usually mistaken for weathering, as it indeed looks the part.

The “Pyro” Models

With the complexities of the X-wing Hero fighters, how did ILM then simplify the process for the Pyro models? In an interview after the film’s release, McCune stated there were nine Pyros made. These would have to be easier and quicker to make, given financial and time considerations. In speaking at length over the course of multiple years with Dave Jones, he explained about the master pattern he helped make for these Pyro versions of the X-wing. 

Returning to the photographic sequence of events, the Pyros were an all-hands affair, with Lorne Peterson, Paul Huston, and Dave Jones constructing and assembling the Pyro builds and a “first wave” of Pyro X-wings painted by Joe Johnston, featuring a level of care and sophistication that was given to the hero builds. These well-painted Pyros were photographed by Richard Edlund and serve as a wonderful preservation of some of the work that was quite literally destroyed to get the pyrotechnic shots. 

Many have described that the initial Pyros did not result in the explosions they wanted for the shots. Later Pyros would have to be made and would be more hastily constructed. Infamously, at least one, had “sticks” as stand-ins for the laser cannons, which made it into a final shot. It can still be seen in the current version of the film (look for Red 10’s demise for the shot).

The Pyro master pattern was created by taking a Hero top and bottom shell, mating them with the torpedo tubes, and grafting in a nose cone. The wing root area was fitted with a fixed wing mount, constructed in the open “X” mode, and then panel lines and chips were applied. This assembly was then cut vertically, so that the body was now a left and right shell. Dave Jones then poured liquid resin into the inside of this pattern to strengthen everything from behind. The thinking being that the weight of the wings would help to quite literally pull the body apart when they exploded. 

Wings were constructed similarly to the Hero wings, but any undercuts were filled in on the underside, and the wings overall were slightly shorter (in the area where they ultimately attach to the hull). Laser cannons and engine assemblies were in brass, but also constructed and cast as simpler, more complete assemblies, and then everything was molded and cast.

This meant that every Pyro X-wing would lock in the locations of the nose, the torpedo tubes, the angle of the “X” wing deployment (they are noticeably a wider splay on the Pyros), the panel lines, and the chip detail. The body is overall shorter than a Hero and surprisingly skinnier as well, as there was width lost to the kerf of the physical saw blade used to cut the body in two, and then again but to a lesser degree when assembled, as the cast halves would have had their mating surfaces sanded slightly once cast, to remove any irregularities/flashing, or to ensure a flat plane. Some seem to have been constructed without a butt plate casting, and seemingly backfilled with foam so they could slide onto a C-Stand. On stage, they found that there would be better results if the bodies were pre-scored to break apart into smaller pieces, and surviving fragments will sometimes show these odd zigzag shapes carved into the castings.

Over the years, photographs have helped identify these pyros. Red 1, Red 3, Red 4, Red 6, Red 10, and Red 12 have been identified. Red 1 closely followed the Hero’s paint job, but at some point was partially detonated, and then was repaired and partially repainted. Curiously, two more stripes were added to it and the Hero, to make it appear as Red 3. Red 3 bears little resemblance to the Hero Red 3, and Red 6 seems to have been detonated and then donated some of its parts, becoming Red 10. The stripes top out at 6 on the wings, and for 10 and 12, ILM simply took a thin length of additional tape when masking for paint, and cut the 6 bars in two, so that when painted, they became shorter stacked markings. 

Many pieces of Pyro X-Wings have surfaced over the years. Some have been positively identified as one of those mentioned above. But many pieces have no photographic reference, which perhaps speaks to the speed at which the later Pyro builds were created. 

These Pyro molds (and castings pulled after the film, which were themselves used to mold and cast again) are where all “lineage” post-production castings originate, including the first licensed replica created by Icons in the 1990s. When compared to a production pyro casting from 1976, dimensional shrinkage will be noticeable, making the Heros look massive in comparison! 

These kinds of details and observations are what drive people like me to learn as much as possible about the filming miniatures of Star Wars. Every new piece of information about the construction of these filming miniatures would encourage me and others to refine recreations of the X-wing miniatures, and there is no greater satisfaction as a modelmaker than to see how close the builder community has gotten as we have continuously improved the builds over the last twenty-five years. Part archaeology, part artistry, and part friendship, the journey to get to the center of these models has been illuminating and gratifying. 

The amount of heartfelt thanks to individuals is massive, but I would be remiss in not specifically mentioning Lorne Peterson, Dave Jones, Bill George, Dennis Muren, Paul Huston, Jon Erland, Gene Kozicki, Richard Edlund, John Goodson, Sean House, Hiroshi Sumi, Ed Minto, Craig Underwood, Bryan Babich, Mike Salzo, Dave Mandel, and my supernaturally-cool-with-this-stuff wife, Lisa Eaton. You can find a few X-wing replicas I have made here: www.jasoneatonstudio.com.

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Releasing January 13, 2026, the landmark book is now available for pre-order.

By Lucas O. Seastrom

Although Ian Failes was surprised when offered the chance to write Industrial Light & Magic: 50 Years of Innovation, he’d seemingly been preparing for it much of his life. 

Growing up just south of Sydney, Australia, Failes was an avid fan of ILM productions, including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series, the Back to the Future trilogy (1985-90), and Jurassic Park (1993). But it was 1994’s Forrest Gump that piqued his curiosity about the visual effects craft. Watching a behind-the-scenes documentary included with the film’s VHS release, Failes became enraptured with the process of how these visual effects marvels were created by the ILM team.

“I saw plenty of films growing up, but I didn’t really understand that visual effects was an industry,” he tells ILM.com. “As you see this behind-the-scenes material, you realize that people actually work on this stuff. It was towards the end of high school that I started to be obsessed with visual effects, and ILM in particular.”

Failes admits “I don’t think I’ve reread a book as much as I have Into the Digital Realm,” in reference to the 1996 publication about ILM by Mark Cotta Vaz and Patricia Rose Duignan. That book was the second in an ongoing series showcasing ILM’s story, which has also included Thomas G. Smith’s The Art of Special Effects (1986) and Pamela Glintenkamp’s The Art of Innovation (2011). Failes’s own 50 Years of Innovation from Lucasfilm Publishing and Abrams Books carries the tradition forward with its release in January 2026.

A Self-Taught Storyteller

“Those early ILM books were huge parts of my formation as a visual effects journalist, but also just to spur on my interest in visual effects before that,” says Failes. His current vocation as founder and editor of the visual effects publication, befores & afters, was inspired by his passion for reading about the art form in magazines like the iconic Cinefex. Studying law and information technology, he began his career as a lawyer while blogging about visual effects on the side. 

“In some ways, I was more obsessed with the journalism of visual effects than visual effects itself,” Failes notes. “But I am in Australia, and back then, I didn’t think it was possible to cover the visual effects industry from here. I would go to work as a lawyer, come home, and blog more about visual effects, conversing with people on the internet. Then I started doing interviews, usually at five or six a.m. from Australia, and transcribing them from a tape. Over time, it was clear to others, and then eventually to me, that that’s what I was passionate about. It wasn’t clear how I could have an income and a career from this. But then I started to find ways to do it.”

Initially working for the publication fxguide, Failes is largely self-taught both as a journalist and in his knowledge of filmmaking craft. He authored the book Masters of FX in 2015, which included interviews with a number of ILM visual effects supervisors like Dennis Muren, Scott Farrar, and John Knoll. He soon founded befores & afters as his own independent outlet. “Celebrating the artists” is his chief priority.

“Personally, I think visual effects is an art form that doesn’t always get its due,” explains Failes. “My mandate with befores & afters is simply to report how a movie, a sequence, or a shot was created. I’ve found that it’s a really good antidote to some of the discourse online, which can include misinformation about how things were made. If I can report it accurately, then my goal is to be the source for accuracy in the visual effects community, not that anyone else isn’t doing that. But I really want to try and rally against the misinformation. The artists do such incredible work. They’re a big part of these huge films that we get to watch.”

Crafting ILM’s Narrative

“I don’t think I’ve ever said ‘yes’ faster than when I was asked to write this book,” Failes recalls with a laugh. ILM’s 50th anniversary “crept up on me,” as he says. “Visual effects companies don’t normally last that long. This isn’t a common thing.”

In discussing the book’s story with ILM’s leadership and publicity team, Failes worked to identify the company’s many eras, each full of creativity and transformation. ILM didn’t reach its 50th anniversary without constantly embracing changes in technology, filmmaking trends, and an expanding, global industry. The company itself has played a significant role in shaping that industry, making ILM’s story a 50-year history of the visual effects art form in itself. In the end, Failes is pleased with the resulting book in which readers “can see the progression of work and changes over the years,” as he explains.

“There are great stories about people embracing change,” Failes says. “There were artists who were practical modelers or painters, and they realized that they needed to move into the digital realm to keep their jobs. As those individuals had to adapt, ILM as a whole has had to as well. The good thing is that ILM has jumped on big changes all the time. Digital was one of those, but virtual production is another one, with ILM StageCraft and how that’s been used on The Mandalorian [2019-23] and elsewhere.

“What interests me is that these changes were not brand new inventions,” Failes continues. “There are all these nice threads in ILM’s history linking a past development to what they’re currently doing. The virtual production work has its roots in older rear projection methods, and ILM has dabbled with this kind of thing a lot over the years. So many different tools and techniques come together. Because ILM is a place full of innovation, they can put the best and brightest onto these projects and make them happen. So I hope that when people read the book, they can see that we’ve connected some of those threads together.”

