Fully understanding that 8th September was Star Trek Day (we didn’t forget, we just didn’t want to draw attention away from the Hasbro reveals) it’s never a bad day to celebrate the stellar work of Industrial Light and Magic and the effect it’s had not only on the galaxy far, far away but another galaxy much closer, in time and in space – our galaxy, just a few centuries down the road.
On this day, 55 years ago, Star Trek was born; a franchise that represented the hope of what space—the final frontier—could mean for all of humanity. ILM has played a significant part throughout Star Trek history, including the creation of the first completely computer-generated cinematic image sequence in a motion picture. Read on to learn about other exciting work we’ve brought to life for Star Trek.
Nearly a year before Return of the Jedi wrapped production, Industrial Light & Magic began work on another famous space film: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. ILM crafted many of the effects for the motion picture and even built scale models of both the ‘Enterprise’ and the ‘Reliant’: the first non-Constitution-class Federation starship ever seen in the series. As the script called for the Reliant and Enterprise to deal out significant damage on one another, ILM developed techniques to convincingly simulate the destruction without physically damaging the delicate models. Rather than move the models on blue screen during shooting, the VistaVision camera was panned and tracked to give the illusion of movement, a technique that ILM pioneered for the Star Wars trilogy, and further refined during seasons 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian. One of the most groundbreaking sequences of the film was ILM’s animation for the demonstration of the Genesis Device on a barren planet. The first concept for the shot took the form of a laboratory demonstration, where a rock would be placed in a chamber and turned into a delicate flower. Effects supervisor, Jim Veilleux, wanted the sequence’s size and scope expanded to show the Genesis effect taking over an entire planet; a challenge that ILM’s Computer Graphics group was up for. The team introduced the novel technique of “particle systems” for the sixty-second sequence, going so far as to ensure that the stars visible in the background matched those visible from a real star that was light-years from Earth. The animators hoped it would serve as a calling card for the studio’s talents. Their hard work paid off, as the group would later be spun off and become the foundation for Pixar Animation Studios.
