When Disney bought Lucasfilm, it didn't just get Star Wars — it picked up the real wizards of the movie industry, George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic. Movies wouldn't look half as cool today without these crucial firsts.
The Dykstraflex camera and elaborate motion-controlled photography
Via: mystoryboard.fr
To make the Star Wars film he envisioned, George Lucas established his own special effects company, Industrial Light & Magic. And the mindblowing-for-the-time space sequences in Star Wars were only made possible by ILM's development of the Dykstraflex, a motion-controlled camera that was totally digitally controlled, so shots and camera movements could be precisely duplicated again and again and again. Otherwise, X-Wings would've just looked a lot like this on the big screen.
Go Motion, a new kind of stop motion animation
Via: stopmotionworks.com
First used on Empire Strikes Back, and used extensively in the first non-Lucasfilm movie that ILM worked on, Dragonslayer, Go Motion is a stop-motion animation technique developed by Phil Tippet to create realistic motion blur by having the puppet make several moves per frame. Like the Dykstraflex, the key is full digital control versus manual puppeteering — the motors controlling the rods manipulating puppet are run by computer, resulting in way smoother animation than traditional stop motion.
