Inside ILM

The ILM shooting stage, a darkened warehouse-like space lined with computers and esoteric film-making equipment. "Basically the entire room is a live virtual space," explains digital supervisor Mike Sanders. "We can do blue screen, green screen, HD, you name it. It's equipped for state-of-the-art virtual cinematography, so there's a 40-camera motion capture system in here – if we have actors in mo-cap suits we can record whatever they're doing."

This system is used in almost every movie that ILM works on now. The background characters and hero actions in Iron Man, Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean were captured here. "We also provide a lot of digital doubles of actors for the stunt work," says Sanders. "We'll either do full CG replacements or we'll do a head or face replacement. We have a technology called Clone Cam, which allows us to rebuild the actor's head in immensely high resolution. It's a photographic technique like a scan, but laser scans take too long, and there are a lot of inaccuracies if the actor moves their head. We invented this technique about six years ago because we were doing Lemony Snickett and we needed a digital baby. You don't want to put babies in front of a laser…"

This same technology, the motion capture cameras and the Clone Cam, have also been used in LucasArts' latest games, including Force Unleashed 2. The pipeline is slightly different, and the data has to be scaled down (it can take all night to render a single frame of a movie CG sequence – a video game needs to render 30 frames a second), but it's the same teams and equipment serving both sectors.

And vitally, this isn't just movies leading the way with video games benefiting from a trickle down effect: game technology is ahead in certain areas. "When we've been able to share our real-time shaders and real-time lighting advances with ILM, they've been blown away," says LucasArts art director Matt Omernick. "In fact, they have wanted to adopt it into many of the projects that they're working on. For a lighting artist, there's a huge advantage in being able to get a scene perfectly right, iterate on it 100 times in one day and then send it off as a render. Movies have got to the point where you can do almost anything, and while games still have a lot of problems to solve, what we're good at is doing things very quickly, and iterating very quickly, and that inevitably gets you to a higher quality. That will feed back in to both industries."