Industrial Light & Magic - A Lucas Film Company)
excerpt from the foundry’s press release
London, June 8th, 2009 – Leading visual effects software developer, The Foundry (www.thefoundry.co.uk), today announced that Industrial Light & Magic (ILM,) Lucasfilm Ltd’s Academy Award-winning visual effects studio, has purchased a site license of Nuke to complement their in-house pipeline.
Founded in 1975 to create visionary effects for the what would become the space epic Star Wars,ILM has gone from strength to strength producing groundbreaking visual effects work on nearlythree-hundred films including Oscar® nominees Iron Man and Transformers, the Indiana Jonesseries, and the Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean and Jurassic Park franchises among many others.
Their visionary work has earned them thirty-seven Academy Award® nominations for Best Visual Effects and garnered fifteen Oscars as well as twenty AMPAS Sci-Tech Awards®.
Lucasfilm’s Chief Technical Officer, Richard Kerris, comments:
“ILM has a history in providing breakthrough imagery for production and to do that, our artists need to be equipped with the best possible tools. We believe Nuke is a forerunner in the compositing field. The Foundry’s investment in research and development and customer-focused approach has produced a flexible, artist-focused tool set. We are excited to work with The Foundry and see where these new possibilities will take our work.”
“Nuke allows us to leverage our 3D pipeline while remaining in the compositing environment which puts a great deal of power into the hands of the compositors,” explains Pat Tubach, ILM’s compositing department supervisor. “We work on very complex shots and the remarkable speed at which Nuke operates means our artists can focus on the art of visual effects and not have their creativity impeded by a software speed limit.”
Bill Collis, CEO of The Foundry, commented, “ILM is a huge force in the world of visual effects and we are thrilled that they have chosen to add Nuke as a key tool in their compositing workflow.We are very excited to see where our working relationship takes us.”