It’s All in the Details

Conducting a number of original interviews for 50 Years of Innovation, Failes was able to go deep into some long-held questions, such as the origins of digital compositing in the late 1980s and early ’90s. “Many of us know about these three huge films – The Abyss [1989], Terminator 2 [1991], and Jurassic Park [1993] – and the incredible innovations achieved in CG modeling, animation, and rendering of different creatures,” the author says. “But an enormous part of why they worked was because of digital compositing. 

“I got to chat with [visual effects supervisor] Dennis Muren about this topic,” Failes continues, “things I haven’t read much about before, including the methods created for ingesting film and outputting digital images back out onto film, plus the actual compositing approach. The book has allowed me to fill in some of these details that I didn’t know.”

Throughout the book, many sidebars expand on various details from specific tools and methods to characters and films. “Members of the ILM Publicity team contributed to these sidebars,” notes Failes. “They’re incredible gems of information that haven’t really been talked about elsewhere.”  

Pulling it all together are upwards of 1,000 images from the ILM archives, something Failes considers to be the book’s marquee feature. “The images involved a team of people at ILM spending countless hours poring through image libraries, scanning 35mm slides and negatives, and then captioning all of them. The images really make this book what it is, a coffee table book that you can flip through a thousand times because you’ll see so many cool things.”

Supporting Voices

ILM’s founder, George Lucas, contributed a brand new foreword to 50 Years of Innovation that captures the spirit of the intrepid company in its earliest years. Filmmaker Bryce Dallas Howard also penned an introduction, bringing not only her lifelong admiration of ILM’s work, but her direct experience collaborating with the team as a director on The Mandalorian and other Lucasfilm series. “She’s really familiar with ILM’s process, in particular StageCraft,” adds Failes, “so we have a filmmaker’s perspective.”

ILM’s current senior vice president and general manager, Janet Lewin, penned the book’s afterword. Lewin helped to craft the book’s story and perspective. “Janet herself has a long history with ILM,” notes Failes. “She is a champion for artists and many of the changes ILM has had to go through over the years. It’s important for her to be a big part of the book.

“Janet really cares about how artists feel inside the company,” Failes adds. “That’s a bit of a secret weapon of this book. It’s not just about the films and shows that the company has worked on, but it’s also about what it’s like inside ILM. What’s the culture? Why has this studio persevered for so long? It’s there in the book, and that comes in part from Janet’s influence.”

Capturing the ILM Spirit

Over five decades and some 500 productions across film, television, theme parks, and interactive and immersive experiences, ILM’s story leaves a lot to cover, perhaps even too much for any one volume. It’s something Failes laments on behalf of his fellow visual effects fans. “That will always be in the back of my mind,” he explains, “and I apologize to those who were looking for a major discussion about a film that isn’t in there. We can’t cover everything, so maybe we’ll just have to do another [laughs].”

The number of ILM shows has particularly swelled in recent decades with the company’s global expansion that began some 20 years ago in Singapore, and now extends to studios in Vancouver, London, Sydney, and Mumbai. Having visited a number of ILM’s locations, Failes is impressed by the company’s ability to maintain its culture between each studio. “You feel like you’re at ILM at each one. That’s not always easy to do. The book showcases ILMers from these different parts of the world.”

As the industry’s oldest visual effects studio, ILM is also arguably its best known, in part as a result of its part within Lucasfilm and association with Star Wars and George Lucas. But that’s not the whole story, according to Failes. 

“ILM’s notoriety comes from constantly proving their skill and innovation,” the author says, “as well as their collaboration with filmmakers. Visual effects is a service industry, but it’s also an art form. Film and TV are amazing ways of combining lots of different art forms, and ILM has a seat at the table, and that comes through in all of their amazing projects.”

From Pirates to Matte Paintings

Whether they’re experienced artists working in the visual effects industry, or brand new to the craft, readers of 50 Years of Innovation will encounter a menagerie of iconic characters and spellbinding visuals, from Yoda and E.T. to the Hulk and Davy Jones. The latter pirate captain has always been a favorite of Failes. “There’s something about the combination of Bill Nighy’s performance and ILM’s digital character work led by John Knoll and Hal Hickel. It’s so watchable, and it stands out in the book.”

Another personal highlight for Failes is the chance to write more about the infant Sunny Baudelaire from A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004). “When that film came out, so many people didn’t realize that in certain scenes she’s completely digital,” says Failes. “Who knows how ILM pulled that off [laughs], though we do cover it in the book, of course. The integration of that character is so effective. The big films are in the book, but people might be surprised at some of the smaller projects in there that are big moments in their own right, and that includes Sunny Baudelaire.”

One of the most “magical” elements for Failes is the traditional matte paintings created by ILM artists in the photochemical era. “A lot of people who’ve just come to visual effects cannot quite believe that it was actually painted on glass or some other surface. Sometimes it’s a full painting in the final film, sometimes it’s a painting integrated with live action, and sometimes it’s a moving shot. The fact that that kind of work could be done pre-digital still just blows my mind.”

All of this and much, much more is to be found in Industrial Light & Magic: 50 Years of Innovation, from Lucasfilm Publishing and Abrams Books, and written by Ian Failes. The book is available everywhere January 13, 2026.

Pre-order the book now from Abrams, Bookshop.org, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. 

Read more from Ian Failes at befores & afters.

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Lucas O. Seastrom is the editor of ILM.com and Skysound.com, as well as a contributing writer and historian for Lucasfilm.

The actor who voiced and supplied the motion capture performance for Grakkus the Hutt opens up about his work on the mixed reality playset.

By Jay Stobie

Star Wars: Beyond Victory – A Mixed Reality Playset immerses users in the Star Wars galaxy, crafting an interactive experience that can be explored through three distinct game modes – Adventure, Arcade, and Playset. Beyond Victory is currently on sale on Meta Quest 3 and 3S headsets, and ILM.com had a chance to catch up with actor Bobby Moynihan, who voiced and provided the motion capture performance for Grakkus the Hutt. From brushing up on Grakkus’ origins in Star Wars comics to describing his collaboration with Industrial Light & Magic, Moynihan shares his insights on creating the mixed reality playset.

Grakkus the Hutt, a crime lord whose muscular frame sits perched atop cybernetic legs, made his debut in 2015’s Star Wars #9. An avid Star Wars fan, Moynihan was aware of the character prior to taking on the role in Beyond Victory, telling ILM.com, “I knew of the character from the comics. I knew he had robot spider legs. I knew he had a lightsaber necklace.” Once he discovered he’d be bringing Grakkus to life, Moynihan dove deeper into the lore surrounding the Hutt. “I bought the comics and read them,” Moynihan states before jovially reflecting on his early impressions of Grakkus by quipping, “I thought I was not nearly as jacked as I needed to be.”

When it came time for his motion capture collaboration with ILM, Moynihan describes the process in a way only he can, explaining, “I got to do motion capture sitting in an office chair on wheels being pushed by a man with a mask on. I highly recommend it if you get the chance. It was very cool to see it in real time. It felt very Star Wars. I was in heaven. The most challenging part was not peeing for a long time because of the jump suit. And even that wasn’t that bad.”

Asked how he determined the manner in which Grakkus would move, Moynihan declares, “That’s the best part. I don’t have any legs so the extremely talented animators helped me a great deal. But the upper body… that’s all Moynihan.” The actor’s praise for the ILMers doesn’t stop there, as he reveals what made working with ILM and Beyond Victory director Jose Perez III so special, relaying, “I love working with people who adore what they do. Who really truly love the universe they are working and creating in. Jose is the best!”

On a lighter note, Moynihan jests about the traits he feels he infused into his Grakkus performance, teasing that his contributions include, “Lumbering movement. Slight back pain and male pattern baldness.” When it comes to Moynihan’s favorite Grakkus attribute that had already been established in the comics, the actor focuses on the collection of Jedi lightsaber hilts the Hutt wears around his neck. “That saber necklace is a STATEMENT PIECE,” Moynihan proclaims.

As much as he delighted in voicing and supplying the motion capture performance for Grakkus the Hutt, Moynihan’s enthusiasm for Beyond Victory now takes the form of enjoying the mixed reality playset from a player’s perspective. “I have been having an absolute blast playing this game. It’s so fun to be fully immersed in a universe you love,” Moynihan asserts. Summarizing his reaction to seeing Grakkus in the final release, Moynihan emphatically concludes, “Grakkus. Is. Huge.”

Star Wars: Beyond Victory – A Mixed Reality Playset is currently on sale on Meta Quest 3 and 3S headsets.

Read more about Beyond Victory on ILM.com.

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Jay Stobie (he/him) is a writer, author, and consultant who has contributed articles to ILM.com, Skysound.com, Star Wars Insider, StarWars.com, Star Trek Explorer, Star Trek Magazine, and StarTrek.com. Jay loves sci-fi, fantasy, and film, and you can learn more about him by visiting JayStobie.com or finding him on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms at @StobiesGalaxy.

