Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" As Lucasfilm is developing IP and we're working on our projects, we should be using those films to advance the ball further down the field and to make things better for the rest of the company and the rest of the industry. "

John Knoll

Rest

Down

Better

" Ideally, you will never know that you're seeing a computer-generated car. "

" Almost everything I've been paid to do was something that was largely self-taught. "

" 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. "

" Part of the process is always, 'Is there a better way?' We try to think through if there's something we can do better creatively or technically, or just is more efficient. "

" 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. "

" Visual-effects shots should flow into the rest of the live action, and you shouldn't be able to see a difference. "

" 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. "

" 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

Job

Important

" 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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've always lived by the principle of find what you really enjoy doing and make it your career. "

" It's harder to get your second picture than it is to get your first one. "

" 'Pacific Rim,' for me, was a chance to touch on those old Toho monster movies. 'Godzilla' and 'Rodan'... and then 'Ultraman' and 'Robotech' and all those kinds of things. "

John Knoll

Monster

Old

" 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. "

" As soon as you take your hobby and make it into your profession, it sort of kills it as a hobby. "

" A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game. "

" A spacecraft cockpit interior is a set where there are a lot of little techy bits, control panels and graphics displays, and other things that are kind of a job to manufacture well. "

" ILM was the first company that I had worked at that had a computer-graphics division. "

" I've been lucky enough in my career to have opportunities to revisit things that meant a lot to me in childhood. "

John Knoll

Opportunities

Childhood

" A lot of us got into the industry because of 'Star Wars,' and we all have this love of the original source material. "

John Knoll

Star

Got

" 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. "

" On every show, there's some amount of work that is brought to some state of completion - or even finished - and then cut out of the movie. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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?' "