3. Real Time Visualizations

Part of the demands on the IT department is doing near real-time pre-visualizations to give directors and producers a closer sampling of what the digital wizards can eventually deliver. "We try to give people more insight into what a final product is going to look like," Plumer said. "We want to make it seamless for any artist to see anything quicker."

This means more computing gear on the set. "We are pushing what we can do on set, and what the directors can do when they are shooting and doing the photography," Plumer said. "We can sit with a director anywhere in the world, and show them what is happening with interactive pre-visualization, which is very important and very useful."

But it isn't just being on the set with the right gear, it is also reaching out to their clients wherever they are around the world. "Most of our clients are in L.A. or somewhere else. We hardly ever deliver real film to them. Now we deliver digital files," Plumer said. "Sometimes we use Firewire drives or tape. It depends on what the client asks for. Star Wars Episode 2 is the first film that went through a complete digital intermediate process. Now 90% of the movies we work on go through this process."

Given the grace with which ILM pulls off every task thrown at it, including moving 4,000 servers and workstations without losing a minute of productivity, Cliff Plumer may be George Lucas's real Yoda.

ILM now exploits the synergies between the movie and gaming groups that until now have been at different locations and involved different people and different computing systems. The intent behind the consolidation of their offices in the Presidio was to bring everyone together, and start to leverage the assets, techniques and tools that one group used with the other. "We work on 10-12 movie projects a year, and the game division works on 2 or 3 titles at one time, so it makes a lot of sense," Plumer said. "Most of what we do is designed for summer and holiday releases. This year we had four or five pretty large projects at once, and that is very typical now."

Exploiting these synergies between movies and games is where it is at: "Right now we aren't designing things for just one medium. Games and DVDs are part of movie production now from the get-go," Plumer said. "We have lots of additional content and story tie-ins, and sharing these assets are all part of the plan now. We are always thinking about how we reuse some of our assets to provide content to the home that has a broader appeal than just a movie screen."