How Industrial Light & Magic Uses Computer Animation

Unless you've never seen a movie, you've probably seen a movie created in part by Industrial Light & Magic. Visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) has played a part in ten of the top fifteen worldwide box office hits of all time. Find out what makes working at this company the goal of many computer animation students.

From Computer Animation School to Movie Magic

From Indiana Jones to Iron Man, ILM has created effects for over 300 feature films, amazing audiences along the way. For computer animation students, the excitement of working as an animator for a company like ILM is well worth the commitment of an animation degree.

Innovation has always been part of the mission at ILM. From the first scenes of Star Wars, artists have moved from the matte painting, model construction, and blue-screen photography techniques of old to high-tech computer animation, 3D rendering, and other advanced digital effects.

Cutting-Edge Effects & Computer Animation

When M. Night Shyamalan insisted on realism for the effects in The Last Airbender, he meant it. Standard effects like fire had to practically be reinvented for the film. "These challenges are the reason we do what we do," Pablo Helman, the effects supervisor for the film, told the Los Angeles Times.

In order to make the effect of fire more realistic, the experts at ILM had to study the source. They used reference images of flames being pushed through the air by giant fans, and considered different effects techniques, such as using a mix of animated and real-life fire in the complex effects.

In the end, the team decided to go with the control and richness of a fully digital blaze. Craig Hammack, associate visual effects supervisor on the movie, recognized the challenge. "There's so many movies that have done digital fire and not done it all that well," he said. Eventually, the fire was rendered in Nvidia's GPU language Cuda as a hardware volume, making it easier to edit and tweak the effect.

Computer Animation Training Recommended

Working for ILM and other visual effects studios is a dream job for many. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that multimedia artists and animators earned mean annual wages of $62,810 in 2009. Those working for the motion picture industry earned even more, at $70,960. Healthy wages are just one reward for landing a career at one of the top visual effects studios in the world.

The salary and prestige of the career makes it a highly competitive field, particularly for recent graduates. Formal training in the form of a bachelor's degree program is recommended for entry level positions. Explore your training options today and learn how you can take the first steps towards a career that reinvents the way the world watches movies.