Industrial Light & Magic Will Open a New London Facility for Star Wars 7 and Avengers 2

You all know that Star Wars Episode 7 will be filmed at London Pinewood Studios. Now, according to the Hollywood Reporter, ILM - Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects division created by Georges Lucas - will open a new SFX facility in London specially for Star Wars 7 and Avengers 2, but not only :

With Star Wars: Episode VII casting underway and production expected to begin in the spring in the U.K., Industrial Light & Magic -- the VFX division of Lucasfilm, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company -- is getting ready to launch a new feature visual effects facility in central London. The target is to bring the London operation to about 200 employees initially and Marvel's   Avengers: Age of Ultron will be ILM London’s first project. 

ILM is set to sign a lease for space just outside of Soho -- a neighborhood already populated with numerous VFX houses -- and north of Tottenham Court Road, ILM president and general manager Lynwen Brennan told The Hollywood Reporter. An extensive remodel of the space is planned, and the target to move-in is late March or early April. “It will be a full service studio,” she said. “We’ll have an art department, previsualization, and an entire end-to-end visual effects and computer graphics pipeline.”

She also revealed that since production of J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars is planned at London’s Pinewood Studios, “we’ll certainly have some art department and previs there, but we’re not currently planning on having a large ILM presence at Pinewood. We did consider splitting the facility in two, but we are now focusing on our London facility and having an as-needed facility at Pinewood to be near the production.”

ILM’s Roger Guyett (who earned his third Oscar nomination this year for Star Trek Into Darkness) will be the VFX supervisor on Star Wars Episode VII. The plan is for the ILM facilities to handle all of the work for the film, not just in the U.K., but also in ILM’s San Francisco headquarters, and Singapore and Vancouver locations, as well as at its strategic partner, Base FX in Beijing. The London facility will have a pipeline allowing it to share work with the other ILM offices.

The U.K. base is part of an overall global expansion plan -- and it is not opening just to accomodate Star Wars. “ILM will be working on not only Lucasfilm projects, Disney projects and Marvel projects but [productions] for other studios as well,“

You can read the full THR article HERE.

Talking about Star Wars, here is a fun Darth Vader "Look Back" Facebook video - a fake one, of course, but really fun.