Lucasfilm’s Lucas O. Seastrom talks to author Ian Failes about his new book Industrial Light & Magic: 50 Years of Innovation, scheduled for release on January 13th, 2026 (February 5th in the UK) by Lucasfilm Publishing and Abrams.
Although Ian Failes was surprised when offered the chance to write Industrial Light & Magic: 50 Years of Innovation, he’d seemingly been preparing for it much of his life.
Growing up just south of Sydney, Australia, Failes was an avid fan of ILM productions, including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series, the Back to the Future trilogy (1985-90), and Jurassic Park (1993). But it was 1994’s Forrest Gump that piqued his curiosity about the visual effects craft. Watching a behind-the-scenes documentary included with the film’s VHS release, Failes became enraptured with the process of how these visual effects marvels were created by the ILM team.
“I saw plenty of films growing up, but I didn’t really understand that visual effects was an industry,” he tells ILM.com. “As you see this behind-the-scenes material, you realize that people actually work on this stuff. It was towards the end of high school that I started to be obsessed with visual effects, and ILM in particular.”
Failes admits “I don’t think I’ve reread a book as much as I have Into the Digital Realm,” in reference to the 1996 publication about ILM by Mark Cotta Vaz and Patricia Rose Duignan. That book was the second in an ongoing series showcasing ILM’s story, which has also included Thomas G. Smith’s The Art of Special Effects (1986) and Pamela Glintenkamp’s The Art of Innovation (2011). Failes’s own 50 Years of Innovation from Lucasfilm Publishing and Abrams Books carries the tradition forward with its release in January 2026.
A Self-Taught Storyteller
“Those early ILM books were huge parts of my formation as a visual effects journalist, but also just to spur on my interest in visual effects before that,” says Failes. His current vocation as founder and editor of the visual effects publication, befores & afters, was inspired by his passion for reading about the art form in magazines like the iconic Cinefex. Studying law and information technology, he began his career as a lawyer while blogging about visual effects on the side.
“In some ways, I was more obsessed with the journalism of visual effects than visual effects itself,” Failes notes. “But I am in Australia, and back then, I didn’t think it was possible to cover the visual effects industry from here. I would go to work as a lawyer, come home, and blog more about visual effects, conversing with people on the internet. Then I started doing interviews, usually at five or six a.m. from Australia, and transcribing them from a tape. Over time, it was clear to others, and then eventually to me, that that’s what I was passionate about. It wasn’t clear how I could have an income and a career from this. But then I started to find ways to do it.”
Initially working for the publication fxguide, Failes is largely self-taught both as a journalist and in his knowledge of filmmaking craft. He authored the book Masters of FX in 2015, which included interviews with a number of ILM visual effects supervisors like Dennis Muren, Scott Farrar, and John Knoll. He soon founded befores & afters as his own independent outlet. “Celebrating the artists” is his chief priority.
“Personally, I think visual effects is an art form that doesn’t always get its due,” explains Failes. “My mandate with befores & afters is simply to report how a movie, a sequence, or a shot was created. I’ve found that it’s a really good antidote to some of the discourse online, which can include misinformation about how things were made. If I can report it accurately, then my goal is to be the source for accuracy in the visual effects community, not that anyone else isn’t doing that. But I really want to try and rally against the misinformation. The artists do such incredible work. They’re a big part of these huge films that we get to watch.”
Crafting ILM’s Narrative
“I don’t think I’ve ever said ‘yes’ faster than when I was asked to write this book,” Failes recalls with a laugh. ILM’s 50th anniversary “crept up on me,” as he says. “Visual effects companies don’t normally last that long. This isn’t a common thing.”
In discussing the book’s story with ILM’s leadership and publicity team, Failes worked to identify the company’s many eras, each full of creativity and transformation. ILM didn’t reach its 50th anniversary without constantly embracing changes in technology, filmmaking trends, and an expanding, global industry. The company itself has played a significant role in shaping that industry, making ILM’s story a 50-year history of the visual effects art form in itself. In the end, Failes is pleased with the resulting book in which readers “can see the progression of work and changes over the years,” as he explains.
“There are great stories about people embracing change,” Failes says. “There were artists who were practical modelers or painters, and they realized that they needed to move into the digital realm to keep their jobs. As those individuals had to adapt, ILM as a whole has had to as well. The good thing is that ILM has jumped on big changes all the time. Digital was one of those, but virtual production is another one, with ILM StageCraft and how that’s been used on The Mandalorian [2019-23] and elsewhere.
“What interests me is that these changes were not brand new inventions,” Failes continues. “There are all these nice threads in ILM’s history linking a past development to what they’re currently doing. The virtual production work has its roots in older rear projection methods, and ILM has dabbled with this kind of thing a lot over the years. So many different tools and techniques come together. Because ILM is a place full of innovation, they can put the best and brightest onto these projects and make them happen. So I hope that when people read the book, they can see that we’ve connected some of those threads together.”
It’s All in the Details
Conducting a number of original interviews for 50 Years of Innovation, Failes was able to go deep into some long-held questions, such as the origins of digital compositing in the late 1980s and early ’90s. “Many of us know about these three huge films – The Abyss [1989], Terminator 2 [1991], and Jurassic Park [1993] – and the incredible innovations achieved in CG modeling, animation, and rendering of different creatures,” the author says. “But an enormous part of why they worked was because of digital compositing.
“I got to chat with [visual effects supervisor] Dennis Muren about this topic,” Failes continues, “things I haven’t read much about before, including the methods created for ingesting film and outputting digital images back out onto film, plus the actual compositing approach. The book has allowed me to fill in some of these details that I didn’t know.”
Throughout the book, many sidebars expand on various details from specific tools and methods to characters and films. “Members of the ILM Publicity team contributed to these sidebars,” notes Failes. “They’re incredible gems of information that haven’t really been talked about elsewhere.”
Pulling it all together are upwards of 1,000 images from the ILM archives, something Failes considers to be the book’s marquee feature. “The images involved a team of people at ILM spending countless hours poring through image libraries, scanning 35mm slides and negatives, and then captioning all of them. The images really make this book what it is, a coffee table book that you can flip through a thousand times because you’ll see so many cool things.”
Read the article/interview in full at ILM.com, and preorder Industrial Light & Magic: 50 Years of Innovation from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Read more from Ian Failes at befores & afters.
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