#johnknoll

#NewSwag from the Toy Collector's Fair at NEC Birmingham #HeirToTheEmpire by #TimothyZahn #DarkForceRising by Timothy Zahn #TheLastCommand by Timothy Zahn #ShadowsOfTheEmpire by #StevePerry #ReturnOfTheJedi by #JamesKahn (illustrated with storyboards by #JoeJohnston & #NiloRodisJamero) 'Creating The Worlds Of Star Wars 365 Days' by #JohnKnoll (at NECBirmingham)

John Dykstra and John Knoll show how the original Star Wars special effects were created on a Dykstraflex at an event at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, California In this video, Jake watches ILM & Lucasfilm LEGENDS like John Dykstra & John Knoll explain how the original effects in Star Wars were filmed. This video was filmed in 4K at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, California. All views expressed in the video are Jake’s own and do not represent the views of any public/private entity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNK6tew8jfg

ILM's John Knoll has sat down for a conversation with NASA Astronaut Kjell N. Lindgren. