ILM and London's creative VFX wizards behind Star Wars, Gravity and Interstellar

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the events portrayed in the Star Wars films are supposed to have taken place. When the newest instalment of George Lucas’ intergalactic saga finally arrives in December, it will actually have been put together not that long ago in a street pretty nearby.

At the end of Shaftesbury Avenue, in a discreet Art Deco building, under conditions of secrecy that stop just short of Stormtroopers patrolling the interchange outside, the artists, technicians and programmers in the new London office of Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the special effects company founded by Lucas 40 years ago, are adding the finishing touches to what they refer to in hushed tones as ‘Episode VII’. You wouldn’t know it at first glance, but the clues are there. In the lobby there are blueprints of X-wing starfighters and desert cruisers. The gents’ toilet is signposted by Han Solo, the women’s by Princess Leia. In the animation studios upstairs, I see little R2-D2 toys scattered across the desks.

While the filming of the hotly anticipated sequel at Pinewood Studios was largely completed by the end of last year, this is the first time that the special effects of a Star Wars episode are being worked on outside California. Indeed, although ILM has offices in San Francisco, Singapore and Vancouver, the London outpost has only been up and running since October. Created for the first Star Wars film and now owned by Disney, which completed a £1.4bn takeover of Lucasfilm in 2012, ILM is the oldest and most successful visual effects company still around. It has pioneered the techniques that define the modern blockbuster — such as go motion animation, motion-controlled cameras and blue screen — through films such as The Abyss, Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park.

That they should choose the capital as a base to develop the tricks that will define the next ten or 20 years of film-making is no coincidence. Spending on film production in the UK reached a record £1.47bn last year — an increase of 35 per cent on 2013 — with £1.23bn coming from foreign projects. The fastest growing component of that is visual effects (VFX). The industry now receives revenues of an estimated £600m. The so-called ‘special effects Square Mile’ of Soho and Fitzrovia houses half a dozen top-flight VFX companies, which have worked on the biggest films in recent memory.

A ten-minute walk away is the Noel Street office of Framestore, which last year won multiple Academy Awards for its ground-breaking work on Gravity. On Great Portland Street is Double Negative, which created sequences in Inception and Interstellar, earning them Oscars for both films. At the Moving Picture Company (MPC) on Wardour Street, they’re working on The Hunger Games and the new James Bond movie Spectre (they’re also responsible for that John Lewis advert with the penguin). Alongside these heavy hitters are smaller houses such as Cinesite, The Mill and Baseblack.

‘The classic line that we get from studios is: “We want to do something no one’s ever seen before,” ’ says Ben Morris, ILM’s London creative director. ‘In the incredibly rich visual world that we now live in, that’s a genuine challenge, but it’s one London is equal to.’ He and his business partner Sue Lyster set up the studio last year, rapidly growing the team from three people to 130 in weeks. Both had previously worked at Framestore: Morris, who first decided to go into the industry after seeing the original Star Wars film as a child, and who won an Oscar for his work on The Golden Compass in 2008, was a visual effects super-visor; Lyster was head of production. It’s all a long way from the mid-1980s when the industry was in its infancy. Framestore, the oldest London VFX company, was founded in 1986. Back then, says CEO William Sargent, the demands on processing speed and storage were so huge, they could only make short CG films at television resolution — it took a bank of hard drives the size of a two-bedroom flat to create 90 seconds of footage. The company’s first projects were pop videos for bands such as Culture Club and A-Ha. Using Moore’s law — a theory devised in 1965 by the computer scientist Gordon Moore, which predicted that processing speed would double every year — they could plan for the moment when they would be able to move into film. ‘We knew as early as 1986 that we’d be able to, but we knew we’d have to wait until around 1993 for it to become cost-effective.’

They moved into TV commercials and mini-series, picking up an Emmy for Gulliver’s Travels. Now the company has a turnover of £90m and runs two London bases — on Noel Street and Wells Street. For Gravity, the director Alfonso Cuarón initially wanted to suspend the actors on wires to simulate weightlessness, but the blood rushing to their faces would have destroyed the illusion. Instead, the actors kept still and they moved the camera, using high-speed robots purloined from the auto industry. The cast members were suspended within a lightbox containing LED lights projecting an animated version of the film to create the right play of shadows and light on their faces. For the spacewalking sequences, Sandra Bullock acted with just her head — her body in the spacesuit was produced by the animation department.

Now the 800 or so employees have diversified into projects including virtual reality experiences for the Samsung Note 4 and the Oculus Rift. I spend a happy afternoon in the office on Noel Street exploring the asteroid belt, floating around the spaceship from Interstellar, ascending The Wall from Game of Thrones in a creaking lift and experiencing a fight from the new Avengers movie from the very centre of the action, ducking to avoid being hit by Thor’s hammer. ‘We’re just very good as a nation at lateral thinking,’ says Sargent, when I ask what the strengths of the London scene are. ‘Creativity is just another word for problem-solving.’

