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• The Letterman Digital Arts Center is the new San Francisco home of Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light & Magic and LucasArts. The campus includes:
o A state-of-the-art high-performance data network with more than 300 10-gigabyte ports and 1,500 1-gigabyte ports -- the largest in the entertainment industry
o Fiber-optics cable pulled to every artist desktop, enabling Lucasfilm to deliver high-resolution images to each digital artist
o 600 miles of cable throughout the four buildings on the campus
o Raised floors throughout the building, opening the layout of the studio and enabling the workspace to be reconfigured with each new project
o Data storage (at opening) of more than 100 terabytes
o A Media Data Center to host custom-designed media servers to deliver high-resolution images to the on-campus digital theaters, screening rooms and desktops
o Systems for image and sound editing, color management and correction, and high-speed compositing
o A Media Control Room that manages media input, output, format conversions and duplication
• A 13,500-square-foot data center houses a render farm, file servers and storage systems (a "render farm" is a cluster of computers that work around the clock to process synthetic images), including:
o More than 3,000 AMD processors
o Proprietary render-management tools, allowing desktop workstations to be added to the render farm pool after hours, expanding the processing capacity to more than 5,000 processors
• The campus houses a 300-seat theater with a 49'x21' screen, optimized for both digital and film projection
• There are two 65-seat dailies theaters for viewing visual effects work and for digital color timing

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When a young filmmaker named George Lucas pitched his idea for a space saga, FOX and most people were wondering how he was going to pull it off. The movie called for more cuts, action sequences and imaginative landscapes that had never been done before. When the studio asked him how he planed to do that, though Lucas had no clue he boldly told them he would figure it out.

"WIth Star Wars I want to do an action picture," George Lucas said, repeating his original intentions for the iconic film in Creating the Impossible. The Encore documentary, which airs Nov. 12, focuses on the revolutionary special effects company ILM. "I want to do something where I can pan with the space ship. I want to do quick cuts. There's a lot of rhythm, a lot of pace. There's a lot of movement on the screen. I want it to be very cinematic, and at that point in time that was impossible."

To complete this monumental task, Lucas founded his own special effects company to complete the difficult scenes needed in Star Wars. The company was named Industrial Light and Magic, better known as ILM. Over 300 films later, ILM has proven to be the industry leader in special effects, one of the first purveyors of computer generated imagery and the original parent company of animation giant Pixar. From Jurassic Park to Avatar, the company has put their stamp on some of the biggest films of all time.

Before ILM most studios had their own in-house special effects teams. Lucas' company was one of the first to open their doors to filmmakers. Since the company was willing to experiment with new techniques, ILM found itself in the forefront of many cutting-edge technologies. From the unheard of over 360 special effects shots needed for Star Wars to the first computer graphics visual effect in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, the company found new ways to solve their problems. "Those were massive tasks that no one was going to undertake," said ILM's John Knoll to Techland. The visual effects supervisor has worked on films including Captain Eo, Avatar, The Abyss and Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III.

"George always seemed pretty confident. He would always say, ‘Oh, you guys will figure it out!'” Knoll said.

Smaller films like Forrest Gump have also benefited from ILM's expertise. The famous scene where Gump is playing ping pong is actually an ILM effect Recently, Knoll worked on Confessions of a Shopaholic. In one scene, the film has talking mannequins and Knoll said he jumped on the opportunity to test out some new techniques.

Perhaps ILM's greatest achievement lies in the realm of inspiring new inventions and companies. Pixar was formed out of ILM's computer animation department. Knoll himself was inspired by photo editing software he saw at ILM. When his brother told Knoll about his PhD thesis regarding a photo editing program for home computers, the two worked together and co-created Photoshop. “ILM was the first place I went to that had a computer graphics department,” Knoll said. “So in a way, George had kind of fostered the creation of Photoshop.”

“His influence is huge because not only the technical contributions of ILM, but the people that have come through the company,” Iwerks said.

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