Here’s a two-part interview with the head techie at ILM, George Lucas’ effects house.
Part I
Part II

Yeah, I’d love to work here.

Cliff Plumer is the Chief Technology Officer of Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic, the creative engines of George Lucas. As the CTO, he has the enviable position of being on the leading edge of movie and game production, and has tremendous resources at his disposal to make the latest creative ideas happen. The combined corporate entity is both a visual effects house and game studio. For the past ten years, he has worked his way up through various jobs in the company and now supervises a group of more than 150 engineers and developers who support the digital technologies that Lucas and others need to make their visual realities look great.

“It turns out we weren’t quite accurate in what we were showing from a physics perspective. So we told him ‘Of course we can do that,’ having no idea how we were going to do it and we did. We constantly walk a fine line of ‘that’s good enough’ and build the controls so that the creative person can get the look that they want and the performance that they want.”

“We were pushing 150 TB across our network on a daily basis during peak production times,” Plumer said. “And now we just have new peaks, with games for next-generation consoles as complex as some of our films, and all this strains our systems more and more.”