In fact, the rapid growth of the industry is largely due to two figures: Gordon Brown and Harry Potter. It was Brown as Chancellor who created the conditions that allowed the film industry to flourish. In 1997, he implemented a series of tax breaks that allowed films with at least ten per cent of production in the UK to claim tax relief on up to 25 per cent of their costs. At present the London film industry is worth £3bn, while the creative industries as a whole is the fastest-growing sector and employer. Since 1999, UK-made films have paid a voluntary levy of 0.5 per cent of their budget (up to £40,412), which has raised more than £10m towards education, training and development. Last year, the government in-vested £6.5m in the Next Gen Skills Academy, to train upcoming talent with the help of Double Negative and Framestore among others.

The eight Harry Potter films — shot at Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire — provided regular work for UK companies to develop. When the first Potter film was shot in 2000, less than a third of the effects were produced in Britain. With the last film, it was pretty much an all-British affair. Work was spread across the industry and most of the Soho companies contributed to at least one instalment. As Morris puts it: ‘Before Harry Potter, there were big films going through London, but there wasn’t the consistent training ground and resource-building faculty. The studios realised that there was something special fermenting here and the images we were producing were the equal of anywhere in the world.’

Morris and Lyster also point to the proximity of the firms to each other as a reason the London industry has an edge. ‘We’re all competitors, but we’re friends as well, so all the companies know how to collaborate. And you get a lot of artists moving from one company to another, so the talent pool is constantly mixing itself.’ It’s not unusual for a film to recruit teams from multiple firms to work on it, allowing for talent to cross-pollinate. ‘We all benefit from it,’ says Lyster. ‘In California, you either work for ILM, or you’re resting. Here, there’s a lot more ebb and flow.’

But the Soho VFX scene has benefited from more general trends, too. Costs have come down as technology has improved. Meanwhile, films have grown increasingly reliant on visual effects. While it is superhero and science-fiction movies that bear the most obvious imprints, VFX is now used much more subtly to add detail to period drama — for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, set in the late-Victorian period, Double Negative was tasked with recreating the London of the time, including a version of Tower Bridge that was still under construction — or to create stadiums full of cheering fans, as it did for Rush.

‘Visual effects are a huge part of film-making and are used in all kinds of films,’ says Double Negative’s CG supervisor Eugénie von Tunzelmann. ‘Some are obvious — spaceships, monsters, falling skyscrapers — but others are subtle or unexpected. A period drama might use computer graphics to create a crowd, extend a set or achieve a moodier sky. Visual effects can be used to remove modern details from an environment, to add or remove people from a location, or to adjust the lighting, atmosphere or mood of a scene.’

At Framestore, another of Sargent’s projects was Paddington, which became the highest-grossing non-Hollywood family film last year. ‘What has changed in the past few years is that a CG character can now take the lead in a movie and you’ll believe it. If you don’t believe in Paddington, you don’t believe the movie. We spent a lot of time discussing whether he was 3ft 3in or 3ft 6in, and the precise texture of his fur. But the big thing that we cracked was the eyes. The difference between you buying it and not going with it is 0.001 per cent, but if you don’t, the whole movie will fail.’

Morris believes the divide between visual effects and other aspects of film production is disappearing. ‘The visual effects supervisor is quite often the first person who sits down with the director and discusses how they can tell the story — and we’re the last people to get the film once it’s been edited.’

The next phase will be live-action effects, which will draw on technology from computer games and apply them to the film industry. The company is also working out how to film effects in real time, so the director can look into a monitor to see something approaching the finished product. Currently, a CG character will be added in post-production.

As well as the new Star Wars film, ILM has been working on Avengers: Age of Ultron, which Morris describes as containing ‘every possible technical challenge’, including destroying Johannesburg and animating the Hulk. ‘The normal way to create a character like the Hulk would be to put someone in some silly motion-capture suit with ping-pong balls on their heads and transform it at a later stage. What we want to do is allow the director to see the actor as Hulk in real time, performing with the same fidelity.’ Once this is fully mastered, companies will be able to make films much more rapidly. Instead of acting in front of a green screen and being asked to imagine the environment that will later be created, in future, it’s hoped, actors will be able to take advantage of virtual reality technology and be fully immersed in the worlds, just like the audiences, making their reactions much more authentic. ‘If the actor can actually see the X-wing fighter flying across the horizon, their response will be more real.’

Such are the security arrangements around Star Wars, I sense Morris will be called up in front of Lord Vader if he reveals any details of the film. ‘Episode VII is amazing. I can tell you that,’ he says. He sees it as a return to the spirit of the original films. This appears to be backed up by the 88-second teaser clip released online, which shows shots of the Millennium Falcon soaring above a desert, and X-wings flying low over water, as well as the trailer released this spring, which shows Harrison Ford with Chewbacca the Wookiee in a very familiar spaceship (‘Chewie, we’re home’). The second Star Wars trilogy was made when computer effects were in their infancy; the new films will incorporate them more organically. ‘The kids who grew up on the first set of Star Wars films are now making the new Star Wars films,’ says Morris. ‘We naturally hark back to the things that inspired us as children and changed our lives.’ The first day of filming Episode VII in Abu Dhabi was particularly surreal: ‘There were a lot of middle-aged people standing there as the sun went down on the 50C heat having their little emotional moments. When you looked on set and realised what you were making… I’m still pinching myself.’

Portraits by Matthew Stylianou. Post Production by izabellapro.com.