STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
If you look at some of this century's most popular films - like "Lord Of The Rings," "The Avengers," "Harry Potter" - you will see the work of one company - Industrial Light & Magic.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
When directors want to achieve an impossible shot, they go to ILM for help. This month, it's celebrating 50 years in business.
INSKEEP: The company started when George Lucas had a vision for a film he called "Star Wars." This is the '70s. He wanted the camera to move around the models of spaceships as they battled and was told this wasn't possible, so he started his own company to get it done.
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GEORGE LUCAS: We figured out how to take models and match backgrounds and so shoot them where you could pan through space, which you couldn't do at that point. You could move the camera. So that was a major breakthrough.
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MARTIN: That was George Lucas speaking to Fresh Air back in 2010. He said Industrial Light & Magic scored another advance in the early '90s with improvements in computing power.
LUCAS: The breakthrough at Industrial Light & Magic really was "Jurassic Park." That was when we finally got a 3D animated character of a dinosaur to look real.
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LUCAS: From the very, very beginning of the movie industry, people have been struggling with these issues, and we finally did it.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) We're going to make a fortune with this place.
INSKEEP: People have certainly made fortunes off of the special effects. In "Terminator 2," when a bad guy turned to liquid, that was ILM. The way they made it look like Forrest Gump was shaking hands with Lyndon Johnson was also ILM.
JOHN KNOLL: The projects that attract us the most are the ones where we're not certain how we're going to do them when they come through the door.
MARTIN: John Knoll is the current executive creative director at Industrial Light & Magic. He was there for the challenges of the third movie in the "Pirates Of The Caribbean" franchise.
KNOLL: We had to do this big whirlpool in the ocean, and that required computer-generated water. And I was kind of right at the limits of what computers were capable of at the time. When we got it together, the director really didn't like it at all.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character, shouting) Ah.
KNOLL: I felt like the scale wasn't there, that it looked too small for him. And we got together with all our smartest R&D engineers and figured out a way to essentially trick the computer into getting us about 10 times that resolution.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Maelstrom.
KNOLL: That process of trying to create beautiful art to a client's very specific demands against a looming deadline, often with technology that's brand new, you know, it's scary, but there's an adrenaline rush to it.
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INSKEEP: And John Knoll thinks George Lucas doesn't get enough credit.
KNOLL: And you can certainly look at the state of the film industry before George started pushing all of this and where it is today, and I think it's pretty different because of his efforts.
MARTIN: Fifty years later, Industrial Light & Magic is still creating grand illusions. The George Lucas Educational Foundation is a financial supporter of NPR, but I want to tell you, they had nothing to do with this story.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIMAS & LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA'S "MAIN TITLE (FROM "STAR WARS")") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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