Who wants to make a brush before painting a picture?
One of the most striking things about Light & Magic, Lawrence Kasdan’s captivating documentary series about the early days of the special effects house behind Star Wars, is how differently artists were forced to work back then. It was one thing to have an idea about how a space battle might look on the screen, but getting it up there could involve literally inventing new physical technology in order to facilitate capturing the shot. ILM pioneers such as John Dykstra and Dennis Muren had to be as much engineers as artists, which makes the visual qualities of George Lucas’s original trilogy all the more remarkable. Little wonder that it remains such a key reference work throughout movies, TV and indeed games. Nowadays, achieving high-quality visual effects isn’t exactly easy, but…
