how one thing can change everything

perusing blogs this morning, i came across a post on Alex's blog by Stephen Tremp about low-budget movies. the first one listed was American Graffiti. which made me think of George Lucas.

we have discussions about George here at the Gregory house on a regular basis. we're not always happy with his creative decisions, but we do give him credit for changing the movie landscape over the last 30 years. and we don't really talk about how Star Wars has invaded our culture with terms like "may the Force by with you" and "I have a bad feeling about this."

our discussions center more around the results of one man's vision for a story. we're referring to a special effects company called Industrial Light and Magic.

"Lucas created the company (in 1975) when he discovered that the special effects department at 20th Century Fox was shut down after he was given the green light for his production of the film Star Wars."

"They have since gone on to produce special effects for nearly three hundred films, including the entire Star Wars saga, The Abyss, the Indiana Jones series, the Harry Potter franchise, the Jurassic Park franchise, the Back to the Future trilogy, many of the Star Trek films, Ghostbusters II, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the entireTerminator sequels, the Transformers films, the Men in Black series, most of the Mission: Impossible films, and also provided work for Avatar, alongside Weta Digital."

(to see more: ILM filmography)

"John Lasseter worked for ILM in the early 1980s as a computer animator. The computer graphics division, now known as Pixar, was eventually sold to Steve Jobs, and went on to create the first CG animated feature with Toy Story."

they've also done a lot of firsts:
-- first completely computer-generated characters
-- first completely computer-generated sequence
-- first morphing
-- first cg hair and skin
-- first i-mocap (motion capture)

in my opinion, without their ground-breaking technology, we probably wouldn't have effects houses like Weta.

though we may never have the influence George has, maybe our stories will influence one person who will go on to influence the world. you just never know.

keep writing.

(all information was taken from Wookieepedia.com)