With the second season of Light & Magic now with us, director Joe Johnston sits down with Lucasfilm historian Lucas Seastrom to look at the three fascinating episodes that make up the second season and wherer they take us on the half century journey of Industrial Light and Magic. Also be sure to check out StarWars,com’s coverage of the Light & Magic season 2 panel from the first day of Celebration Japan.

“I don’t have any experience in documentary or non-fiction filmmaking,” Johnston tells ILM.com. “When I was at Cal State Long Beach, I worked on a documentary that was directed by Tony Brennan called Hitler’s Secret Weapon. It was about the V2 rocket. Basically, my job was to do illustrations that explained some of the ideas he was trying to get across. That was my entire experience with documentary filmmaking, almost nil.”

But Johnston does have experience as a storyteller. “While I had never worked on a documentary, I had a pretty good idea of how to tell a story, whether it’s real or fictional,” he says. “And you have to remember, especially with a project like this, though it’s true of all filmmaking, I had so much help. I had a supervising producer [Nicole Pusateri], story producer [Carly Baggett], a line producer [Andrew Hafnor], three great editors [Mike Long, Jennifer McGarrity, and Robinson Eng], and an archivist [Eugen Bräunig] whose job it was to go through thousands of hours of footage from ILM. It was more like a steering process, and I steered that process toward an ultimate goal. It was a real team effort all the way through.”