Just finished the first episode and it's so damn good.

If I could choose to live anywhere at anytime doing any job, I don't know what my top choice would be, but up there somewhere on the list would be as one of the first employees at ILM in the valley in the mid '70s. This is just such fun, pioneer, rock-band-practicing-in-the-garage stuff.

Also, I figured this would be a weekly series, but when I went to watch the first episode I saw that all six dropped at once, and now I don't see how I don't binge the rest of it over the next couple of nights. For those even remotely interested in movie making, special effects, Star Wars, etc, this is an absolute must-see so far...

Light & Magic
Limited Series (6 Episodes)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19896784/
July 27, 2022
Disney+

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If I could choose to live anywhere at anytime doing any job, I don't know what my top choice would be, but up there somewhere on the list would be as one of the first employees at ILM in the valley in the mid '70s. This is just such fun, pioneer, rock-band-practicing-in-the-garage stuff.

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I find something about that whole era really cool and fascinating. The whole "New Hollywood" era with this tight-knight group of young, maverick directors doing their thing and taking Hollywood by storm. (Lucas, Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese, De Palma)

Their influence on the industry is still being felt to this day. It's so cool how they all came up at the same time together, each of them legends in their own right.

Corridor Crew has a great youtube channel that is somewhat along these lines, but more from an outsider perpsective. The last couple years, they keep getting industry veterans to come in and talk about famous shots of theirs. For cgi, physical stunts, practical effects, all of it really.

Thanks for the reminder on this.

Back in my junior high / very early high school years, these guys were my heroes. While I played baseball growing up, I wasn't really into athletics and athlete hero-"worship", so these were the kind of people that I looked up to. I built (actually, still do) scale models. When Star Wars came out, there were a few kits released that I built many times over, mostly X-Wings. I had an idea that I wanted to go to ILM to build film models. I hung one of the X-Wings I built in a tree, and did some trick photography on that old Kodak 110 camera I had to make it appear that I had caught a shot of it flying overhead in the distance. The effect worked perfectly when I got the film developed - except that I forgot to remove the chair I had set up to get the model high enough into the tree to make it appear high enough that it was flying over the neighbor's house instead of right in front of it.

Also around that time, my mom got me a 8mm silent movie camera with a projector. I learned how to use that camera as best I could to do visual effects shots. I took all my old Star Wars figures and animated them in a trilogy of movies (no delusions of grandeur here, these movies ran all of 5 minutes per reel or something like that) about an invasion of toys. Had a model of an imperial walker that I had built not per the instructions, which would have you glue the legs in place, but instead I used some small screws and nuts to attach the legs, allowing for articulation of those legs. Of course I animated that model walking across a white sheet on some desk in my house. Probably the best shot I ever did was a replication of the opening shot of The Empire Strikes Back, where I hung a die-cast metal Star Destroyer from the garage ceiling, with a stand-alone light set up and a buddy holding a piece of black poster board that I had painted stars onto. I started the shot solely on the star field poster board, my buddy lowered it and I matched that action with my camera until I settled onto the Star Destroyer. All in a garage with maybe a $10 budget (film reels ran a few bucks in those days).

The last time I used that camera, I had just graduated from high school and had just seen Back to the Future. Toom my camera and my car to the local junior college parking lot one afternoon, set the camera up on a tripod, my buddy filmed me approaching in my car, cut off the camera while I drove off camera, then resumed the filming to make it appear as if I had hit 88mph.

edit to add - early on in high school, I wanted to go to USC's film school, but probably half way through those 4 years, I abandoned that idea in favor of something that I thought would be less dependent on being in the right place at the right time, or just being lucky, to be noticed as I think happens in Hollywood. I ended up deciding I would go to A&M, where there was (is) no film school.

The names in the first 15 minutes of ep 1 alone...wow.

This makes me regret not going more full on into animation, though I really started a bit too late to be able to do the whole move to LA and be broke for 10 years thing. I've got friends at ILM now and the stuff they get to work on is just mindblowing.

That said, nothing compares to the early years of what these guys were doing. Imagine working on this stuff a few years out of school having no idea you were literally revolutionizing the movie making industry. Crazy.

Loved the ending of episode 1: George returns to the states to find that that the team has spent 40% of the budget and has two shots completed.

Halfway through ep 2, but a few other thoughts...

- It's insane how smart these guys were. Even just looking at their student/teenage films they were doing in camera effects and optical compositing that they just figured out...no YouTube, no tutorials, just "how can I do this?" Unreal.

- All these guys are crazy multitalented, but Joe Johnston...wow. I'll do storyboards even though I don't know what those are, let's also make some models, I'm going to redesign the visual language for the Empire and the Rebels, and hmm how do I design the most iconic ship in scifi history. Later I'll win a VFX Oscar for Raiders of the Lost Ark before going on to be an award winning director.

- I bet working for John Dykstra was a blast.

- Dykstra's explanations of how they used photography and detail to convey scale was incredible. Them digging into why and how they created the motion control camera rigs was also just fascinating.

Halfway through episode 2 and I am absolutely loving this. Star Wars fans, and fans of Hollywood in general, will really enjoy this.

Just finished the last episode and this has to be one of the most engaging docuseries I've ever seen. I didn't want it to end, as I could have watched another six hours, easily. More than anything, I just loved being in this world, around these people. To have been a part of ILM back in the day, from the ground up, with these exact people, would have been the experience of a lifetime (or, more fittingly, as one of them said, multiple lifetimes), and this series at least gave us a taste of what that would have been like. It was also incredibly inspiring creatively, to the point where I may need to watch it annually, as a spark of sorts to recharge my creative batteries. What a incredible, out-of-no-where surprise this was.

only made it through the first episode so far and i think the most amazing thing from that (and it's a good thing) was showing all the crazy at home movies that were made from these guys when they were teenagers (or just really young adults)

seriously think about this.....there was no photoshop.....no camera phones.....no immediate feedback on what you had filmed or how it had turned out.....and they were pulling off these awesome at home movies that adults now adays would still have trouble with....

these guys were smart as hell

Jurassic Park still holds up with modern CGI in my book.