More than a decade after first planting roots in Vancouver’s visual effects (VFX) community, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) has officially opened its new, purpose-built and expanded studio.
Earlier this year, ILM began operations in its new 40,000 sq. ft. space, which spans two levels within the base podium of The Stack — a striking office tower in the Central Business District of downtown Vancouver, completed in 2022, that now stands as the tallest 100 per cent office building in the city.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony held today marked the official opening and celebrated the storied studio’s continued growth in the city.
You might also like:
– Industrial Light & Magic to relocate Vancouver studio to The Stack office tower
– Industrial Light and Magic opens LED video wall film studio in Metro Vancouver
– Vancouver’s new tallest office tower, and Canada’s greenest, officially opens (PHOTOS/VIDEOS)
– Hollywood North: British Columbia’s struggling film production industry gets big boost with new tax incentives
– Sony Pictures Imageworks to relocate global headquarters office to The Post in downtown Vancouver
“The role of government support in the film and television sector is crucial to our success here. It has been instrumental in building a dynamic, competitive and innovative entertainment industry in British Columbia — one that provides thousands of individuals with the opportunity to build careers in this creative field,” said Janet Lewin, senior vice president of Lucasfilm VFX and general manager of ILM, during her remarks today, while also noting that this milestone also comes just weeks ahead of the 50th anniversary of George Lucas’ founding of the VFX studio.
“While we often refer to what we do as art, and rightfully so, it’s also very much a business at ILM. We’re committed to not only delivering the highest quality work, but also to maintaining a healthy studio where people thrive in Vancouver. We have amazing talent and tax incentives, which enable us to be price competitive, land the very best work, and remain very busy,” continued Lewin.
Recent government policy changes increase British Columbia’s Production Services Tax Credit from the previous rate of 28 per cent to the new rate of 36 per cent starting in 2025.
ILM first opened in Vancouver in 2012 as a pop-up studio to test the market. Since then, the studio has seen remarkable growth.
This new Vancouver studio in The Stack at 1133 Melville St. is now ILM’s largest out of their five locations worldwide, says Lewin.
The new space is also 25 per cent larger than ILM’s previous longtime Vancouver permanent studio facility in the nearby Gastown district, where the company first opened a 30,000 sq. ft. location at 21 Water St. in 2014 — a heritage warehouse building turned into office space, and the former home of Pixar Animation Studios Canada up until 2013 — with a team of about 100 employees.
The studio previously operated a smaller second space in Gastown before consolidating at 21 Water St. during the height of the pandemic, and ultimately relocating entirely from the district in 2024.
The company now has over 3,500 employees across all of its studio locations, with the Vancouver location growing to about 950 artists, technicians, production staff, and support personnel or more than a quarter of the entire ILM workforce around the globe.
The new studio space accommodates up to about 300 people or about 33 per cent of the local team at any given time under a semi-remote work model.
Spencer Kent, the executive in charge of ILM’s Vancouver and San Francisco operations, noted that the initial impetus to relocate from Gastown was due to the expiration of their lease.
“We really saw that as an opportunity to reformat what we want from an office space for our talent, for our people,” said Kent.
“What we saw here was an opportunity to start from a blank slate, The Stack as a new building. It was slab to slab. That’s what we walked into. We’d inherited and retrofitted previous spaces, but this was our chance to start something from the ground up and really build something that works well with a hybrid workflow.”
The floors of The Stack occupied by ILM feature airy double-height ceilings, with the fully optimized purpose-built space featuring hot desks, meeting rooms, lounge areas, a large kitchen, and other amenities, as well as a large theatre to facilitate the critical review and presentation of their work.
Ample artwork from ILM’s iconic creations can be found throughout the studio space — from models and sculptures of Yoda, the Millennium Falcon, C-3PO, Chewbacca, a Stormtrooper, the Mandalorian, and a Jurassic World velociraptor, to collectible figurines and wall-mounted concept art from the Star Wars universe and numerous other intellectual properties.
Employees also have access to various other shared amenity spaces in the 530-ft-tall, 37-storey tower, including a fitness gym and the outdoor rooftop space. At ground level, the building features a 5,000 sq. ft. location of the Nook restaurant chain.
This LEED Platinum green building certified building is also Canada’s greenest high-rise commercial building, the first office tower to attain Canada Green Building Council’s (CAGBC) Zero Carbon Building design standard certification, and the first high-rise office tower in North America built to zero-carbon standards. Other tenants in this 550,000 sq. ft. premium Class AAA office building include Ernst & Young, BDC, Blakes, DLA Piper, Canaccord Genuity, Fluor, and Plenty of Fish.
The Stack is owned by Oxford Properties and designed by James Cheng Architects and Adamson Associates Architects. The previous Gastown location, also known as The Packing House, is owned by Low Tide Properties.