Avatar: Fire and Ash, Jurassic World: Rebirth, and Sinners are among the selected films.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the shortlists for productions in 12 categories at the upcoming 98th Academy Awards, including Best Visual Effects. Industrial Light & Magic contributed to all 10 films shortlisted for the category. The films include:

Avatar: Fire and Ash

The Electric State

F1: The Movie

Frankenstein

Jurassic World: Rebirth

The Lost Bus

Sinners

Superman

Tron: Ares

Wicked: For Good

Voting for nominations will take place between January 12 and 16, and subsequently announced on January 22, 2026. The 98th Oscars will be held on March 15, 2026 in Hollywood. A huge congratulations to our ILM teams from around the world!

Our colleagues at Skywalker Sound have also contributed to 5 out of 10 films shortlisted for Best Sound, including Avatar: Fire and Ash, F1: The Movie, One Battle After Another, Sinners, and Superman.

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Read more about the Oscars announcement here.

And discover more about ILM’s work on The Electric State, Jurassic World: Rebirth, The Lost Bus, and Superman right here on ILM.com.

ILM.com is showcasing artwork specially chosen by members of the ILM Art Department. In this installment of a continuing series, three artists from the San Francisco and Vancouver studios share insights about their work on the 2025 Warner Bros. production, Superman.

Art Director Chris Voy

The premise for the Luthcorp escape shuttle was that it would first be seen by the audience as a command center/observation deck at the center of the skybridge between the towers of the Luthcorp building. During the escape it is revealed that the room doubles as an aircraft detaching from the structure and takes flight.

When we started on it, the overall design of the building and shuttle had been established. My task was primarily to work out the details and mechanics of how the two structures would fit together and work in a convincing way. I provided a range of iterations and options to the client but always tried to maintain the elements of the design they liked. It was a challenge to make the shuttle first believable as architecture and then as an aircraft without the former spoiling the later! 

The client provided concise tasks and great feedback with reference that made it a fun sequence for us. At one point they asked to see how the shuttle would detach, clear the tower and the engines would deploy in time without everyone inside falling hundreds of feet. I mocked up a few rough animations where we played around with timing and different ideas of how it might detach from explosive hard points like a fighter jet canopy or something. We experimented with a few variations on the idea until they were happy and could see how all the elements would work together.

Senior Art Director Alex Jaeger

I jumped into this project late to help out with some designs, one of which was the look of the Engineer’s “nanite tech,” and how it took from one part of her body to form another part. The challenge was to come up with believable solutions for where to take away, and how much, and what would the resulting areas look like. 

My goal was to create a balance of removing enough material from her silhouette to create the weapons, while leaving enough in the right places so she still felt strong and capable of holding up the new weapons. I had also played with whether or not to reveal some sort of understructure or skeleton in areas.

While researching various looks, I came across some great minerals in nature that exuded a great level of design within chaos. They show how, even in the depths of the Earth, there is a design presence in the smallest of details.

Senior Concept Artist Evan Whitefield

The concept captures a defining moment that shows who Superman truly is, someone who puts saving lives above everything. In the story, he holds up a collapsing building until every last person is out of harm’s way, letting it fall on him to keep them safe. Then, through the rubble and dust, he rises. It’s the moment we see the cost of his sacrifice and the unstoppable strength of his compassion.

The composition and scale were established with a wide, low-angle shot, placing Superman small against the vast, ruined building to emphasize the enormity of his sacrifice and the weight of what he had endured. Clouds and smoke were added, carefully scaled to match the figure, reinforcing the sense of vastness. Light and atmosphere were refined, shifting from dull gray smoke to a warm, golden palette of dust and heat, tones that conveyed both the chaos of the collapse and the radiance of hope breaking through it. Finally, subtle rays of light were added, with one more pronounced, elevating the iconography as it pierced the haze and cast a long shadow framing his upward, determined stance. The effect felt almost celestial, transforming the small, central figure into a symbol of resilience and hope rising from the ruin.

Inspiration for this piece merges classic comic book iconography with modern film cinematography. It draws on the emotional power of Superman’s emergence from overwhelming danger and the idea of his strength being renewed by sunlight.

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See the complete gallery of concept art from Superman here on ILM.com.

Learn more about the ILM Art Department.

The ILM visual effects supervisor reflects on ILM’s contributions to the riveting film inspired by a compelling real-life story.

By Jay Stobie

Inspired by the events of the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, and based on Lizzie Johnson’s 2021 book “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire,” The Lost Bus (2025) follows Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) and Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera) as they attempt to shepherd 22 children to safety aboard a school bus during a chaotic evacuation. Directed by Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum [2007], Captain Phillips [2013]), who co-wrote the screenplay with Brad Ingelsby, the film puts the audience in the front seat on a harrowing ride through the awful inferno.

Industrial Light & Magic’s Dave Zaretti (WandaVision [2021], Willow [2022-2023], The Acolyte [2024]) generously took time to sit down with ILM.com and discuss his role as the project’s ILM visual effects supervisor. In a wide-ranging conversation, Zaretti touches on studying real-world references, crafting intricate assets and environments, paying respect to those who endured the tragic events depicted in The Lost Bus, and much more, detailing every level of ILM’s extensive contributions to the captivating film.

Real-world References

As the ILM visual effects supervisor, Zaretti operated out of the London studio and oversaw the company’s work on the project. “I think ILM had the lion’s share of the visual effects work for the second part of the film,” Zaretti tells ILM.com. “I supervised all of the London work, and we had work from ILM’s Mumbai studio that [ILM associate visual effects supervisor] Steve Hardy supervised. My daily role was to keep an eye on the overall vision of the show and check in with Charlie Noble, the client-side visual effects supervisor.”

Noble supplied ILM with what Zaretti describes as a nearly two-hour-long “megaclip” of reference material, which helped ILM ground their visual effects shots in realism. “I’ve never had so much reference on a show,” Zaretti emphasizes, “because this event occurred in 2018, and everyone had phones and cameras. It was a very filmed event. A pickup unit also went to Paradise and filmed loads of additional footage of the actual place itself. In terms of the environment and road layouts, we spent a long time on Google Maps ensuring we got all of the turns in the road correctly.”

ILM broke up the reference megaclip into separate asset types. “We had shots within the smoke cloud, shots outside of the smoke cloud, big fires, small fires, brush fires, trees burning, houses burning, and cars burning,” Zaretti recalls. “There were fire tornadoes; I didn’t even know that was a thing! We were spoiled with references to the point where the references began to contradict each other because there’d be wind blowing in two different directions in the same piece of footage. Those contradictions actually helped us in certain scenarios. For example, during the escape sequence when the bus is winding down this thin road, there are points where we had flames licking at it from both directions to portray the danger that they were in. So, having a real reference to back up your visual effects often helps.”

Assembling Assets

The abundant reference footage proved incredibly useful; although, its varied nature also meant ILM needed to build a wealth of digital assets to fully represent the range of material. “We had about seven types of fire assets,” Zaretti says of the meticulous process. “You’d think fire would count as one thing, but no, we had small, medium, and large fires. We had traveling fire that was needed to show the spread of fire through the grass. There were several types of smoke because vegetation has a lighter smoke, while houses and cars have a darker, roiling, inky smoke.” Surprisingly, minute embers seen amidst the chaos are burning or smouldering pine cones, reflecting the heavy debris encountered throughout the 2018 fire.

“We built a CG bus, as well as the digital cars we used on the multilane Skyway. We added to the cars they already had to create a sense of everything being jammed together, with people nudging and jostling.” Though a practical bulldozer was captured on location, the ILM team lobbied Paul Greengrass to supplement a fully digital version, which Zaretti notes “looked fantastic. Our team at ILM’s Sydney studio built that for us.”

ILM constructed large environments for the project, such as Roe Road and the Skyway. “We had to build all of that. There were other environments here and there, too. We had to augment Pearson Road’s falling power cables. Paul [Greengrass] did some practically, but we added more to get a chain reaction of the cables coming down and whipping around. We did nine or ten species of trees. We had variants of each species, and for each variant, we had different strength winds going through several levels of fire. We must’ve had hundreds of tree variants in total, as well as bushes and grass. One of the biggest technical challenges was the scale of the event,” Zaretti advises.

“When it came time to design the shots, we already had these component parts and could drop them in. Then, when we needed to do a hero simulation for something in the foreground, we could simulate that,” Zaretti continues. “Our effects team was amazing, and Billy A. Copley was our effects lead. [ILM digital artist] Matthieu Chardonnet devised a really cool fire setup where, once we had a look that we liked, we could essentially paint where we’d want the fire to be on the trees. Within a few hours, we’d have a first pass of how it’d look. Normally, doing that work would’ve required a couple of days turnaround.”

Dynamic Details

Zaretti and the ILM team considered their visual effects work as another tool the director could utilize to tell this immensely important story. “Despite the fact that some of the shots are perhaps 90% visual effects, they were always supporting what had been filmed. We viewed the fire, smoke, and embers as a character,” Zaretti explains, noting that Paul Greengrass felt the ember cam shot was the film’s “Jaws moment.” “The fire is coming for you, and there’s this impending doom. It is the protagonist in the film – it’s the baddie.”

The scene in question finds the camera weaving through the forest from the fire’s perspective, as the smoke and embers close in around the trapped bus. “That was a big operation. The nature of Paul Greengrass’s dynamic camera shots meant that you never focused on anything for too long. Suddenly, you come to this calm, slow, and long piece of track material through the woods. It was entirely digital because the filmmakers wanted to completely art direct where they went. We had an environments build for our forest, which we used for the rest of the show, but we increased the resolution for this particular shot and simulated all of the grass,” Zaretti declares.

