Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

How do!

Just on the last episode of Light & Magic, a Disney+ documentary on the story of Industrial Light & Magic. Being D+ it does of course focus quite heavily on the making of Star Wars, and is somewhat self congratulatory. But it’s pretty informative all the same.

The whole series is around a 6 hour run time, but nothing feels tedious or superfluous. Definitely give it a watch, then come back and chat about it

My wife is a Disney nut, so I've sat through a ton of Disney+ documentaries on the studio, the animators and the parks (she watches, I paint minis). They are really fascinating, don't paper over difficulties, and have lots and lots of insightful interviews. Content and quality is high across the board.

Thanks for the heads-up, I reckon this will be great too.

They even covered some of the whys of John Dykstra not working on any other SW movie after the first - and what he thought about it.
The interview parts with all of the 'old guard' were really cool, as was the "fly on the wall" of the building of what would become ILM from the ground up.

I’ll always be amazed at just how on the forefront ILM have been over the years.

Whilst I’m certainly not knowledgable to place every SFX advance since Star Wars at their feet, they did a lot of them, and often it seems on the fly/on demand.

Though given we’re reminded they did the (excellent) sfx works for the (wasted opportunity, but I still kind of like them) Bayformers, I wonder how they felt about the action direction being “make sure we’re all zoomed, with fast blurry action and don’t forget all the bells and whistles to really really obscure what’s going on let alone who is lamping who at any given moment”.

As I said in my OP, at times the show does feel a bit self congratulatory, but I’m not entirely convinced it’s undeserved. And a lot of that comes from the ILM vets praising the other ILM vets in a genuine manner.

I wonder how they felt about the action direction being “make sure we’re all zoomed, with fast blurry action and don’t forget all the bells and whistles to really really obscure what’s going on let alone who is lamping who at any given moment”.

100% okay with it. Quick shots, motion blur, and environmental occlusion effects are all part of the magic that makes SFX work look real. If you removed all of that stuff, it becomes a lot more obvious that its CG work and you can see the clunkiness of the motion and the faults in the animation and modeling, etc.

Thats the impression I have from watching lots of "making of" film docs, anyway. Much of modern filmmakings tendency towards fast short-take shots from off angles is a direct result of CG SFX, going back to Jurassic Park. When they were rendering motion for the dinos, they found that adding motion blur to them and keeping the camera moving made the CG more convincing (thats why most of the still shots in the film use animatronics), but conversely shots where the dinos weren't moving very much weren't as convincing if your eye had time to settle on the image and begin to pick out details, etc. which necessitated rapid cuts to different shots so as to prevent that from occurring. That kind of started a cinematographic trend towards more rapid cuts, especially as CG SFX became more and more prevalent in film.