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.

John Knoll

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.

John Knoll

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.

John Knoll

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.

John Knoll

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.

John Knoll

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

John Knoll

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.

John Knoll

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

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.

John Knoll

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.

John Knoll

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.

John Knoll

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.

John Knoll

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

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.

John Knoll

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.

John Knoll

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.'

John Knoll

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.

John Knoll

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.

John Knoll

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

John Knoll

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