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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. "
John Knoll
Well
Possible
Real
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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. "
John Knoll
Myself
Goals
School
" 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
" 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
" It's part of the culture at ILM and at Lucasfilm that the work is better when you collaborate, you know. There's this culture of open exchange, a wonderful ego-free sharing of ideas and talent. "
John Knoll
Work
Culture
Ideas
" I've been on lots of movies where we've done a lot of planning of sets - how much you build, and is this big enough, and will this get us what we need? - just with foam-core models. "
John Knoll
You
Planning
Movies
" 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
" 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
" Eighty percent of my job is to ask the question, 'If this were real, what would it look like?' "
John Knoll
Job
Like
Ask
" I've always lived by the principle of find what you really enjoy doing and make it your career. "
John Knoll
Enjoy
Always
Doing
" Any tool can be used for good or bad. It's really the ethics of the artist using it. "
John Knoll
Ethics
Artist
Good
" 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 certainly have opinions about things, but we're a service organization. Our job is to try and realize the director's vision. "
John Knoll
Job
Organization
Try
" 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. "
John Knoll
Simple
Hope
Death
" I loved movies. In particular, I loved movies depicting places and events that obviously you couldn't have gone out and shot. It was obvious you were looking at something that had been manufactured in some way. I was fascinated by that. "
John Knoll
Looking
Events
Loved
" 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
" 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
" 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
" When I was a kid, one of my hobbies was as model-maker. "
John Knoll
Hobbies
Kid
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
John Knoll
Kind
Hobby
Gone
" 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
" ILM was the first company that I had worked at that had a computer-graphics division. "
John Knoll
Company
Worked
Had
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
John Knoll
Even
Work
Some