Director Ron Howard and producer George Lucas among actors and crew from Willow.

VFX Voice: What are your memories of coming onto the film, initially?

Dave Carson: At that time, I was head of the art department at ILM. My earliest recollection is sitting in the art department meetings with George and Ron, as they talked about the early drafts of the script, to give us an idea of the kind of imagery they would like to see us do.

The script was still pretty fluid. They had a strong outline, but they were still open to changes as we contributed art and as they continued to have their story meetings. George had also brought in Moebius [pen name of French artist Jean Giraud] to do some concept art based on this early outline. I remember those pieces showing up, and they were really fun to look at. He would do these beautiful ink drawings and then he would Xerox them and color the Xeroxes. He never colored the originals.

I had also just brought in a couple of new artists. One of them was a storyboard artist, Dave Lowery. There was another young man, Richard Vander Wende, who came on as a concept artist. He did these beautiful Ralph McQuarrie-esque kind of paintings.

VFX Voice: What was involved in your role as visual effects art director?

Carson: Apart from the initial design work, I would go to dailies every day and Dennis would sometimes ask my opinion on how things looked, how shots looked. For some reason, early on, he decided that I should be the expert on whether the blue glow of the wand in the film was consistent from shot to shot. I don’t know how I got saddled with that chore, but that was one of the things that I was always asked about almost every daily: if the degree of blue glow on the wand was appropriate from shot to shot.

VFX Voice: One of the things about Willow is that the visual effects were largely still done in the practical and optical days, but then it also saw the advent of morphing. What was the feeling there at ILM about how the effects techniques would be combined?

Carson: George definitely was pushing us to do the most that we were capable of, using the technology at the time. Phil Tippett [VES] was still using traditional stop motion for the Eborsisk monster, and optical was being pushed to its limits. And the morphing thing was a huge challenge as well. The script was pushing us to do things that we maybe hadn’t done before. But, on the other hand, we had Dennis Muren [VES] at the helm, and Dennis is just the best when it comes to figuring out how to do effects.