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Light and Magic is a six part documentary that tells the story of the first and most influential visual effects company of all time, Industrial Light and Magic. (ILM).

The story begins with a team of the country's best technical wizards and artists being assembled for the purpose of creating visual effects for a little movie called Star Wars. At this point in cinematic history the bar for special effects had been set by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although the effects were beautiful and looked realistic, everything in the film was slow. George Lucas didn't want space stations rotating slowly to classical music; he wanted dog fights in space and a world full of alien creatures, and ILM was the group who would bring his galactic visions to life.

Except, of course, there really wasn't an ILM, at least not yet. The people that would become ILM were a rag tag group of people (mostly dudes) in their 20s, trying to figure stuff out. They hired matte painters to paint fantastic backgrounds on glass. He stumbled into someone who could do stop motion, who as a test animated space chess pieces. He hired every model in California, who raided model shops of WWII battleships to find little guns and other giblets to attach to the model of the Death Star. Perhaps most importantly, John Dykstra developed a motion controlled camera that would photograph models and move based on computer input, which gave the illusion of ships flying through space. Dykstra's contribution cannot be understated; from the very beginning, ILM was not just creating visual effects, but the technology required to make those effects as well.

Star Wars came in behind schedule and over budget, but the film was (as we all know) a runaway success. When Star Wars was released nobody could have fathomed the megahit it would become. When the special effects team behind Star Wars began to disband, Lucas formed ILM as a way to keep the team together. The only glaring omission from the team was John Dykstra, the ringleader who had not only developed the tools necessary to create many of the jaw-dropping shots that made Star Wars so iconic, but served as the group's cat wrangler, keeping everyone on track. While Dykstra did not join his cohorts at ILM, Lucas had no problem using the Dystraflex camera system on his subsequent films. (In 1978, Dykstra won an Academy Award for developing the first digital motion control camera system.)

With the bones of ILM formed, Lucas not only used their talents for his upcoming Star Wars films, but began hiring them out to his friends. ILM provided the effects for films like E.T., Bladerunner, Poltergeist, and (of course) Raiders of the Lost Ark. Despite the company's mastery of special effects, George Lucas had an ulterior motive for forming the company. You see, Lucas hated working with film -- like, cutting and splicing actual film -- and thought there had to be a way to perform this function digitally. Back then there was no computer power enough to digitize film much less manipulate those images, but every now and then Lucas would poke his employees and push them toward that goal.

In later episodes of the series we can see that begin to happen. In the fifth and next to last episode, James Cameron hires ILM to create the watery-pod tentacle in the Abyss. ILM takes the job, even though nobody there knows how to animate water with a computer. (Yet.) When that works, Cameron hires the company to produce the effects for his next film, Terminator 2, even though nobody there knows how to animate a chrome person. (Yet.) That kind of sums up how ILM operated; delivering state of the art special effects while pushing the form forward. In the mid-80s the company had dozens and dozens of model makers and special effects wizards; over time, the computer division began to grow while the model makers began to shrink.

Things come to a head in the final episode of the series during the development of Jurassic Park. ILM was hired to produce the film's special effects, which everyone agreed would be done through traditional stop motion effects. While that work was happening, the computer department launched a sneak attack and began animating dinosaurs on their own. When Spielberg visited ILM to check on progress, the computer department just so happened to have their demo of a three-dimensional set of dinosaur bones moving. The visitors saw the footage and asked for a more complete demonstration of the technology. It sook several months, but the department was able to render a full size T-Rex walking toward the camera. After screening the test footage to ILM employees, Spielberg saw that Phil Tippet, one of the greatest stop motion animators ever, had dropped his head. When Spielberg asked him how he was feeling, Tippet uttered the now infamous line, "I'm extinct."





But, he wasn't. Phil Tippet, Stan Winston, and the rest of ILM's model builders and animators were given the opportunity to move to the computer department. Some did, some tried it and quit, and some simply walked away. Tippet and Dennis Muren built a physical armature that linked to the computer models, allowing them a physical interface with which to control the CGI animals. When people complimented Muren on how animal-like the CGI dinosaurs moved in the film, he simply replied, "that's all Tippet."

Everyone who walked out of the infamous T-Rex demo screening said the same thing -- the world of special effects had changed forever. Based on the computer work done for Jurassic Park. Lucas began working on his prequel films. After 20 years, he had got his wish. 2002's Attack of the Clones was completely filmed and edited digitally. The documentary ends with footage from The Mandalorian. Most of the Mandalorian's sets were completely digital, filmed in a space dubbed "the Volume," which has digital screens (and a ceiling) that can render backgrounds, moving them in real time as the camera moves. All Lucas said was, "see? THIS is what I was talking about!"

Shortly after The Empire Strikes Back came out, a special titled SPFX aired on television. That special showed how special effects in Star Wars and several other films were made. I watched people like Dennis Muren and Phil Tippet animating the stop motion Taun-Tauns and AT-ATs roaming Hoth. The majority of Light and Magic was like a deep dive into that era, with a "where are they now?" ending. As a kid who used to make his own movies on VHS and wished he had access to a stop motion camera, this was an absolute thrill.

Light and Magic is currently streaming on Disney+