Incorporating the original 2018 fire conditions increased the scene’s realism and sparked a somber thought for the ILM artists. “The reason the event was so devastating was because the extreme winds made the fire spread, so we always had to convey a sense of high-directional wind by simulating the grass being blown. The environment looked so good, and we wanted to show it off, but it needed to be dark. We had to bring it down and use the distant firelights to illuminate it. We wanted it to feel realistic, which was enough to make it terrifying. It’s difficult because I kept getting excited about our shots – but then I reminded myself that this actually happened and must have been absolutely horrifying,” Zaretti states.

Unexpected Undertakings

ILM’s contributions to The Lost Bus consist of numerous tasks that casual audiences might not typically associate with visual effects work. When McConaughey’s character exits the bus to survey the fiery landscape surrounding it, ILM trained its efforts on a surprising feature. “The scene needed to be windy, but they didn’t have the wind machine on set at that point,” Zaretti remembers. “So, we rotoscoped the beautiful curls in Matthew’s hair and did a comp shake on those to suggest the wind was stronger than it was.”

For the sequence where the bus embarks on its final escape down a narrow road, Zaretti’s ILM artists assessed key factors relating to the fire’s intensity. “If you have too much fire, you’re just going to have a big sheet of orange. As a viewer, you need to see identifiable objects in there to give it some composition. We took a little creative license to guarantee that the audience would know what they’re seeing. Where’s the bus? Where’s the danger? We also played with the density of the smoke to allow shots to be revealed as you go along,” Zaretti divulges.

Even the digital trees were painstakingly reviewed by Zaretti and his ILM colleagues. “At the end, we started on our ‘tree assassination’ rounds. Usually, the procedural winds we added in turned out spectacularly, but they’d occasionally cause a tree to appear a bit suspect,” Zaretti reports. The ILMers searched for and removed any trees that didn’t pass their quality control test, verifying that every tree that landed on-screen behaved naturally.

Detecting Daylight

The Lost Bus reaches its cathartic crescendo when the bus finally exits the fire, traversing the edge of the smoke cloud, and emerging into the safety of daylight. “That was a neat shot, and very big. It was driven purely by reference because we had footage of people driving through smoke as it goes from black to a slightly lighter shade. Then you get a hint of daylight coming through until suddenly it’s daytime and everything seems normal,” Zaretti remarks.

“That shot was an interesting one to put together, to transition from one environment to another, as we did end up needing to go all digital. The daytime section was the same environment we built previously, but because it’s bright out, we had to confirm all the details, like the tree simulations and so on, were there. We put in the CG bus windshield with the wipers, and we had a simulation for the embers. The bus was splatting into the embers, and due to the speed of the bus, the embers sort of floated to the side and got caught underneath the windscreen wiper. All of these details helped convey the sense of travel.”

Committed to Collaboration

As the ILM visual effects supervisor on The Lost Bus, Zaretti notes that he had the honor of overseeing every ILM shot and deciding whether they were up to the company’s high standards. However, Zaretti reserves the bulk of his praise for his artists, pronouncing, “When all the work is presented in our dailies, I’ll sit in a room and see a shot for 30 seconds, and I’ll already have people from production tapping their watch to say I have to move on and keep the pace up. [laughs] The people who really know the shots and contribute are the artists that are doing them. They’ve sat there for two or three days to make the shot beautiful, and then they present it to me.”

Of his review process, Zaretti affirms, “My artists know their shots better than I do, and I’m just looking at a snapshot in time. I have a gut instinct, and I’ll say what I see, but I enjoy it when other people have opinions because I’m but one person. I cannot see all of the things, all of the time. I value having such an excellent team around me that sometimes helps me spot obvious things that I’ve missed. I’m only human, so I encourage it to be a team effort. This is how we make great work, because we’ve got great people.”

Zaretti is also keen to point out the contributions of CG supervisor Jamie Haydock, a fellow member of the ILM London studio. Haydock, as Zaretti explains, was essential to creating all of ILM’s visual effects shots. “His technical knowhow and level headedness kept everything ticking along so well, and he technically enabled the FX artists to let loose and be creative with some very tricky manipulation of our still fresh USD [Universal Scene Description] pipeline.”

Remarkable Reactions

Eight months after completing his work on The Lost Bus, Zaretti and his wife had a chance to see the finished film at a premiere. “It was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever watched, and my wife felt the same way,” Zaretti reveals. “At no point was I inspecting the visual effects, because you’re just in the story. Paul Greengrass has a documentary style that doesn’t allow you to stop and pause and analyze. It’s not too much or over the top – it’s just storytelling. It’s a perfect example of supporting visual effects doing what needs to be done – and doing it well.

”Speaking of the film as a whole, Zaretti proclaims, “I am immensely proud of The Lost Bus. Firstly, because of the work that we did. Secondly, I do think we’ve respected the event itself and what happened that day. Thirdly, it’s a really good film. Visual effects aside, it’s a nice change to work on something that’s so grounded. When I’m working on a fantasy project, it doesn’t have the degree of gravitas that this one did. This was a terrible event. People lost their lives, and the people who survived will never forget what’s happened. It was important that we did it justice.”

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Jay Stobie (he/him) is a writer, author, and consultant who has contributed articles to ILM.com, Skysound.com, Star Wars Insider, StarWars.com, Star Trek Explorer, Star Trek Magazine, and StarTrek.com. Jay loves sci-fi, fantasy, and film, and you can learn more about him by visiting JayStobie.com or finding him on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms at @StobiesGalaxy.

Members of ILM’s visual effects team discuss their cutting-edge approach to crafting a scene from the Emmy-nominated Skeleton Crew through their real-time rendering pipeline.

By Jay Stobie

Industrial Light & Magic’s visual effects capabilities have been synonymous with innovative approaches since the company’s inception, as ILM creatives regularly transform theoretical techniques into groundbreaking developments that emerge as everyday solutions. One such forward-thinking application involves ILM’s use of real-time rendering to present their work to visual effects supervisors and client filmmakers in an immersive fashion that allows them to immediately incorporate the feedback they receive.

This process was utilized in “Zero Friends Again,” the sixth episode of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (2024-25), for a sequence depicting Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and Neel (Robert Timothy Smith) as they ascend a ladder above the snowy plains of the planet Lanupa. A roundtable of ILM team members, including real time principal creative Landis Fields, environment supervisor Andy Proctor, technical artists Will Muto and Kate Gotfredson, and lead compositor Todd Vaziri, joined ILM.com to chat about trying out a new real-time workflow to craft the depth-defying ladder-climbing sequence in Skeleton Crew.

An Interactive Overview

“In traditional visual effects, artists show their work in dailies as a 2D-rendered movie and get feedback,” says Andy Proctor. “They work on those notes, re-render it, and present it again, usually the next day.” However, real time permitted Proctor and his colleagues the chance to incorporate some of their earlier virtual production workflows to achieve an interactive review process. “I was in the virtual art department on Skeleton Crew, and we would do dailies where the key creatives would be in VR headsets while looking at these environments. To build the actual sequence, we had the entire thing set up in real time for the creatives to view on a normal screen.  All the plates were loaded, and the blue screen was keyed out in real time. It’s essentially the same as when the visual effects supervisor is looking at a regular 2D review, except the whole scene is live.”

The planet Lanupa environments for those Skeleton Crew reviews were drawn from material originally created for ILM StageCraft’s virtual production pipeline, as Todd Vaziri highlights, “There are extended sequences where the actors were filmed for this environment on the ground level that were built by our StageCraft crew. There were already rounds of art direction, design, and construction, and that had to be approved by the filmmakers before first unit filming began with the actors. They would get in-camera finals using all of our StageCraft LED technology and real-time rendering technology. All of that work, especially on the creative side, had been done.”

Roguish Roots

Looking back to the origins of these real-time elements, Proctor points to ILM’s proof-of-concept contributions to the creation of K-2SO in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), also overseen by Skeleton Crew production visual effects supervisor John Knoll, as “a technical milestone for real-time visual effects,” which had usually been reserved for games and interactive projects during that time period. “You skip ahead to Skeleton Crew, and now you’ve got much more of a crossover, because we’re using real time to design the environments and work out how they’re going to be shot.”

The Mandalorian’s (2019-23) season three finale followed Rogue One as the next benchmark on the path to the real-time process harnessed for the Skeleton Crew cliff climb. “[Skeleton Crew] represented the natural progression of working with [executive producer] Jon Favreau on The Mandalorian, because we were always pushing the boundaries,” Landis Fields notes, as ILM’s use of StageCraft’s LED-based volume prompted them to lean into virtual production techniques for a variety of different disciplines. “On the volume, you have a real-time environment, and it’s working for in-camera finals. So there’s already a step towards what you’re doing in real-time being what you’ll see in the final picture,” Proctor chimes in.

