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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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" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Reacting is so important to the craft of acting. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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?' "

" Any tool can be used for good or bad. It's really the ethics of the artist using it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

" In animation, you can often defer decisions or make changes later. "

" 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. "

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

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

" There are things that I am nostalgic about from the 'good old days.' I loved motion control cameras, actually. I love the way they sound. I used to do a lot of miniature work, and it's still warranted, but it's done less often, largely for budgetary, schedule, and flexibility reasons. "

" 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. "