Industrial Light & Magic

…became an assistant cameraman at Industrial Light & Magic, Lucas’s special-effects studio. In the mid-1980s Fincher began directing commercials, which quickly led to a successful career as a music video director. He made some of the most iconic music videos of the 1980s and ’90s—including those for Madonna’s “Express Yourself”…

…a number of divisions, including Industrial Light & Magic (ILM, established 1975), which was regarded as the most prestigious special-effects workshop in American film.

At the special-effects firm Industrial Light and Magic, models of the dinosaurs were scanned into computers and animated realistically to produce the first computer-generated images of lifelike action, rather than fantasy scenes. In Independence Day, a film combining the science-fiction and disaster genres in which giant alien spaceships attack…

…concerns such as George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic produce their effects on 65-mm film. Others, notably Albert Whitlock, have revived the old practice of making matte effects on the camera negative. In the silent film days, this was achieved using a glass shot in which the actors were photographed…

Lucas’s effects company, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), designed a slew of imaginative alien creatures and droids that populated a variety of exotic locales. Perhaps most impressive, however, were the elaborate space battles accomplished with scaled miniatures. The series continued to make remarkable advancements in the field of…