In The Mandalorian “Chapter 24: The Return,” ILM chose the astromech droid R5-D4’s descent into the cavern housing Moff Gideon’s (Giancarlo Esposito) secret Mandalorian lair to exercise the most recent real-time advances for the scene’s final pixel shots. “We had done that years ago on some of the K-2SO shots for Rogue One, but real time had changed a lot since then,” Fields adds. “On The Mandalorian, we were able to test integrating real-time visual effects reviews with [visual effects supervisor] Grady Cofer and [animation supervisor] Hal Hickel.” Instead of simply giving notes for changes that would be made at a later date, the supervisors could quickly see the impact of their requests for lighting changes and other alterations.

A New Scope

ILM’s ability to successfully demonstrate the viability of that real-time process was met with an immense wave of support, as Fields credits Jon Favreau, John Knoll, head of ILM Janet Lewin, and Lucasfilm’s Rob Bredow, for being strong proponents of continuing on the cutting-edge course. Nevertheless, Fields emphasizes that this approach was intended to be one of many tools on which they could draw, as the choice of which technique to pull from ILM’s ever-growing arsenal of production pipelines would always come down to “the right tool for the job.” While the majority of the StageCraft volume LED in-camera work for Skeleton Crew was done using ILM’s proprietary Helios renderer and engine, this particular sequence was an opportunity to also see where the use of real time could be pushed and leveraged in novel ways.

Perceiving The Mandalorian’s season three finale as a major real-time stepping stone, Proctor recalls that ILM elected to expand its use to an even greater extent, as he posits, “Now, we’re going to take a sequence and cut it in among live action that was shot in the volume and other traditional visual effects that are rendered offline. It has to match the other sequences and be as visually complex as everything else.”With this real-time production workflow firmly in place when ILM’s work on Skeleton Crew commenced, Proctor recalls the ladder-climbing shot from “Zero Friends Again,” saying, “We knew it was an important moment, because it establishes that Neel is scared. Kate Gotfredson was able to set the shot up in real time so we could do a dynamic height or vertigo wedge.”

This arrangement enabled them to consult with John Knoll and ILM visual effects supervisor Eddie Pasquarello in real-time, experimenting with a variety of elements, from pushing the background forward and away to tweaking the lighting. Speaking to the capacity to review several shots in a row in a single cut with per-shot interactivity, Vaziri adds, “We had a mini-editorial cut with works in progress. Being able to show an entire sequence to the visual effects supervisors and saying, ‘Yeah, this is how it’s going to look, but we can interactively move things around and instantly see in the context of the cut,’ that’s a game changer right there.”

Praise for the Process

The benefits of utilizing a real-time production pipeline are as diverse as the galaxy far, far away that ILM has built on screen. “Real time is very flexible. We were able to develop custom real-time compositing tools very quickly using blueprints, which allowed us to preview the live-action footage directly on top of our environments. With these tools, we could experiment with framing, set dressing, and lighting with immediate feedback,” Kate Gotfredson outlines.

Will Muto offers his appreciation for the interactive workflow, surmising, “You get more bites at the apple. The creatives are able to iterate more and hone in on what they want. That’s where the power is here.” Muto applauds ILM’s real-time process for its smoothness, continuing, “There were no huge surprises. We added tooling around our color pipeline to apply our shot grades within the real-time minicut, so we were certain that artists working real time were viewing plates in the exact same context that the compositors would be viewing downstream. The showrunners [Jon Watts and Christopher Ford], John Knoll, and Eddie Pasquarello all got what they wanted in extremely short turnarounds.”

Fields echoes the praise for the collaborative efficiency, relaying, “In the traditional pipeline, having a review is not just jumping on a call. There’s time that an artist has to dedicate to preparing material to review.” With real-time sessions, Fields divulges that his team can simply “throw together a meeting, and everyone joins the call. There was no prep other than that I had to be at my desk.”

ILM’s ‘Personnel’ Touch

Proctor articulates an unexpected advantage that has a habit of emerging from those video calls, when his team could share a screen and jump right into a real-time session. “You get more moments of serendipity. When someone is showing their work, you can see what they’re doing live and interact with it yourself. By doing that, we’d get these ‘happy accidents,’ where someone was playing around with the water shader and hit a parameter that made everyone say, ‘That looks amazing!’ because suddenly the water felt incredibly translucent. Those collective learning moments happen all the time, and it’s very difficult to get that any other way than in real time.”

The human element also factors into another attribute unique to ILM, as the unprecedented level of professional experience concentrated within the company’s ranks allows its personnel to maximize the real-time workflow’s potential. In terms of oversight, ILM’s senior staff have the expertise to recognize how their colleagues’ talents could be leveraged for optimum efficiency. “Where do you want the masters of these crafts to spend their time? Andy and I were very keen on paying close attention to who was doing what,” Fields remarks. “It’s not about everybody doing everything. That’s another part of working within the pipeline and being smart about the division of labor.”

Applying environments created for the volume in the real-time review process gave some ILM artists the chance to work across multiple stages of development, as well. Once Proctor had finished with the set design alongside his colleagues in the virtual art department, content creation supervisor Shannon Thomas oversaw the creation of the final environment used in the StageCraft volume. Digital artist Nate Propp contributed to both the volume build as well as the real-time work in post-production, for which Proctor then returned to help oversee.

“Not only was Andy familiar with the worldbuilding exercise that he had done,” notes Fields, “but he was familiar with it from the ground-level perspective.” When the real-time crew began on the ladder shots that looked down on Lanupa’s surface, they could rely on Proctor’s insights from his role in crafting that environment. “Andy knew what the environment was supposed to look like,” Vaziri agrees, indicating that his work as the lead compositor involved the important task of exposure balancing for the foreground which meant “a lot of rotoscoping, compositing for the extractions, a tiny bit of effects renders for some blowing mist that went through the environment, a lot of stock stuff that the compositors put in. From our perspective, we had to deal with very few renders overall, which I absolutely loved.”

The Legacy Ahead

“Back in the day, when they did K2, that was about the ‘if.’ Skeleton Crew wasn’t about if we could do it. We knew we could do it,” Fields summarizes. “To be able to see that sequence in the cut, scrub, and get valuable notes that are efficient with the time from the visual effects supervisors was huge. The review was essentially a three-dimensional, real-time composite set that we could move around.” Perhaps the greatest testament to the real-time process is the response its use garnered from individuals throughout the company, as Fields shares, “Everybody outside of our phase, the other departments downstream, started to see the value here.” This particular real-time workflow has joined ILM’s illustrious array of visual effects pipelines, becoming yet another evolutionary tool to be called upon when ILM is deciding which approach is best suited for the visual effects shot it is tackling that day.

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Jay Stobie (he/him) is a writer, author, and consultant who has contributed articles to ILM.com, Skysound.com, Star Wars Insider, StarWars.com, Star Trek Explorer, Star Trek Magazine, and StarTrek.com. Jay loves sci-fi, fantasy, and film, and you can learn more about him by visiting JayStobie.com or finding him on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms at @StobiesGalaxy.

Read more about Star Wars: Skeleton Crew on ILM.com:

‘Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’: ILM’s Visual Effects Treasure Chest, From At Attin to Starport Borgo

‘Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’: ILM’s Visual Effects Adventure from the Observatory Moon to Lanupa and back to At Attin

ILM’s Enrico Damm, Paul Kavanagh, Stephen King, and Matt Middleton share details about ILM’s role in the director’s first theatrical release from the DC Universe.

By Jay Stobie

Written and directed by James Gunn, DC Studios’ Superman (2025) has leapt to the forefront of the cinematic superhero landscape, aweing audiences with a message that inspires optimism and hope with a side of introspection. Industrial Light & Magic played a crucial part in the visual effects that brought this uplifting story to life, collaborating with Gunn and production visual effects supervisor Stephane Ceretti on their quest to supply a fresh perspective on the legendary character.

ILM visual effects supervisor Enrico Damm (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story [2016], Ahsoka [2023-present]), ILM animation supervisors Paul Kavanagh (Star Trek [2009], Deadpool & Wolverine [2024]) and Stephen King (The Avengers [2012], The Batman [2022]), and CG supervisor Matt Middleton (Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One [2023]; Alien: Romulus [2024]) joined ILM.com to chat about ILM’s work on Superman, from taking the lead on characters such as Superman, the Hammer of Boravia, and Ultraman to tackling a large section of the climactic final battle involving a Metropolis baseball field, a deadly interdimensional rift, and fan-favorite dog, Krypto.

Welcome to Metropolis

“I joined Superman early on during pre-production, when [visual effects producer] Susan Pickett and Stef Ceretti approached ILM to talk about how we could build a Metropolis that we could art direct in a real-time fashion,” Enrico Damm explains to ILM.com. “This allowed the production designer and director to creatively iterate until we achieved a layout that would build the foundation for the final, post-production asset. We had real-time sessions with Stephane, [production designer] Beth Mickle, and, occasionally, even James Gunn, where he would be able to direct changes in real time. We established a look that was shared with the previs companies and the other vendors on the show, which permitted us to have everybody start with the same asset.”

Imbuing Metropolis with the living, breathing atmosphere of an actual city without replicating a real-world location was extremely important to Gunn. However, since roughly 70% of the design was inspired by New York, Stephane Ceretti and Susan Pickett authorized ILM to undertake an excursion to gather material. “I spent a couple days in a helicopter over New York City, capturing reference photography,” Damm details. “At the same time, my colleague Dacklin Young was capturing backdrops.”

