Top 40 John Knoll Quotes

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Often if a picture is in trouble one way or another, there are ways to salvage it, through reshoots or whatever.

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

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.

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.

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

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

‘Baby’s Day Out’ is maybe not a great movie, but… No, I’ve enjoyed and learned things from every project I’ve worked on. That was an important step in my career at ILM.

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

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

The way that Lucasfilm used ILM was George never restricted his thinking to things that he knew could be executed with the tools at the time. He would write what he thought would be cool and what he wanted from a storytelling standpoint with the assumption that, ‘Well, they’ll figure it out!’

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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?’

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

‘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.

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.