John Knoll - Visual Effects Supervisor
John Knoll, Visual Effects Supervisor on Star Wars Eps 1,2 & 3, is a digital effects pioneer. In the late 1980’s, he developed the software for Adobe Photoshop with his older brother Thomas, and later on followed this up with the Knoll Lens Flare package. Initially, though, he worked low-tech, with work as an ILM modelmaker during his college vacations from USC.
Quick aside here: USC = University of Southern California, ILM = Industrial Light and Magic, and the fact that almost everyone at the latter seems to have studied at the former is no accident. USC has been George Lucas’s favourite film school since he went there in the 60’s and discovered his true calling, and it’s been his main recruiting ground since then. Even I, the humble author of this article, did some time there in the 90’s, but decided on a future in Australia. USCinema has a slogan: it’s “Reality Ends Here.”
After graduating in 1986, John Knoll was hired as a Motion Control Operator, and rapidly moved up the line to do ground-breaking work on The Abyss, Mission Impossible, Star Trek: First Contact and many more. These days, he’s one of the top Visual Effects Supervisors at the Ranch. ILM consists of numerous departments, each devoted to a different specialty, and any work is split between them. For example, Doug Chang was the Visual Designer for Star Wars Ep.1: he masterminded vehicle designs, colour schemes and so on, but each artist had input, creative and aesthetic, on his own individual shots.
Star Wars 1 (The Phantom Menace) was the biggest visual effects project ever attempted in terms of volume and sophistication. John’s first exposure to the movie was a huge stack of 3,500 storyboards, many of which were alarming to him. He had no idea how to achieve them, yet Lucas ran through them so fast there was no time for questions. He knew they would have to do something new simply to handle it all.
The Pod Race was to be their major challenge. A reference tape (cut by Ben Burtt) showed how George wanted the crashes to look. He’d inserted real shots of wild crashes from F1 & NASCAR between animatics. Apart from their visceral impact, they showed that cars don’t simply crash and explode into fireballs as per the Star Wars convention. You actually saw them break up, metal shredding. He wanted the same for the Pods.
Would it be
better if they did this stuff with miniatures or used computer graphics?
John had one of his assistants (his main dynamics guy) spend a couple of months developing the Pod Race as a graphic just to see if it was feasible. It looked as if it was. They spent a year in R&D on various programmes, with a couple of guys on pods, a couple working on terrain, before the first shot was produced.
They made a breakthrough in the field with the Adaptive Terrain Generator. This made practical the rendering of huge fast-moving landscapes by adjusting how much detail the computer holds in mind: lots for the foreground of a shot, less for the background, which it constantly recalculates according to perspective. By the end, they were achieving complex sequences like the Pod Crash in a couple of weeks, a pace which would have been unthinkable at the start. The final Pod Race runs 320 shots.
Phantom Menace wasn’t all done CGI, though. They used the full gamut of non-digital effects in it too, everything other than optical compositing which John didn’t miss: “it was like wrestling a slippery fish.” Sometimes it’s better and easier to go with established techniques: miniatures, high-speed photography and so on. Indeed, Star Wars Ep.1 involved more actual model construction than any production before it. A lot of movie animation is really 2D image warping: that’s a good matte painting wrapped around a 3D landscape or miniature.
The digital effects they pioneer at ILM will trickle down: there’s “an inevitable democratisation of the technology” which will certainly benefit low budget filmmaking in future. Already, low-end systems such as After Effects on Macintosh can produce great-looking results. There’s even some in Phantom Menace. So “you don’t need lots of money any more to do good digital effects, you just need talent.”
Reported by David Williams, August 2000