Book Review: Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Innovation

The two earlier books from ILM were ILM: The Art of Special Effects in 1987 and ILM: Into the Digital Realm in 1996.

This new 360-page hardcover features 43 films from 1995 to 2011. Movies from before 1995 are featured in only a few pages since they were in the earlier books. To give you an idea of how far it goes back, the first movie featured is Casper (1995).

The more recent movies are Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Transformers, Iron Man, and the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy and even Rango from 2011.

Each movie has a writeup focusing on the special effects used, and comes with accompanying film stills and photos from behind the scenes. The interesting stories and interviews from the film staff makes for a fascinating read. It's like finding out how magic tricks are done. These guys are living right at the bleeding edge, creating software for making movies when nothing else in the market exists. It's intriguing to read how they overcome challenges that come with every film.

This book is a wonderful flashback at how techniques for movie making have evolved. In Jumanji, The monkeys riding on the police bike still looked rather crude. Fast forward to present time, we now have Avatar which is basically a full length special effects movie.

Highly recommended to movie buffs.

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