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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. "

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" 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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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?' "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" I have three daughters who grew up while I was working on the special editions and the prequels. They got to be big 'Star Wars' fans. And, you know, I would see them identifying with a lot of the male characters, and I just thought, 'Star Wars' could use more good strong female leads.' "

" 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 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. "

" 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'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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There's no reason to think Disney is going to stop wanting to make 'Star Wars' movies if there's quality and there's interest. It has unlimited potential. It has a huge number of characters, worlds... It's a massive playground. "

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

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

" When I was a kid, one of my hobbies was as model-maker. "

John Knoll

Hobbies

Kid