In the first part of a new series exploring ILM’s 50-year legacy, Jamie Benning, writing at ILM.com, talks to original Star Wars animator Chris Cassidy and current ILM animation supervisors Rob Coleman and Hal Hickel.
Animation has been woven into the DNA of Industrial Light & Magic’s story since its earliest days. From utilizing legacy techniques in Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) to the groundbreaking blend of live-action and animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), ILM has continually redefined the possibilities of visual storytelling.
Early Innovations and Handcrafted Beginnings
In 1975, as Star Wars, later retitled Star Wars: A New Hope, entered production, Industrial Light & Magic was a fledgling outfit assembled to help realize George Lucas’s ambitious vision. Animation quickly proved essential to the storytelling – Lucas’s needs were varied, including spaceship models firing laser bolts, glowing lightsaber blades, a holographic chess game, and stylized targeting displays.
To create the signature blaster bolts, California Institute of the Arts graduate Adam Beckett was hired in July 1975 to lead a small team in creating the animation and rotoscoping – including a young Peter Kuran. “I was initially shooting wedges and different colors for the laser beams and stuff like that. I was learning to use the equipment. We all were,” Kuran told The Filmumentaries Podcast.
“I actually did the first perspective beams,” said Kuran. “What was being tested was just kind of like back and forth – no perspective on it. I had suggested that we try that, and I actually got a very chilly response. So I decided to stay late one night and do a test and took it to the lab myself. It ran as a daily the next day, and [visual effects supervisor] John Dykstra liked it, so I wound up being the chief of that, at least for the time being.”
The iconic lightsaber effects were outsourced to Van Der Veer Photo Effects for the first film but later brought in-house at ILM. The process began by generating mattes from the live-action prop blades. Early experiments with retroreflective material and spinning poles proved too complex and were eventually streamlined. The mattes were rephotographed and colored frame by frame, with hues used to help audiences distinguish between each character’s weapon – blue for Obi-Wan Kenobi, red for Darth Vader – setting the look for the Star Wars saga for decades to come.
“At first, ILM didn’t have the resources to do all the opticals themselves,” animator Chris Casady tells ILM.com. “They sent shots out to Van Der Veer, Cinema Research, and Modern Film Effects. Those places were the old guard – they’d done work on Logan’s Run (1976), Soylent Green (1973), that kind of thing.
“But the goal was always to bring everything in-house,” Casady adds. “And once ILM got the optical department up and running in Van Nuys, the quality jumped. We had more control, and it just looked better.”
Beckett, as described by Casady, “was without a doubt a genius. Adam was extremely brilliant. He wanted to be able to put some of his psychedelic style into Star Wars. He thought it was almost an obligation to one-up 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]. But Lucas wanted something more realistic.”
Casady noted Beckett’s work on the Death Star superlaser charging sequence, explaining that “Adam did a tremendous amount of work putting together that Death Star laser tunnel shot – all those rings and green things flashing down the middle. It’s built up of multiple passes, multiple exposures, multiple pieces of artwork.” The platform on which the live-action actors were standing was completely hand-drawn by Peter Kuran.
Casady added that “Adam’s signature work is the electrocution of R2-D2,” an entirely hand-drawn effect requiring precision to make the electricity feel convincing on screen.
“I really was brought in at a grunt level to make garbage mattes on the animation stand at night to free up the VistaVision cameras in the daytime,” Casady explained. “Every time they filmed the spaceship on stage … everything outside the blue is considered garbage; it’s got to be masked out. So, my job was to make this matte and block out the garbage.
“On film, my mattes fell below the threshold of black, so it became black,” Casady continues. “Famously, when the film was first released on VHS … my mattes were visible in the negative. … The audience saw my garbage mattes as irregular shapes that jumped every six or eight frames. So that’s the only time people got to see my work on the film!”The animation team also solved another subtle but crucial challenge: making the miniature spaceship models feel more plausible in their scenes.
“There was a shot of a TIE Fighter flying past the camera, and they were concerned it looked too flat,” said Casady. “So they asked if we could paint in some reflections – highlights that would suggest the ship was catching light from the environment. It wasn’t baked into the model photography, so we had to add those glints manually, frame by frame, right onto the animation cels. Just little touches of light to make it feel like the ship belonged in that space.”
Kuran told The Filmumentaries Podcast, “I just thought that that was something that was needed.”
By the time Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983) came around, ILM was called on to create yet another iconic animated visual effect: Emperor Palpatine’s Force lightning. Composed of hand-drawn electrical arcs, the effect required animator Terry Windell to conjure a sense of living, dangerous energy – a visual shorthand for the raw power of the dark side. During his career, Windell brought his animation skills to Poltergeist (1982) and Ghostbusters (1984), among many others.
Though Peter Kuran had since left ILM, his company, Visual Concept Engineering, took on the painstaking task of rotoscoping each frame of the lightsaber combat between Luke and Vader. In total, 102 lightsaber shots were completed for the final film in the trilogy.