With the exponential growth in the local team size, Kent indicated that the ILM Vancouver team has gone from working on just two projects a year over a decade ago to about 20 now — spanning a wide range of content, entailing feature films, television series, feature animation, and the recently added realm of immersive entertainment for live shows, namely the ABBA Voyage show.
“There’s the three T’s everyone hears about when you think about Vancouver and B.C. Tax credit, time zone, and now it’s talent with a capital T,” said Kent.
When it comes to talent, ILM also runs its “Jedi Academy” internship program, which trains recent or soon-to-be VFX graduates or fresh artists with extensive training, with the program having a success rate of over 90 per cent in converting the “Jedis” into ILM employees.
Currently, the company has 10 types of roles open for its Vancouver location, ranging from creature modellers to environment supervisors.
“The local talent base has really expanded. We have at ILM good partnerships with schools,” continued Kent.
“When I first started here, it was a bit of a different story, and I think the industry was still in earlier days. Digital animation has been here for quite a while, but the VFX side of things was early. And I’ve really seen it bloom and the talent pool also come up with it.”
ILM is perhaps best known for its origins as the visual effects powerhouse behind the original Star Wars films.
When asked, Lewin shared that generally, ILM’s workflow is now 40 per cent content for its parent firm of The Walt Disney Company, including the projects for Lucasfilm, and 60 per cent content that is not under the large Disney umbrella.
ILM Vancouver’s contributions span both film and television, with recent feature credits including Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Twisters, and The Electric State, as well as numerous Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) feature titles, such as Deadpool & Wolverine, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Antman and The Wasp: Quantumania, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Thor: Love and Thunder; Doctor Srange: In The Multiverse of Madness.
The Vancouver team has also recently worked on acclaimed television series such as Silo, Severance, Stranger Things, and various Star Wars television series on Disney+, including Andor, Skeleton Crew, The Acolyte, Ahsoka, and Ob-Wan Kenobi.
Throughout ILM Vancouver’s history to date, since 2012, the studio location has contributed to over 120 projects, including earlier works such as the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Jurassic World, Kong: Skull Island, Aladdin, and various films in the MCU’s Infinity Saga, such as Avengers: Endgame.
The team is currently working on several high-profile projects, including Tron: Ares and Avatar: Fire and Ash — the third instalment in James Cameron’s epic film series, which will be released in December 2025 — and the upcoming Star Wars film The Mandalorian & Grogu, coming to the big screens in May 2026. It also had a major hand in making the upcoming 2025 releases of Jurassic World Rebirth and Lilo & Stitch.
Earlier in 2025, ILM Vancouver’s work on the first season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians on Disney+ won an Emmy award for exceptional visual effects. This is also a notable project for being locally produced in and around Metro Vancouver, with much of this television series filmed at Mammoth Studios in Burnaby.
Jeff White, creative director at ILM Vancouver, highlighted the Percy Jackson series as a prime example of the synergy between the studio’s visual effects work and the rest of British Columbia’s major film and television production industry.
In 2022, ILM built a 20,000 sq. ft. StageCraft LED video wall volume in a soundstage of Mammoth Studios. The high-tech production system developed by ILM uses large, bright LED video screen walls to provide a virtual live background for scenes during filming, providing a much more dynamic, flexible and cost-effective alternative to green and blue screens, and reducing the amount of post-production work required.
With powerful computers, a photorealistic three-dimensional background scene is generated by StageCraft LED, and the scene’s perspective follows the camera’s movements.
White shared how they were able to film major scenes in Percy Jackson’s first season using this StageCraft LED volume, including a scene that takes place both inside and outside The Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the video wall’s background scene filmed by two people instead of sending the whole cast and crew to New York.
For a more complex scene of a boat ride through a tunnel, they carefully built a 60-ft-wide, two-ft-deep water tank inside the volume.
“The kids sat in the boat in the middle, and then the tunnel that they were traveling down was all on the walls, and so they didn’t move. The tunnel moved around them,” said White.
Local filming for the second season of Percy Jackson concluded this past February, and ILM Vancouver is again deeply involved in the post-production work ahead of the season’s release in December 2025. Disney also recently renewed the series for a third season, with filming potentially beginning before the end of this year.
Aside from the Vancouver studio and the San Francisco headquarters, other ILM studios are also located in London, Sydney, and Mumbai.
You might also like:
– Industrial Light & Magic to relocate Vancouver studio to The Stack office tower
– Industrial Light and Magic opens LED video wall film studio in Metro Vancouver
– Vancouver’s new tallest office tower, and Canada’s greenest, officially opens (PHOTOS/VIDEOS)
– Hollywood North: British Columbia’s struggling film production industry gets big boost with new tax incentives
– Sony Pictures Imageworks to relocate global headquarters office to The Post in downtown Vancouver
