Allison Montroy
amontroy@mustangdaily.net
The SLO International Film Festival (SLOIFF) started off Wednesday night with a “Red Carpet Gala” in Cal Poly’s Alex and Faye Spanos Theatre. The event featured plenty of wine, a full house, spotlights and a film documenting the history of visual and special effects in films.
All that was missing was a red carpet.
With local Bianchi wine, Vina Robles, J. Lohr and Laetitia Vineyards serving wine at the reception, it was a crowd of clinking wine glasses and buzzing chatter for the first hour before the doors opened to Spanos. A spotlight marked the entrance, and attendees had the opportunity to take pictures in front of a SLOIFF backdrop before entering the theater.
Before the featured documentary, festival director Wendy Eidson opened the festival with a few words about filmmaker Leslie Iwerks and her film “Industrial Light and Magic: Creating the Impossible,” and noted the festival opened and ended with two of Iwerks’ documentaries. Five other documentaries were also to be shown during the festival.
“We’re actually thinking of renaming it the Leslie Iwerks festival,” Eidson joked.
Iwerks, who is the granddaughter of Mickey Mouse designer Ub Iwerks, was also awarded the SLOIFF Spotlight Award for her documentary work.
“Really, documentaries sort of found me,” Iwerks said. “There’s a great diversity of things I’ve been able to document, but there’s a lot more stories to be told.”
Iwerks’ featured film, “Industrial Light and Magic: Creating the Impossible,” was narrated by actor Tom Cruise and depicted the history of visual effects and ILM — starting with George Lucas and his out-of-this-world vision of “Star Wars.”
The documentary continued to follow the visual effects, stop motion, animation and computer graphics timeline of movies such as “Star Trek,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Jurassic Park” and “Transformers,” and even shared how computer generation was used to “enhance” the “simple little things,” such as the feather in “Forrest Gump.”
“Especially being someone interested in the special effects side of films, I found the documentary to be fun, and really neat,” liberal arts and engineering studies senior Joshua Lee said.
Lee said seeing how Lucas created ILM from a film idea “was very visionary.”
After the documentary, Cal Poly liberal arts and engineering professor David Gillette joined a panel that included Iwerks onstage for a Q&A session.
Lee, who participated in the Q&A, said the panelists were “very informative” and he felt “welcomed by them.”
“I enjoyed it a lot,” Lee said. “We had a much larger turnout than I expected, and it wasn’t just a couple of students and the panelists standing around. I had a great time sampling the wine from around the area, and talking to people from the industry.”
Lee said his favorite part, though, was the after-party hosted at the Luis Wine Bar.
“I felt very adult going out for a few drinks and meeting everybody in that kind of setting,” he said. “But they were very welcoming.”