Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the Lucasfilm special effects company famous for its work on movies like Star Wars and Pacific Rim, opened a new 30,000-square foot studio in Gastown Monday.
ILM has operated a temporary studio in Vancouver since 2011 to do effects work on Pacific Rim and The Lone Ranger. The studio employed about 100 artists, but the new studio hopes to expand to around 200 by the summer.
“We’re very happy with life in Vancouver and how that’s worked out for us creatively, so we’re making this move permanent,” said John Knoll, ILM’s chief creative officer and senior visual effects supervisor.
“We’ve got a lot of high-level artists in Vancouver who are capable of doing very high-end work. We have really good TDs [technical directors] and compositors in Vancouver, and I’m very pleased with the quality that we get from them.”
Knoll and ILM president and general manager Lynwen Brennan, president of Lucasfilm Kathleen Kennedy, and B.C. ministers Edward Fast and Naomi Yamamoto attended the opening of the new studio.
The space at 21 Water Street was previously the site of Pixar’s Vancouver office before it was closed by Disney. Lucasfilm has been owned by Disney since 2012.
“We were looking for a new space because we kind of outgrew the old office,” Knoll said. “When Pixar announced they were going to close their office, it looked like we could help out, take over the lease, and move into that space.
“As unfortunate as Pixar having to close that studio was, I’m so pleased that we were able to soften the blow a little bit. We’ve hired some of the folks that were there and taken over the building.”
“It became clear that we had a long-term pipeline of work coming with the Star Wars movies coming up, so that is a gift for a visual effects company,” said Brennan. “We can plot out a backbone of work for the next ten years.”
Along with the upcoming Star Wars sequels, the first of which is scheduled for release in late 2015, ILM Vancouver will also be doing effects work on Warcraft, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Jurassic World and Tomorrowland.
Randal Shore is the supervising producer at the new studio and will be in charge of the shows and day-to-day operations.
Vancouver has often been called Hollywood North by some in the film industry, and two years ago was the third-largest production centre for film and television in North America, after Los Angeles and New York.
Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson said that Vancouver has placed a focus on becoming a world-class media hub, and is now among the top cities globally with over 24,000 jobs in the region.
For ILM, which is based in San Francisco, the fact that Vancouver is also a two-hour flight away and in the same time zone means that collaboration between the two studios is much easier.
“The artists in Vancouver are actually using the server farm and the mass storage that’s here in San Francisco,” said Knoll. “They don’t have a duplicate render farm there, so they can have a lower overhead operation because they’re essentially on the end of really long cables to San Francisco. We can’t do that to Toronto and we can’t do that to London.”
