Star Wars’ John Knoll on Using the Force of Next-Gen High-Def
By Barbara Robertson
May 1, 2005 Source: Film & Video
It’s no secret that director George Lucas is the most vocal — and most successful — advocate of fully digital feature production. Working for him is one of the most challenging jobs a visual effects supervisor or an engineer can take on. For the two most recent Star Wars films, that task has fallen to Industrial Light & Magic’s John Knoll, a digital guru whose resume includes a stint working on The Abyss at ILM at the same time he and his brother Tom were creating a digital image manipulation program for the masses known simply as Photoshop. While the air is “thin” up there at the Ranch, Knoll clearly has an eye out for the working man. He sat down this spring to talk about what anyone planning an HD VFX job needs to know before they start shooting.
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Left to Right: Rob Coleman, animation
director, John Knoll and Gavin Bocquet, production designer, talk about
sets at the Fox Studios in Sydney,
Australia.
