In association with the Black Film Society here at UM, BSA hosted a panel with Lucasfilm Ltd, where Messrs. Cary Phillips and Ryan Smith talked about technology and its place in Hollywood. Mr. Phillips is an R&D supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, and Mr. Smith is the manager for Global Diversity Recruitment Programs at Lucasfilm Ltd. This panel event was followed by a recruitment luncheon the following day.
A glowing review from one of our attendees: “Mr. Cary Phillips talked to us about working at Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm. He showed us some of the projects that he worked on, including Marvel movies like Iron Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, and many other notable franchises.
The presentation was full of clips dissecting how certain scenes were manufactured (adding art to a background, subtracting certain elements of a background, how to add shadows and light to a CGI costume, etc.). He really emphasized that people with various disciplines and interests would enjoy working at ILM. He discussed the different roles that ILM has: artists, animators, software engineers who worked with machine learning to implement changing features, and supervisors.”
All in all, it was a very exciting and illuminating experience.