CG supervisor Matt Middleton would go on to rely on Damm’s city references, explaining, “Our environment team at ILM’s Sydney studio did a large amount of the Metropolis city build. We knew this asset would need to be shared between vendors, and it was strongly based on the New York City references. We built Metropolis in sections, including various hero sections for our work. We had hundreds of unique buildings, which gave Metropolis a great organic feel. That was driven by what Enrico had done before the shoot had started. Many times, we might only build 10 buildings and do variations of them, but on Superman, we utilized an enormous number of distinct buildings to avoid a procedural feel.”

On-Set Observations

Damm’s duties intensified even further once filming got underway. “I was on set for pretty much every ILM-related shot,” he says. “I made sure that ILM would get what was necessary for our work, and I assembled things that could help us, which weren’t part of principal photography. On the side, I gathered motion tests and scans of his cape and suit, essentially grabbing David and the on-set visual effects crew for an hour to film him in the suit and see how the folds move,” Damm elaborates. “During the shoots of ILM sequences, I met with David almost daily and, with client-side visual effects supervisor Stef Ceretti, we developed a specifically-designed scanning system to gather data for ILM FaceSwap training.”

Since David Corenswet portrays both Superman and Ultraman in the film, this technology was useful for the moments when the two characters face off with each other. “The system helped us capture David’s face as faithfully as possible, so we could train a system to replicate him and FaceSwap in those moments. Almost every day, we held sessions with David to go through various lines to ensure that we captured every nuance of his performance, so we would be able to replicate it digitally on his stunt doubles.”

Suiting Up with Superman

ILM’s crucial involvement continued off the set and into post-production. “The client put their faith in ILM and had us build Superman, the Hammer of Boravia, and Ultraman, three characters who we see frequently,” Damm notes. “We even had the pleasure to have David Corenswet visit ILM’s San Francisco studio. Being a huge Star Wars fan, David had quite a blast. We scanned him using our proprietary MEDUSA scanning system to recreate him on-screen, which included a full digital replica with muscle, bone, and cloth systems. We’re dealing with an ultrabeing flying at ultraspeed, so we did a great deal of cloth simulation on his cape, suit, and hair to portray an appropriate sense of speed.”

ILM’s animation supervisor, Paul Kavanagh, is based at the San Francisco studio, the hub that oversaw the entirety of ILM’s work on Superman. Speaking to the prevalence of ILM’s digital Superman replica, Kavanagh says, “A lot of the times when you see Superman flying along in his suit and cape with his hair fluttering, the only thing that wasn’t CG was his face. But everything we did was based off of the live-action shoot, and we were very faithful to it. We weren’t making up a whole new shot; we were simply enhancing what was filmed.”

Meanwhile, operating out of ILM’s Sydney studio, ILM animation supervisor Stephen King was brought onto the project at the beginning of post-production. “As an animation supervisor, my job is to collaborate with Enrico and Paul to make sure that we’re creating the vision that’s coming from James Gunn and Stef Ceretti,” King remarks. “I helped establish the movement of Superman. The animation department was responsible for enhancing David’s performances by taking away the sense of him being on the rig they had filmed him on. We made certain that his body performance didn’t feel like he was on a rig – that he was actually flying. When I think of Superman, I think of his incredible strength and his ability to fly, so we needed that to appear as real as possible.”

King praises the cooperation between ILM’s various departments, stating, “Our team at ILM’s Sydney studio was in charge of Superman, creating the digital double that would go hand-in-hand and blend seamlessly with David Corenswet’s performance. For shots where we had to do a fully digital version, we wanted to ground it in reality. Our simulation department took care of his cape in every shot that we worked on, making it move and feel authentic. In many of the flying shots, we had to add digital hair because hair is difficult to recreate on stage. It’s either completely flat and doesn’t move, or a fan is placed in front of the actor and affects their performance by causing them to squint. James Gunn entrusted ILM with the title character. Guaranteeing that Superman shone in our work was of the utmost importance for us.”

Boravian Brutality

Damm also hones in on David Corenswet’s hair, referencing his previous point about the bald cap utilized to film the battle against the Hammer of Boravia. “James Gunn wanted to approach that scene with visual effects to allow us to portray an appropriate amount of speed within the hair and sell how fast these beings are flying. In the Hammer of Boravia sequence, it’s all digital hair. It was a unique challenge because there’s no room for errors. If there’s something off, it would immediately break the illusion,” Damm asserts.

“In terms of the character itself, the Hammer of Boravia was essentially a hard-surface object,” Damm adds. “Since he’s wearing a suit, he was a bit easier than Superman in the sense that we weren’t dealing with flesh. The main challenge emerged when it came to texturing and shading the character, as there’s a significant amount of creative and technical know-how called for to craft the shading response that a metallic object has.”

Damm hopes that audiences are unable to tell which shots necessitated the Hammer of Boravia becoming a digital character, noting, “There was a full-on practical suit in many shots, where the on-set crew filmed him on wires. Certain action beats and acrobatic movements required he either be partially or completely replaced. Even in a handful of close shots, where you might assume the practical version remained, we had to go with the digital version because the story changed after principal photography had finished.”

The Nature of Narratives

As breathtaking as the visual effects of Superman are, Damm and King both emphasize that ILM’s contributions were all done in service to James Gunn’s compelling story. “There’s a sequence where Superman and Lois Lane [Rachel Brosnahan] are deep in conversation, but you have the Justice Gang fighting a giant jellyfish-type creature in the background. We played on the size of the creature so it would be subtle and not moving fast enough to be distracting,” King professes. “Then, when Superman tells Lois that he loves her, the creature spews out all these different colors, and it’s almost like fireworks that enhance the sense of their love and their connection to each other. It’s visual effects aiding in the storytelling, and that’s a credit to James and Stef knowing what they wanted.”

Similarly, Damm highlights the moment the interdimensional rift arrives at Metropolis and begins to split the city, pronouncing, “We were breaking buildings, and there were so many layers of destruction built on top of each other. However, all of that needed to hit precise story beats, meaning the effects weren’t just taking one building and letting it fall into another building. There’s a specific speed and cadence to it that was art directed by Stef and James. Our effects artists received very precise animations of how everything would collapse from the animation department, which were then used to drive simulations.”

A Kryptonian Canine

ILM handled a major portion of Superman’s final battle, as King describes, “We basically worked on everything from when they land in the baseball stadium until they exit the rift at the end of the fight between Superman and Ultraman.” The beloved dog Krypto is a key component in these sequences, and the director utilized his own dog, Ozu, as a template for the heroic canine. “In essence, James’s dog is Krypto. By that, I mean his dog is also very rambunctious and doesn’t necessarily follow the rules all the time. We had various shots where we animated Krypto, so we built muscle and fur systems to make his hair flow appropriately and match James’s dog,” Damm proclaims, mentioning that Framestore built Krypto’s underlying skeleton.

“The reference footage that James sent over was so fantastic, and [Ozu] was such a character,” agrees Kavanagh, who then turns to the shots themselves. “We received Framestore’s shots of the dog animation well before we started on ours, and they gave us a wonderful target to follow. In animation, we’re constantly paying attention to the little things. For example, when the dog’s foot plants, we’re looking at how deep the foot presses against the ground, the squish of the toe pads, the slight spread of the toes, and the angle of the nails. The same goes for how the dog pants and the way its tongue rolls over its incisors. These are all elements that make the character come alive.”

ILM’s contributions to Krypto were concentrated on the dog’s appearances in the climactic battle, and the team recognized how vital these sequences would be. “James puts a lot of thought and love into his digital characters and their performances,” says King, who jokes that he spent time staring at his own dog as part of his research. “Our Krypto sequences were based more on physicality, like when Krypto knocks over Ultraman and starts destroying all the drones, so we got some nice high-energy panting in there that feels very lifelike. As an animator and animation supervisor, it’s the subtle stuff you bring to the character that can make it more realistic, and that’s what we love to do.”

An Epic Engagement

The Engineer (María Gabriela De Faría) and Ultraman stand as other key factors in ILM’s battle scenes. “I loved our time on the Engineer, because she’s got the nanites that empower her to shapeshift and create nanite obstacles that she fights Superman with,” King relays. “It was important to stay true to what they did on set when Superman fought the Engineer, yet give it extra energy.” Comparing the Engineer to a more complex version of the liquid metal T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Damm states that “the Engineer breaks herself down into nanites, so there are really millions of little individual objects that are coordinating to perform a function. Since we see her punching Superman from far away and also get a closeup of individual nanites on Superman’s eye, we constantly adjusted the size of the nanites.”

Damm was on set when Gunn filmed the characters’ engagement in the baseball stadium, recalling, “People were being pulled on wires and landing on mats for protection. While that provides a solid base, you can’t film at the speed that’s required or crash your star actors into the ground! Visual effects had to be added, especially for ground destruction. We all know what it looks like when you rip grass out of the ground. There are many layers to it, and we needed to represent how it separates in a believable way.”

Matt Middleton points to another facet of the “ground” battle, opining, “There was a lot of work in maintaining the continuity of the dug-up trenches. We had to accurately place specific trenches that the characters had previously skidded through into the background of the shots.”

“We thought a lot about ground interaction and how far to stick the characters into the baseball field to demonstrate the force and energy,” Kavanagh concurs. “And when that impact happens, it kicks up dirt, debris, and grass.” Pivoting to what he calls the “up and down” sequence in which Superman and the Engineer ascend into the atmosphere, Kavanagh says, “We had cloud layers for the characters to go through to get a sense of their speed. We also didn’t want to make it too easy for them to move within the heavy wind resistance. We always want to ground our sequences in reality.”

