Any tool can be used for good or bad. It's really the ethics of the artist using it.
John Knoll
You can hardly turn around and not see something that was done in Photoshop.
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.
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.
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.
When I was a kid, one of my hobbies was as model-maker.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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 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 certainly have opinions about things, but we're a service organization. Our job is to try and realize the director's vision.
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.
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.
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.
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?'
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.
I don't have any particular loyalties to one technique or another. I'm just trying to use the best for the job.
A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game.
Almost everything I've been paid to do was something that was largely self-taught.
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.
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.
In animation, you can often defer decisions or make changes later.
'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.
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!'
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.
Reacting is so important to the craft of acting.
Eighty percent of my job is to ask the question, 'If this were real, what would it look like?'
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.
As soon as you take your hobby and make it into your profession, it sort of kills it as a hobby.
A lot of us got into the industry because of 'Star Wars,' and we all have this love of the original source material.
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.
Visual-effects shots should flow into the rest of the live action, and you shouldn't be able to see a difference.
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.
ILM was the first company that I had worked at that had a computer-graphics division.
Often if a picture is in trouble one way or another, there are ways to salvage it, through reshoots or whatever.
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.
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.
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.
'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've been lucky enough in my career to have opportunities to revisit things that meant a lot to me in childhood.
I've always lived by the principle of find what you really enjoy doing and make it your career.
