LIGHT & MAGIC (Seasons 1–2)

Light & Magic (2022) is a documentary series by Lawrence Kasdan about Industrial Light & Magic that you can watch online on iFILM. In 1975 George Lucas gathered a handful of young dreamers in a California warehouse to invent the special effects Star Wars needed — effects that simply didn't exist yet.

That gamble became ILM, the studio that rewrote the language of visual effects for the next fifty years. The series hands the mic to the people who built it by hand: Dennis Muren, Phil Tippett and his stop-motion creatures, Ben Burtt sculpting the hum of a lightsaber, and John Knoll, who later carried cinema into the digital age. Workshop footage shows spaceship battles coming together out of plywood, optics and sheer stubbornness.

Kasdan, who wrote The Empire Strikes Back, films his colleagues not as legends but as engineers and pranksters who broke the rules because nothing else worked. The best part is that garage-workshop feeling, where a mistake often turned into a breakthrough. Stream Light & Magic online on iFILM.