As a clone of Superman, Ultraman’s appearance is tied to the look of the titular hero in a multitude of ways. “Unlike in previous Superman films, Superman’s suit was a little looser,” Damm outlines. “James Gunn has explained that Superman’s mom made his suit, so it’s not something fashioned from super technology or sent from Krypton. Ultraman’s suit was also fairly loose, so we had to go the extra mile. Since we built it based on digital scans taken with David standing in a scanning studio, there were naturally folds present in the cloth. We rebuilt his suit in a way that allowed us to put effects simulations on it, enabling Ultraman’s suit to move properly in the wind and when he was being punched.”

Rumble in the Rift

The interdimensional rift that slices through the city represents another important feature in the third act’s big fight sequence. “It’s unique and almost a living organism,” Damm remembers. “Rick Hankins, who joined Superman early on as the effects supervisor, took on large chunks of that R&D project. We applied various elements into it, such as how metal melts and the crystalline growth of bismuth. We presented hundreds of versions and eventually found a look that was approved.” Matt Middleton adds, “The geometric detail that went into the bismuth was immense, and our goal was to achieve a look that people could believe in, which doesn’t look like a CG fantasyland. Also, the previs that was done by the client was exceptionally helpful because James Gunn knew how he wanted the broad geography of the sequence to come together.”

“In the third act, we spent quite a bit of time inside the rift,” notes Damm. “Being so close to it and having it around us the entire time proved to be very challenging. If the surface qualities of the rift don’t feel like believable metal, the entire sequence falls apart. To represent real bismuth in a meaningful way, we needed ours to have a believable, metallic nature to it, as well as an underlying sheen that goes through rainbow colors. Additionally, when the other dimension opens, and we see a black hole, there’s a ton of heavy effects simulation that goes into having assets breaking and being pulled into the black hole before disappearing.” Kavanagh cites ILM’s insertion of debris elements moving toward the black hole as being the foreground cues that keeps audiences oriented to which direction is “up” throughout that sequence.

An International Effort

As a global studio, ILM’s work on Superman – which Damm estimates to be in the vicinity of 560 visual effects shots – occurred around the world. ILM’s Sydney studio took on more than half the shots, while ILM’s studios in San Francisco, Vancouver, and Mumbai combined to handle the rest. “In Sydney, we worked hand-in-hand with San Francisco in our respective time zones. I would plan our sequences with [visual effects supervisor] Dave Dalley and Matt Middleton, then we’d get invaluable input from Enrico and Paul,” King explains.

“ILM’s San Francisco studio worked concurrently with the client’s time zone as they were based in Los Angeles,” Kavanagh adds. “The time difference can be tough because Sydney is a day ahead. It’s like you’re time-traveling [laughs]. However, it often worked to our benefit. We could give the Sydney studio feedback on a Friday, and by the time we came in on Monday morning, they already had a day to work on the notes and provided new takes for us to show to the client.”

On a grander scale, King interprets ILM’s international presence as a phenomenal sign for the company’s future, commenting, “I came to the Sydney studio when it opened in 2020, and we started with relatively small jobs. It’s exciting for us to have grown so much that our location can take on the end battle sequence of a big summer blockbuster like Superman. ILM opened up new studios in Sydney and Mumbai within the last six years, plus we have the more established studios in San Francisco, London, and Vancouver. ILM is growing, and the work is turning out to be magnificent.”

A “Super” Success

Considering the project as a whole, King is immensely satisfied with his team’s performance on Superman. “As animators, we put so much thought and effort into everything we do. It’s not just sitting at a computer. We use computers as tools, but we often go and shoot references for the shots that we’re working on, so we can study them. We want to inspire young people to have that same love for movies that we grew up with. ILM is the dream job for myself and many people in our industry. At ILM, no one is too small to give their opinion or voice an idea. We create works that stand the test of time, that we can look back on and be proud of.”

Matt Middleton proudly sees Superman as one of the most complicated projects he’s worked on, summarizing, “There were a number of different challenges, ranging from FaceSwap to stadium destruction, as well as the amount of detail that went into hand-cutting out all the little tears in Ultraman’s suit to match the on-set costume. The hundreds of buildings that went into the city, and the hero buildings that have to be built with internal beams that you can see as they get pulled apart. The complexity goes with the territory in superhero movies, but it’s an incredibly intense amount of intricate work spread across all of our departments.”

“lt’s a massive team effort, from the client side all the way down through to the artists and production, but the process of sitting in meetings to work out how we’re going to get the project done is fun,” Kavanagh discloses. “As a supervisor, I’m conscious of hitting deadlines, incorporating changes, and achieving the highest quality look for the client. I also want to make it enjoyable and interesting for the people who are working on the show. Together, we know we’re going to come up with some outstanding ideas and have a terrific time doing it.”

For Damm, one of his favorite moments from Superman encapsulates his appreciation for ILM’s role in the project. “There are plenty of occasions where Superman helps people in this movie,” Damm begins, “But when he saves the woman on the bridge from a falling building, it’s not just that he puts himself in danger to save one person. By showing how important it is for him to save a single individual at any cost, it demonstrates how human he truly is. Afterwards, when it all collapses, he heroically rises out of the ashes. Plus, that shot itself feels as if it’s right out of a comic, with the dust billowing to either side. It was very beautiful to see this shot come together and even more so to see the great reactions from the DC fanbase.”

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Jay Stobie (he/him) is a writer, author, and consultant who has contributed articles to ILM.com, Skysound.com, Star Wars Insider, StarWars.com, Star Trek Explorer, Star Trek Magazine, and StarTrek.com. Jay loves sci-fi, fantasy, and film, and you can learn more about him by visiting JayStobie.com or finding him on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms at @StobiesGalaxy.

Go behind the scenes of ILM and LIMINAL Space’s ‘Real-Time Rocket’ activation at Disney Accelerator Day 2025.

By Patrick Doyle

At Disney Accelerator Day 2025, guests witnessed an extraordinary moment where the line between movie magic and real life all but disappeared. In a collaboration between Industrial Light & Magic and LIMINAL Space, attendees met a live, interactive version of Marvel Studios’ Rocket Raccoon, rendered and animated in real time and presented in fully dimensional 3D.

A Rocket Moment Like No Other

The activation, aptly named “Real-Time Rocket,” invited guests to step up to a large, glowing display, the kind of screen that instantly makes you curious about what’s about to happen. After donning a pair of polarized glasses, attendees found themselves face-to-face with Rocket Raccoon, who wasn’t just playing back a pre-recorded clip, he was there, moving, talking, and reacting live.

Rocket leaned forward, smirked and started chatting with the crowd. He cracked jokes. He called out a few attendees by their outfits. He laughed at his own punchlines. The energy in the room was electric as laughter, awe and a collective sense of “how is this even possible?” filled the air.

“What made Real-Time Rocket so special was seeing a beloved character come to life in a way that felt truly spontaneous,” said Christopher Jones, virtual production supervisor of Real-Time Rocket. “You could see the audience forget they were looking at a screen and, for a moment, they were simply having a conversation with Rocket. That’s the magic we aim for at ILM, where performance and technology meet to make something that feels real.”

Making the Impossible Possible

The “Real-Time Rocket” experience was powered by a creative combination of ILM’s real-time animation technology and LIMINAL Space’s Spirit Screen, an innovative display that uses polarized light to create a 3D effect without the need for headsets or holographic projection. Through this setup, Rocket appeared to step off the screen and into the same physical space as the audience, creating a shared moment of astonishment and delight.

“This activation was a perfect example of what happens when creative teams collaborate across disciplines,” said Alyssa Finley, Real-Time Rocket’s executive producer. “Working with LIMINAL Space allowed us to merge our real-time animation pipeline with an innovative display technology that gives audiences a live, shared, dimensional experience with a digital character that they’ll never forget.”

A Room Full of Wonder

As guests filed through the activation, the reactions were priceless. Attendees waved, Rocket waved back, and many leaned closer to see if there was a trick to it. Guests laughed when Rocket playfully teased them about their love of Baby Groot or asked if anyone had seen Star-Lord around. It was equal parts hilarious and jaw-dropping.

Throughout the day it was clear there was something unmistakably Disney happening. When Rocket waved goodbye at the end of each session, the sense of wonder lingered. For a few moments, the technology faded away, leaving only the feeling that audiences had truly met Rocket Raccoon in person.

“Standing in the room and watching people laugh and talk with Rocket was incredible,” said Michael Koperwas, creative director of Real-Time Rocket. “You could feel the energy shift the moment he appeared. Those moments of pure audience connection are what drive us at ILM to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.”

For more on Real-Time Rocket, check out ILM’s “Behind the Magic” video from the D23 activation here:

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Patrick Doyle is a senior publicity manager at Industrial Light & Magic.

The multi-sensory experience is on view in London through February 22, 2026.

Industrial Light & Magic has partnered with Somerset House in the United Kingdom for the major new exhibition, Wayne McGregor: Infinite Bodies. The series of multi-sensory choreographic installations, performances, and experiments were directed by acclaimed choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor, and invite visitors to experience the intersections of dance, art, and technology.

