Rob Bredow

OK, we've been here before.

And I believe this is an interesting collision, right, of tech and art.

And I believe what George Lucas created in Industrial Light & Magic, his visual effects company, ILM, he founded this 50 years ago to solve the visual storytelling challenges in his films.

And what he did there is he put artists side by side with engineers.

They were working together to be able to innovate and create the future.

This is artist-driven innovation.

I'm passionate about this.

So what we're going to do today is we're going to look at 50 years of history at ILM.

We're going to pull some of those cinematic game changers that have happened over this period of time, and then we're going to try to draw some universal themes out of that.

And in the end, I'm going to premiere for you, for the very first time, a short created by an artist using the latest generative AI tools, so we can see the trajectory we are on and the trajectory we want to be on next.

Let's turn the clock back to the Jurassic era.

This is the Jurassic Park era, my Jurassic era, 1993.

On this film, they were going to use as many full-scale dinos on set as possible.

Just an amazing, amazing movie.

I mean, this film really ended up redefining the way visual effects were done in movies.

But it wasn't planned that way from the beginning.

They were going to do these huge, full-scale dinosaurs, which they did, and they were amazing.

But for the shots where they couldn't have a full-scale dinosaur run like a T-Rex, they were going to do stop-motion animation.

And all that changed one day when Kathy Kennedy, the show's producer, she was walking the halls of ILM, and she noticed this test looping on a monitor.

Now, the animators had actually positioned this monitor, hoping she would see it.