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" Eighty percent of my job is to ask the question, 'If this were real, what would it look like?' "
John Knoll
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" I've always lived by the principle of find what you really enjoy doing and make it your career. "
John Knoll
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Always
Doing
" I think it's an important part of the visual effects supervisor's job to get really deeply embedded in production and keep us all focused on trying to generate the best result. I'm not proprietary about, 'I would rather do this effect than let physical effects do it.' No, let's do the smartest thing for the movie. "
John Knoll
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" As soon as you take your hobby and make it into your profession, it sort of kills it as a hobby. "
John Knoll
Hobby
Profession
Soon
" You can hardly turn around and not see something that was done in Photoshop. "
John Knoll
Done
Turn
You
" Imagine a 'Mission: Impossible'-style spy or infiltration mission into the core, the very heart of the Empire's military-industrial complex, the most secure facility in the Empire. You have a small band of experts with complementary skills who, together, are able to do these amazing things. "
John Knoll
Heart
Amazing
Together
" Every film tries to advance the state of the art, at least a little bit. Brand new techniques? A lot of them are just evolutionary: we're just building on something that's like something we've done before and just trying to do it a little bit better or make it a little bit more realistic. "
John Knoll
Trying
Art
Better
" Any tool can be used for good or bad. It's really the ethics of the artist using it. "
John Knoll
Ethics
Artist
Good
" Ideally, you will never know that you're seeing a computer-generated car. "
John Knoll
Know
Car
Never
" I started off as a model maker, so the first part of my career was a model maker and then a motion control camera operator, so I shot a lot of miniatures. "
John Knoll
Career
Started
Motion
" There was a 3-foot-long model that was built for 'New Hope,' and then there was an 8-foot model that was built for 'Empire Strikes Back.' The 8-foot model and the 3-foot model are kind of different. A lot of the details are different between the two of them. "
John Knoll
New
Empire
Kind
" It's definitely an issue if the actor has passed away without stating any intention or desire about how his or her likeness should be dealt with. Then it falls to their estate. That's a problem that will start solving itself. Now the technology exists, and actors are aware of this and can make their wishes known. "
John Knoll
Problem
Desire
Now
" In animation, you can often defer decisions or make changes later. "
John Knoll
Changes
Decisions
Make
" 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. "
John Knoll
You
Army
Need
" I came in during the era of models, motion control, and optical printers. ILM had just started its own computer graphics division, after the Lucasfilm computer division had been sold off and became Pixar. "
John Knoll
Control
Started
Own
" Visual-effects shots should flow into the rest of the live action, and you shouldn't be able to see a difference. "
John Knoll
You
Live
Rest
" 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. "
John Knoll
Time
New
Night
" 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. "
John Knoll
Start
You
Ship
" Reacting is so important to the craft of acting. "
John Knoll
Acting
Craft
Important
" When I was a kid, I built miniatures, and that was actually the first thing I did professionally in the film industry. It was a demonstrable skill that I had, so I worked as a model maker. "
John Knoll
Model
First
Industry
" We were in an atmosphere in the household that you could accomplish anything you set your mind to. If you were willing to put in the hard work, nothing was beyond your grasp. "
John Knoll
You
Accomplish
Hard Work
" 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. "
John Knoll
Work
Digital
Right
" Life's too short to be spending all your waking hours doing something you're not excited about. And when people are that excited, you can see it in the work. "
John Knoll
People
You
Work
" '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. "
John Knoll
Work
Done
Big
" ILM was the first company that I had worked at that had a computer-graphics division. "
John Knoll
Company
Worked
Had
" 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. "
John Knoll
Pictures
Struggle
Environment
" 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. "
John Knoll
Well
Possible
Real
" A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game. "
John Knoll
Change
Done
Game
" 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. "
John Knoll
Interviews
Think
Star
" When you are shooting traditional motion capture, it's a big footprint on set. There are, like, 16 cameras that are needed and constraints over the lighting. "
John Knoll
Motion
Over
Capture
" 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?' "
John Knoll
Digital
Aesthetic
You