Aggie Talks About Job At Industrial Light & Magic

“If we can make it invisible to you, we’ve done our job,” said Franklin Chance of his job as a creature technical director at George Lucas’s motion picture visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). The Texas A&M graduate visited campus and addressed an audience of Aggie movie buffs about his education, his stints working for Pixar and LucasFilm, and shared some funny behind-the-scenes anecdotes.

Chance earned his bachelor’s degree in environmental design in 2001 and his master of science in visualization in 2005, both in the College of Architecture at Texas A&M.

He says growing up, his career aspirations travelled the gamut from garbage man – “because you get to ride on the back of the truck” – to jet pilot, to paleontologist (after watching Jurassic Park). “At one point I wanted to BE the flying dinosaur,” he joked.

But, he says, coming from a family full of engineers, when the time came it seemed natural to declare engineering as a major. But as much as he enjoyed certain aspects of engineering, Chance says he grew to realize it wasn’t his true passion. “One day I had an epiphany,” he shared. “I realized I spent half my time going to the movies with my friends. So I had to figure out how to turn my hobby into a way to make a living.”

That’s when he says he discovered the Department of Visualization, or VizLab, and after a change of major and a lot of hard work, he joined the program and began working toward a career in visual effects.

He says his VizLab education was invaluable in numerous ways. “This industry has many different specializations and Texas A&M allows you to push toward a specialization, but keep your knowledge broad enough that you could fit in anywhere,” he explained. He said the program also placed heavy emphasis on teamwork, which is important because “there’s almost nothing in this industry you do by yourself.” And, he noted, the VizLab and the university as a whole, gave him a huge network of people to help and advise him along the way. “I’m not exaggerating when I say a third of my graduating class works at Pixar. And there are many Aggies at ILM. It’s so great to be part of the Aggie network,” he said.

VizLab routinely brings industry professionals to campus to mentor students and it was through one such visit, Chance says, he was able to land an internship at Pixar and among other projects, worked on the animated film Ratatouille.

In fact, he takes credit for an Easter Egg (a hidden homage) in Ratatouille: the character Linguini’s underwear with the Incredibles’ logo. “I mostly made sure background characters had clothes on, so that was my biggest contribution,” he laughed.

From Pixar, Chance moved on to LucasFilm animation, where he worked for six years on the animated Star Wars-inspired series The Clone Wars, followed by a short stint with LucasArts creating video games.

Eventually, he says, he was contacted by people at ILM, who invited him to join the team to work on feature films. “ILM was the first real visual effects company; they did things no one had ever done before. Back in the 70s, people had no idea how they were doing these effects,” he said, while displaying pictures from the set of the first Star Wars movie.

“We’re all a big bunch of cheaters,” he told the audience, explaining that visual effects creators use anything and everything to create their movie magic. He said there’s a scene in Return of the Jedi featuring a row of power generators. “Those power generators are really spray-painted, upside-down Dixie cups.”

He adds in today’s digital age, it’s not so different; reusing old assets is a common trick of the trade, he said, pointing to a scene in J.J. Abrams’ first Star Trek film where none other than R2D2 floats through space in a debris field.

Chance’s film credits include 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 (2016) and the upcoming Warcraft (2016).

Although he didn’t work on the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he knows plenty of people who did, most notably his wife, also a Texas A&M grad. “She kept trying to make me come to her desk and look at this scene or that scene, but I refused,” he noted, saying he wants to see the film as a whole along with everyone else when it’s released on Dec. 18.

Even though he did work on Warcraft, he wouldn’t reveal any secrets. The film, based on the online game World of Warcraft, will be out in June.

Chance encouraged the audience to explore their own creativity in whatever they choose to do. “In film we can do just about anything. We can take you beyond the real world to places you can only imagine,” he said. “Everybody has creativity — it just comes out in different ways.”