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" 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

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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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't have any particular loyalties to one technique or another. I'm just trying to use the best for the job. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" Eighty percent of my job is to ask the question, 'If this were real, what would it look like?' "

John Knoll

Job

Ask

" I certainly have opinions about things, but we're a service organization. Our job is to try and realize the director's vision. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" You can hardly turn around and not see something that was done in Photoshop. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" '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

" 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. "

" 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?' "

" 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. "