John Knoll Quotes

John Knoll

Profession : Artist

Birth : October 6, 1962

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

John Knoll

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

John Knoll

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

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

'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.

John Knoll

'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.

John Knoll

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.

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 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.

John Knoll

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.

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

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

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?'

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

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.

John Knoll

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!'

John Knoll

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.

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

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

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