“Wayne McGregor: Infinite Bodies at Somerset House is an ambitious exhibition that explores intersections of the body, movement, and technology,” explained Dr. Cliff Lauson, director of exhibitions at Somerset House. “We’re delighted that the exhibition has provided the opportunity for Wayne to collaborate once again with the ILM team on the new commission OMNI (2025). This large-scale, screen-based film is the first work visitors see in the exhibition and is a spectacular introduction to beautifully-rendered dance presented at life-size. We’re deeply grateful for the creative talent and technical expertise that ILM has brought to this landmark artistic project.”

“Wayne came to us with a challenge,” explained ILM visual effects supervisor Matt Rank. “We had previously worked with Wayne on ABBA Voyage, and he wanted an opening piece for his new exhibition.  Initially, that was all the brief we had, so we set about researching Wayne’s previous work, the history of Somerset House, and exploring how we could take digitised human movement, and bring it to life as part of his exhibition.”

Rank further explains that the concept of “looking at bodies internally” became the focus of their presentation. “It’s something that Wayne’s traditional work is unable to visualize, we thought it would be fascinating to start blending the different forms that our internal skeleton, nervous system and capillaries took, and how they could appear when formed from less naturalistic materials, and lit from different angles.”

The equally dazzling and thought-provoking results are now open for visitors to see from October 30, 2025 to February 22, 2026. Head over to SomersetHouse.org.uk to learn more, and watch ILM.com for more behind-the-scenes insights about Infinite Bodies.

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ILM.com is showcasing artwork specially chosen by members of the ILM Art Department. In this installment of a continuing series, three artists from the San Francisco and Vancouver studios share insights about their work on the 2025 Netflix production, The Electric State.

Supervising Art Director Fred Palacio

The primary goal for this piece was to expand the universe of the book by introducing a new character type of “humanoid drones.” A secondary objective was to give the drone a distinct identity — customizable much like how we personalize our phones. 

We started with some existing designs but needed to push further to keep the spirit of author Simon Stalenhag. Take Wolfe, for example: it features numerous subtle details and paint choices that lean into a biker aesthetic, ranging from purely decorative elements to practical tools. Its unique color scheme further pushes this visual language. In contrast, the Security drone is designed to feel more industrial and less customizable. One of the most challenging aspects was the head design, which needed to resonate with the book’s visual style. 

Designs should always speak to the client and audience alike, while staying true to a consistent visual language. The design must strike a balance between distinctiveness — so the character can be recognizable in any light situation — and coherence with the established universe. Struggle is the challenge, which we love. Our job is to embrace it and transform into an achievement, where a piece concept becomes a living character on screen.

Senior Art Director Alex Jaeger

These were the outcast Scav bots. They were also an attempt to add back the more creepy and somber tone that Simon Stalenhag’s artwork contained. The goal for these was to design a series of bots that were “collectors.” They each had a theme and that theme is what drove the design and personality of each one.

The process for creating these was to first block out some overall shapes for the proportions, so that they would read in the shadows since these would mostly be seen at night. Second was to block them out in 3D and begin the themes of each, adding more complexity with each pass. Then came the balance of tone. I created cleaner, brighter versions, then dirty and desaturated versions, then darker, moody versions. The end product was a mix with the colors only coming through brighter around the heads to draw the eye, and the rest faded off. There were also several passes for the amount of cables and adjustment of scale. This final version was the midway level of cables and adjusted scale.

When it came time to do the dirty textures I found some great inspiration from abandoned theme parks. To see how some painted graphics faded while others almost got better with age and gathered great patinas even over brighter colors. 

Senior Concept Artist Kouji Tajima

They are two robots from the mall, named Tacobot and Pianobot. They were probably robots that worked in the mall’s restaurants or music stores. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to get the style as close as possible to Simon Stalenhag’s. To do that, I studied the kinds of parts and cables he uses in his paintings.

When I was designing Tacobot, I studied the textures of a lot of advertising figures and signs from real taco and hamburger shops. Because of that, I gave the taco ingredients on its body — like the vegetables — a painted look instead of a realistic texture.

Normally, I don’t do any sketches. I go straight into 3D software and develop a few different ideas. In addition to this version, there was also one with a face and a mustache in the middle of the taco!

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See the complete gallery of concept art from The Electric State here on ILM.com.

Learn more about the ILM Art Department.

Watch The Electric State on Netflix.

Drew Struzan’s art became part of filmmaking mythology, from Star Wars posters to ILM’s classic emblem.

Drew Struzan distilled movie magic into a single iconic image, often the one audiences saw first. The celebrated creator of hundreds of one-sheet movie posters that blended classic portraiture with cinematic montage passed away October 13 at age 78.

For decades, the renowned artist and Industrial Light & Magic moved in the same creative orbit — ILM conjuring the visual effects that brought cinematic worlds to life, and Struzan capturing their spirit in paint, in turn inspiring generations of ILM artists.

Struzan was instrumental in helping define ILM’s early identity. Working from a design by ILM matte painter Michael Pangrazio, Struzan hand-painted the company’s first logo, depicting a tuxedoed magician conjuring a spark of light, framed by a large gear bearing the letters “ILM”. Struzan’s painting was a perfect visual metaphor for what ILM represented: the fusion of artistry and technology, imagination, and precision.

The font style used in ILM’s current logo, revealed in 2023, was closely inspired by the typography in Struzan’s painting.

Struzan’s logo became shorthand for creative excellence. It appeared on letterhead, production slates, and crew gear, signaling that the work within carried ILM’s signature blend of craft and wonder.

His association with Lucasfilm began in 1978, when he collaborated with Charles White III on a special re-release poster for Star Wars: A New Hope. The “circus-style” artwork — with its layered texture and weathered look — became a favorite among fans and collectors, launching Struzan into a long association with Lucasfilm and, by extension, ILM.

Over the next three decades, Struzan’s brush defined the visual identity of films that spanned the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series, Back to the Future, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, and many more. His posters for Star Wars entries The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith threaded prophecy and tragedy through glowing color and emotional expression. Each piece was created by hand: sketches on gessoed boards, acrylics and airbrush for texture, and Prismacolor pencils for final detail.

In the same way his movie posters gave films an emotional face, Struzan’s ILM logo gave the company one — a timeless emblem for the artists who turned imagination into illusion.

Read more at Lucasfilm.com.

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Muren celebrates ILM’s 50th anniversary at the place where it all began.

By Clayton Sandell

Dennis Muren was there at the beginning.

As one of the first employees of George Lucas’s fledgling visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, Muren spent many long and intense hours working inside a nondescript industrial building in Van Nuys, California, helping bring the director’s Star Wars vision to life.

Through their groundbreaking effects work on Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), Muren and his colleagues pioneered modern filmmaking from this former warehouse on Valjean Avenue, not far from a noisy airport.

“It was a long time ago, but I remember everybody. All the people and making the film and the excitement of it not being a Hollywood movie – not a home movie – but it was a big movie,” Muren tells ILM.com. “And we were all on the same team working to get it done.”

For the first time in about 50 years, the nine-time Academy Award winner recently came back for a tour of ILM’s original home to help celebrate the company’s golden anniversary. A lot has changed.

“There’s a wall here I don’t even remember being there, dividing the two parts,” Muren points as he looks around the warehouse floor, a few steps from where the ILM model shop was set up back in the day.

The floor plan of the building today – now home to a commercial sign company – is roughly the same as it was in 1975. As Muren walks the halls with his wife Zara, one second-floor room in particular brings back a galaxy of emotions.

“That’s very memorable. Going back to the screening room,” Muren says. “It just brought back a flood of memories of the dailies. George would often come to the dailies, and he’d be looking at the shots over and over and deciding what’s going to work and what needs to be redone.”

Muren is also reminded of the stress that faced the ILM crew as they rushed to finish the visual effects shots on time.

“‘Are we going to get the show done on time?’” he remembers being a frequent worry. “We’d go over the storyboards there too, and the schedule was on the wall of the dailies room. We would say, ‘Look, we’ve got to get these shots this week or else we’re in trouble.’”

After his tour, Muren signs autographs and poses for pictures with fans who gather to sing “Happy Birthday” to ILM. He blows out candles on a special Darth Vader cake before introducing a screening of A New Hope for an audience seated in the same parking lot where some of the film’s most iconic shots were filmed.

“Right here, [ILM modelmaker] Steve Gawley’s pickup truck would race by as fast as it could go, with [miniature and optical effects cameraman] Richard Edlund on the back of it with a VistaVision camera shooting the [surface of the]  Death Star as pyro was blowing up,” Muren tells the crowd.

“That was a typical day,” he smiles.

Muren attended the celebration over Star Wars Day weekend as a guest of the event organizers, My Valley Pass and On Location with Jared Cowan, a podcast hosted by movie location expert Jared Cowan.

For more on ILM’s early history and the creative geniuses that changed moviemaking forever, check out Light & Magic, a two-season, nine-part documentary series now streaming on Disney+.

Listen to Dennis Muren’s interview from On Location with Jared Cowan.

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Clayton Sandell is a Star Wars author and enthusiast, TV storyteller, and a longtime fan of the creative people who keep Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound on the leading edge of visual effects and sound design. Follow him on Instagram (@claytonsandell) Bluesky (@claytonsandell.com) or X (@Clayton_Sandell).