With a nip here, a tuck there, a little lift, and a collagen boost, Star Wars is back on the big screen after 20 years. As timeless as Sophia Loren or Cher, and with as faithful an audience, the fairy tale can still draw serious crowds. Lucas plans to start filming in England this fall for what is being called the "prequel trilogy." So, needless to say, Industrial Light & Magic is hiring.
I had so much fun writing the story on ILM last August that I've been itching to do a follow-up piece. When I got to kick it at the Ranch for the company screening of the Star Wars rerelease and saw the Lucas Digital Ltd. recruiting site (the only official Lucas site other than the Educational Foundation and the sadly disappointing Starwars.com), I couldn't resist giving it another go.
Between Lucas Digital Ltd. (ILM and Skywalker Sound), Lucasfilm Ltd. (George's production company and THX), and LucasArts (the gaming and product division), the short showman employs some 1,500 people in Marin County, California. Industrial Light & Magic is up from 660 last August to 800, and counting.
ILM is hiring a computer graphics technical assistant. The pay ranges from US$14.89 to 17.50 an hour, because this is basically a "foot in the door" job. Typically, with overtime and weekends, weeks are 50 hours. "It's like any other production environment," says technical assist supervisor Jay Johnson. Except any other production environment doesn't work with backup tapes of Jabba the Hut.
There are 24 technical assistants at ILM, including about nine beginners, divided into several groups: Jay's CG group, render support, a video group, the Sabre team (TV and commercials), and a special-projects group.
In offices papered with movie posters from Twister, Mission Impossible, Eraser, 101 Dalmatians, and other ILM-enhanced flicks, you'll manage day-to-day dataflow for the computer-graphics department. "Typically, ILM works in terabytes of data on the network," explains Jay. You might make backups of the 3-D geometry for T-Rex in Jurassic Park, or the texture-map info for the alien creatures in Men in Black, currently in production up in Lucasland. Or you might restore data to the network. "It's a juggling act," Jay says of the job. "A lot of manipulating data, making sure it's in the right place at the right time, and not in the way."
It's certainly nothing glamorous, but if there's one thing about working at Lucas companies, the advancement opportunities for employees are prime. "It's the place to learn the company and the systems," says Jay of the tech-assist department. "From here you can work into other areas - it could be anywhere in the company. There's a lot of leeway here for good people."