While rotoscoping and hand-drawn animation effects remained essential throughout the early 1980s, ILM was already looking ahead, seeking ways to evolve another time-honored technique: stop-motion animation.
The Rise of Go-Motion
Before work began on Return of the Jedi, “Go-Motion” – a breakthrough in dimensional animation pioneered by ILM’s Dennis Muren, Phil Tippett, Stuart Ziff, and Tom St. Amand – offered a major refinement to traditional stop-motion by introducing motion blur, an effect crucial to achieving realistic movement. Unlike standard stop-motion, where models remain static during each frame’s exposure, go-motion employs stepper motors driven by a motion-control system. These motors subtly shift the puppet during the open-shutter phase, simulating the kind of motion blur found in live-action 24fps cinematography.
“The significance is that we got it working,” Ziff told Cinefex, downplaying the complexity of a system that required months of development before the first usable shot could be captured.
First explored during production on Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and fully realized on Dragonslayer (1981), the process eliminated the telltale staccato of conventional stop-motion.
Ziff’s engineering expertise led to the development of a modular rig dubbed the “Dragon Mover,” which connected to the model’s limbs via rods and enabled precise, repeatable motion sequences. Tippett, St. Amand, and Ken Ralston meticulously animated both walking and flying versions of the puppet, blending mechanical precision with handcrafted nuance.
“We started off with some of the more complicated shots,” Tippett told Cinefex, recalling the weeks spent programming movement cycles before finally achieving a fluid, natural gait. This meant that the process became easier over time, a testament to the artists’ dual roles as problem solvers. The result was a new level of fluidity and realism, particularly evident in the scenes featuring the film’s dragon, Vermithrax Pejorative.
Blending Animation with Live-Action: A New Frontier
ILM’s reputation for innovation took a significant leap forward with Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, the film demanded the seamless integration of hand-drawn, cel-animated characters with live-action performances and practical on-set effects. ILM’s task was to anchor the animated characters convincingly in the real world.
Visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston oversaw the technical and creative challenges of making cartoon characters interact believably with real environments. “The animation had to exist in a real world, with real lighting, perspective, and interaction. That had never been done before at this level,” Ralston told Cinefex.
“It was great for me because I am a huge fan of those early cartoons by the great Warner Brothers directors, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. And when that showed up with the intent that Bob [Zemeckis] wanted for it, man, that was a match made in heaven. And it was brutal, but it was great at the same time. It keeps you going. And when you see results on something that’s finally coming together, it’s a blast,” Ralston explained to The Filmumentaries Podcast.
Marking a turning point in hybrid filmmaking, they also decided to discard the traditional locked-off camera in favor of dynamic movement. To support this, ILM developed new methods to track live-action camera motion and translate it into data that animators could use to maintain consistent character positioning and perspective. “The opening camera crane shot proved to be historic. … No one had ever done a crane drop with a live-action camera and planted an animated character firmly on the ground,” Zemeckis recalled to Cinefex.
ILM and the special effects team constructed practical rigs to simulate interactions between live-action props and invisible cartoon characters. In one sequence, when Roger Rabbit turns a water faucet, a hidden mechanism releases a perfectly timed spray – a practical effect used to sell the interaction.
To match the shifting light within live-action environments, ILM tracked moving shadows and highlights, ensuring the animated characters were illuminated just like the actors. “If a light in the scene was swinging, … then the Toon characters would have to be lit in exactly the same way,” said Ralston. Animators relied on detailed lighting references to maintain visual consistency frame by frame.
Performance presented its own challenges. Bob Hoskins, cast as Eddie Valiant, was required to act opposite characters that weren’t physically present. “What I had to do was spend hours developing a technique to actually see, hallucinate, virtually to conjure these characters up,” he told Cinefex. To assist, Charles Fleischer, the voice of Roger Rabbit, wore a full Roger costume off-camera and delivered his lines live. “Although he was on the other side of the camera, I was able to talk to him as if he were right next to me. We could even ad-lib together,” Hoskins said.
After principal photography wrapped, ILM tackled the complex process of optical compositing while Richard Williams’s animation team in London produced the character animation. ILM integrated those elements into the live-action footage. “Every frame had to go through multiple passes to create tone mattes, shadow mattes, and interactive lighting effects. It wasn’t just a matter of drawing the character,” explained optical supervisor Edward Jones. “Every single frame had to be drawn, rechecked, and composited with multiple elements to make sure the animation fit seamlessly into the live-action,” Zemeckis recalled.
The result was a groundbreaking fusion of animation and visual effects that redefined the possibilities in cinematic storytelling. It was a winning combination of traditional techniques and innovation that was widely praised. The film won Best Visual Effects and a Special Achievement Award at the 1989 Academy Awards. Many saw the film as the zenith of the photochemical era, even to the extent that it was perceived as too complex to repeat.
Read the article in full here.
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