John Knoll Quotes
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Any tool can be used for good or bad. It's really the ethics of the artist using it.
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I don't have any particular loyalties to one technique or another. I'm just trying to use the best for the job.
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Often if a picture is in trouble one way or another, there are ways to salvage it, through reshoots or whatever.
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I just have this very simple idea about the rebel spies in the opening crawl of A 'New Hope' who steal the plans for the Death Star.
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Reacting is so important to the craft of acting.
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When I was a kid, one of my hobbies was as model-maker.
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'Baby's Day Out' is maybe not a great movie, but... No, I've enjoyed and learned things from every project I've worked on. That was an important step in my career at ILM.
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When I first started in the industry, there were - this is prior to the era of computer graphics and all these digital tools - there were some pretty rigid, technologically imposed limitations about how you shoot things, because if you didn't shoot 'em the right way, you couldn't make the shot work.
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Ideally, you will never know that you're seeing a computer-generated car.
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There's a shot that I designed to try and illustrate the scale of the Death Star that's sort of framed in close on the equatorial trench as Krennic's ship is leaving. The camera's pulling back, and you start with it framed so you can kind of see those docking bays that are in that trench.
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Eighty percent of my job is to ask the question, 'If this were real, what would it look like?'
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In high school and college, I'd set a bunch of goals for myself. I wanted to be the lead effects supervisor on one of these really big, innovative visual effects productions, something on the scale of a 'Star Wars' movie. And I wanted to work on a project that wins the Academy Award for best visual effects.
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I have three daughters who grew up while I was working on the special editions and the prequels. They got to be big 'Star Wars' fans. And, you know, I would see them identifying with a lot of the male characters, and I just thought, 'Star Wars' could use more good strong female leads.'
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I read a magazine called 'Cinefantastique' that had just come out with a making of 'Star Wars' issue. They had some very long and detailed interviews with a whole bunch of people at ILM. I think I memorized that whole magazine.
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Having been a cameraman, I think about, 'Well, if this was real, how would this be shot?' I try to inject as much realism as much as possible.
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You have to do what the story demands, but inside of those constraints, I try to inject as much realistic physics as I'm allowed to.
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A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game.
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The way that Lucasfilm used ILM was George never restricted his thinking to things that he knew could be executed with the tools at the time. He would write what he thought would be cool and what he wanted from a storytelling standpoint with the assumption that, 'Well, they'll figure it out!'
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There's things that you just couldn't do with an optical printer. Now, with digital compositing, most of the energy that goes into a shot goes into the aesthetic issues of, 'Is it a good shot or not?'
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If you were a new guy at ILM, they put you on the night crew - my shift was from 7 P.M. to about 5 A.M. In my free time, I was working on an idea with my older brother, a software engineer getting his doctorate at the University of Michigan. Ultimately, it developed into Photoshop.
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Something we often struggle with on pictures is the right way to shoot live-action elements that are for an environment that's very complicated from a lighting standpoint. An example is a starship flying through an environment that's constantly changing.
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If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that's a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It's very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it'll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven't really seen since the '50s and '60s.
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'Phantom Menace' was a huge project. It was the biggest visual effects production ever done at that point, and it was a little scary how big it was and how many unknown technologies had to be developed to do that work.
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I've gone through a whole series of careers where something started as a hobby of some kind. Almost everything I've been paid to do was something that was largely self-taught.