After a decade-plus in Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood, Industrial Light & Magic have moved to a new 40,000 square foot purpose built facility in The Stack office tower on Melville Street, occupying two floors.
“Here’s the three T’s everyone hears about when you think about Vancouver and B.C.: tax credit, time zone, and now it’s talent with a capital T,” said ILM’s Spencer Kent, executive in charge, San Francisco and Vancouver studios.
Starting in 2025, the B.C. government increased the British Columbia Production Services Tax Credit from 28 per cent to 36 per cent.
Celebrating its 50th anniversary, ILM, a division of Lucasfilm, now has over 3,500 employees across five studios located in San Francisco, London, Sydney, Mumbai and Vancouver. Vancouver, with well over 900 employees, is the largest of those locations.
“The role of government support in the film and television sector is crucial to our success here,” said Janet Lewin, senior vice president Lucasfilms VFX and general manager of ILM. “It has been instrumental in building a dynamic, competitive and innovative entertainment industry in British Columbia, one that provides thousands of individuals with the opportunity to build careers in this creative field. While we often refer to what we do as art, and rightfully so, it’s also very much a business and at ILM we’re committed to not only delivering the highest quality work, but also to maintaining a healthy studio where people thrive.”
ILM made the move to their new digs after their lease expired in Gastown, giving them the chance to do a purpose-built office complete with cool models of iconic characters such as Chewbacca, Yoda, the Millennium Falcon, C-3PO, a Stormtrooper, the Mandalorian, and many other collectible figurines.
“We really saw that as an opportunity to reformat what we want from an office space for our talent, for our people,” said Kent. “What we saw here was an opportunity to start from a blank slate. The Stack is a new building, it was slab to slab. That’s what we walked into. We’d inherited and retrofitted previous spaces. But this was our chance to start something from the ground up and really build something that works well with a hybrid workflow. We were really excited to find a building too that is carbon neutral.”
ILM Vancouver’s recent feature film credits include Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Twisters, Deadpool & Wolverine and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. The Vancouver office has also worked on TV series such as Severance, Stranger Things, and an array of Star Wars TV titles.
The post Industrial Light & Magic Opens New 40,000 Square-Foot Vancouver Studio appeared first on Jedi News.
