From the cuddly best friend, to Earth invading aliens, ILM brings to life the everyday and the unimaginable. Our team continues to collaborate with studios and directors to bring characters to life and create movie memories

In the ILM Art Department, every piece that is created is targeted towards bringing a filmmaker’s vision to life. The mantra; “Each image must tell a story, and ask questions,” What happened before? What is happening now? What is going to happen in the future? Those are the questions that make a key frame or environment evolve from still ...

There isn’t a designer in the ILM Art Department that doesn’t owe a debt of gratitude to visionary artists like Joe Johnston and Ralph McQuarrie, who were there at the company’s inception. Their genius, along with many other artists over the years, is part of the building blocks that make up our company’s DNA.

In the ILM Art Department, every piece that is created is targeted towards bringing a filmmaker’s vision to life. The mantra; “Each image must tell a story, and ask questions,” What happened before? What is happening now? What is going to happen in the future? Those are the questions that make a key frame or environment evolve from still ...

Design for visual effects is often epic in scale and but typically must remain grounded in the physics of our world to be believable. We are skilled with developing visuals that represent a pivotal moment in the story and often asked to visualize something we've never seen before. Being filmmakers themselves, our artists' design effects, ...

Since Industrial Light & Magic’s inception in 1975, every idea dreamt into existence found its genesis within the ILM Art Department. Forty years ago, legendary concept designers like Ralph McQuarrie and Joe Johnston brought George Lucas’s brainchild of an asymmetrical Star Wars “used universe” to life, imagining fantastic worlds bursting ...

Movie fans know the term concept art as one of the earliest stages of filmmaking. Directors and writers collaborate with the ILM Art Department to visualize story beats, characters, design creatures, vehicles, and define a film’s tone and mood. But, even after the cameras have rolled, the ILM Art Department plays a critical role in finishing ...

Today, ILM Art Department's Steven Zavala, Alex Jaeger, and Alexander Gustaveson break down the development of their concept art for the Cybertron sequence in Paramount's Bumblebee.