The studio responsible for visual effects for some of the world’s most famous movie franchises officially opens its Vancouver office today – and it will soon get to work on the new Star Wars movie.
Industrial Light and Magic, founded in 1975 by George Lucas to produce visual effects for his movies, is holding a ribbon-cutting event today with Kathleen Kennedy, President of LucasFilm.
They hope to have 200 new employees at the studio by the summer in order to work on a host of upcoming movies, including Transformers: Age of Extinction, Jurassic World, and Star Wars: Episode VII, which is expected to be released in December 2015.
The studio, which has been nominated for dozens of academy awards in the last 30 years, has been responsible for the visual effects in the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Jurassic Park franchises, among others.
They’ve moved into a Gastown studio that was formerly filled by Pixar, the Disney-owned animation company which operated in Vancouver for three years before closing shop in 2013.
Despite the loss of Pixar, Vancouver has increasingly become a hub for the visual and digital effects industries. Last month it was announced the ‘Angry Birds’ movie would be created at Sony Pictures Imageworks’s Vancouver studio.
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