ILM veteran Benton Jew, who worked on projects including Jurassic Park and The Mask, helped to create a special Halloween poster that inspired the moniker for ILM’s new podcast, Lighter Darker.
Listeners of the premiere episode of Lighter Darker: The ILM Podcast may be curious where the show found inspiration for its name.
27 years ago in 1997, Industrial Light & Magic was in the midst of the digital renaissance in visual effects, with projects as diverse as Men in Black, Contact, and Titanic being released that year, and others like Deep Impact (1998), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) readily underway. ILM’s then home at the Kerner facility in San Rafael, California was a bustling center of creativity across both digital and practical disciplines, and arguably the most exciting time of year came during Halloween season when hundreds of employees and their families gathered for an annual costume party.
Benton Jew had been with the ILM Art Department since 1988, working as a storyboard and conceptual artist on everything from Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) to the fabled television commercial where basketball star Charles Barkley plays one-on-one with Godzilla. Later, his responsibilities grew as he became a visual effects art director on projects like The Mask (1994). But there was always time for side projects in between work for clients, and in 1997, Jew was asked to illustrate that year’s invitation and poster for the fabled ILM Halloween Party.
IMAGE: The poster for the 1997 ILM Halloween Party, designed by Mark Mulabayo and illustrated by Benton Jew.
Designed by the late Mark Mulabayo, an in-house graphic designer at the time, the poster was envisioned in the style of the classic EC Comics of the mid-20th Century, known for their horror and science fiction stories. This “issue,” dated from October 1997, is entitled “Tales of Terror: Attack of the Nitpickers,” with the subtitle, “Producers! FX Supervisors! Art Directors! Nitpickers all!” Jew’s illustration below depicts a visual effects artist surrounded by figures caricatured in the horror style. He frightfully grasps his computer as the onlookers share their feedback about his work. “…Lighter…” one says, while someone else contrasts with “…Darker…” Yet another recommends, “…Split the difference…”
This tongue-in-cheek bit of satire about the collaborative process of visual effects would have inspired a chuckle from just about everyone at the company, and two of its word bubbles have now become the namesake of ILM’s new podcast. “I just wanted to capture that look of someone when a person comes by their workstation and points something out, or someone’s expression in dailies,” Benton Jew tells ILM.com. “It seemed like that kind of situation came up a lot in CG. Okay, no one can make a decision, let’s split the difference.
“Especially as an art director, I think I’d been seen as someone who would pick out little things,” Jew continues. “I’d be on The Mask or something, and would tell an artist, ‘Oh those icicles, they’re not quite right,’ or whatever it is. I’m sure that anybody who’s worked in CG can relate to that. People are always pointing and giving you backseat directions.”
Known within the department for his versatile and prolific output, Jew was also a lifelong comics fan, an attribute that earned him the Halloween Party assignment. “I was sort of the resident comic book geek,” he explains, “and obviously a Halloween piece would have an EC Comics theme to it. I tried to be in the spirit of artists like Jack Davis, Jack Kamen, and Graham Ingels. Mark Malabuyo was the graphic designer on it. He was a wonderful guy, so easy to work with. He was really jovial and friendly. We all miss him. He was set on making sure that the graphics had a fidelity to the old EC stuff. He made it as close as he could, with obviously some differences.”
Read the article in full at ILM.com.
