By George & Josh Bate
Those who took the time to watch Light & Magic Season 1 three years ago likely came away with a deeper appreciation and understanding of visual effects artists. The Disney+ documentary series directed by Ron Howard chronicled the beginnings of Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the renowned visual effects studio founded by George Lucas in 1975, and showcased the company’s groundbreaking work that has reshaped the scale of cinema for the past fifty years. Aptly aligned with ILM’s 50th anniversary this year, Light & Magic Season 2 premieres, providing viewers the opportunity to learn about ILM’s work over the past 30 years and further understand how the family of innovative storytellers created some of the most iconic moments in movie history.
We recently had the opportunity to attend a virtual press conference about Light & Magic Season 2 moderated by Brandon Davis. During the press conference, director Joe Johnston, VFX veteran John Knoll, the legendary Doug Chiang, actor Ahmed Best, the animation director of the Star Wars prequels Rob Coleman, and Lucasfilm senior vice president for visual effects and ILM general manager Janet Lewin discussed how digital technology changed the film industry, the making of The Phantom Menace, the backlash to Jar Jar Binks, and more.
Light & Magic Season 2 distinguishes itself from its predecessor in its focus on digital technology and how this forever changed filmmaking and visual effects. Director Joe Johnston, who worked on the Star Wars original trilogy and famously designed Boba Fett’s armor and equipment, explained his approach to Season 2. “We start this season with Jurassic Park, because it is recognized as the moment in the history of film when everything changed, when digital technology became viable as a visual effects tool,” Johnston said. “One of the important stories that I wanted to tell with Season 2 was the effect that George Lucas has had on digital technology and just film itself, all his influences, the things he’s contributed, the things he’s come up with and invented and inspired. That’s one of the focuses of Season 2.”
In the press conference and the documentary itself, it is clear that George Lucas’ relentless imagination and drive to achieve the impossible were behind the numerous innovations of the digital technology era. The Star Wars prequel trilogy, for instance, pushed the boundaries of cinema further than ever before as ILM was tasked with creating cutting-edge technology from the ground up. “George [Lucas] is famous for saying, ‘You guys will figure it out,'” Rob Coleman remarked. “We had a production meeting every Wednesday [on The Phantom Menace] with all of the visual effects supervisors, producers, and the head of production, and there was one agenda item every week: can we get the movie done? And for months, if not a year, the answer was no we cannot get the movie done even though we were making the movie.”
Coleman elaborated by explaining the difficulties posed by the final battle of The Phantom Menace. “For example, there’s a line in the script that something like the Gungan Army marches out to war,” Coleman added. “We had no crowd system. I could load maybe 10 characters into my software to animate it. There’s no way I could do hundreds or thousands. So, we reached out to the R&D team, and they were feverishly writing this stuff. But time was ticking, and I’m actually getting goosebumps thinking about it right now, there was a reality in my head which is we’re not gonna be able to deliver the Gungan Army.”
Eventually though, Coleman and his ILM colleagues were able to actualize Lucas’ vision. “So the thing about ILM, and even to this day, is that it’s a company made of a bunch of really smart people, who sit together and say, ‘How are we gonna figure this out?'” Coleman continued, “I think there were heart palpitations, and you can see it both in the new footage of us talking and in the historical footage. You’ll see facial expressions. And yes, we didn’t always agree with George, because cause I was in my head going, ‘Can we get this? I don’t know how to do it that way.’ And then he’d say sometimes, ‘Well, you go away and figure it out and you come back,’ and we would, and I would.”
There is perhaps no visual effects achievement in ILM’s past 30 years as groundbreaking as the character Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace. Binks was the first entirely computer-generated character in a live-action film, paving the path for the decades since of digitally-created characters in movies.
“Jar Jar walks so Gollum can run and the Na’vi could fly,” Jar Jar Binks actor Ahmed Best aptly stated.
But CGI in film wasn’t universally accepted from the get-go. “I think in ’99, there was such a huge shift in moviemaking just in general, right, when digital was coming up,” Best reflected. “So there were a lot of people who were very resistant to this idea that digital filmmaking was actually gonna take over filmmaking. And then there was also this idea that these digital characters were going to take away from real-life live-action characters, right? It’s kind of the same conversation we’re having about artificial intelligence right now. That was happening in ’99 as well.”
George Lucas was always one to break from convention though, and he did so with Jar Jar Binks. “There was this real big change happening, and when someone like George Lucas, who is a futurist, one of the reasons why I do the futurist work I do is because of George Lucas, who knows that we have to move forward in these ways,” Best continued. “When that person comes in and pioneers the way he comes in, there’s going to be pushback. And Jar Jar was a perfect lightning rod for that pushback.”
And there certainly was pushback. Best candidly discussed the backlash to Jar Jar Binks during the press conference. “One of the things that was tough for me when the whole backlash happened with Jar Jar was the fact that the thing that was overshadowed was the work,” said Best. “We were really focused on making the really special, and when it came out, we were all excited about the really special. So, the hard part about it for me was not being able to continue that really special work, right? I really wanted to be integral in where motion capture was going because I saw the potential of it. I got so excited by not only the technological advances of it but the art involved. And watching John [Knoll] and Rob [Coleman] create software that was based off of the input of what I performed, I just saw this entire world open up that had tremendous amounts of potential. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to contribute in the way that I wanted to because of the backlash, and that was hard.”
Best recounted how Lucas predicted that backlash to CGI characters like Jar Jar would be temporary. “He was like, ‘Twenty years from now, it’s gonna be a different story.’…And it was hard to deal with at the time, but looking back now, he was absolutely right. It’s a completely different story now.”
One can’t speak of artistic achievements in filmmaking over the past 30 years without bringing up the name Doug Chiang. The art director on The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, who went on to become vice president and executive creative director at Lucasfilm, provided the press conference’s funniest moment when he remarked that he didn’t think he was a good artist. Johnston was quick to correct Chiang. And rightfully so, given any piece of concept art made by Doug Chiang would not be out of place in the most prestigious of art museums.
Chiang discussed how the focus of him and the others at ILM to actualize George Lucas’ imagination meant he rarely had the time to reflect on his work, until Light & Magic Season 2. “You’re just busy trying to innovate and create and…fulfilling George’s vision,” Chiang said. “I never really stopped to look back. When Joe put this together, it was terrific, it was surreal in a sense of, ‘Wow, that was a really special moment…I’m very grateful to be part of it.’”
Chiang’s point resonated with the others in the press conference. “I’ve never worked on anything that was as well documented as those films were,” Knoll stated. “The cameras were there capturing everything, partly because I think George wanted to make sure that things were being recorded because you never knew what meeting something really significant might happen.”
Janet Lewin stated that she “loved reliving this transformative time in our history.” She continued, “The way Joe put together this story using the archival footage to really give you that candid sense of what was happening. You can almost read the minds of people in the room. It captured a moment in time that really changed the industry.”
One of the standout elements of Light & Magic is the points of honesty, intimacy, and humanity that shine through amidst the technical difficulties of a demanding profession. “[Light & Magic] captures the vulnerability of making this project, pouring your heart and soul into it…the imposter syndrome, and the daunting task ahead…to do the most visual effects shots that had ever been done. For Ahmed [Best] to embody the performance of Jar Jar and to talk about how that was so innovative, so groundbreaking, and didn’t have the immediate appreciation that it has now. That vulnerability and honesty…was an incredible theme that Joe [Johnston] told so well.”
Fans of Star Wars and the process of filmmaking more generally will come away from Light & Magic Season 2 with a newfound adoration for the incredible visual effects of ILM and the incredible artists behind these effects.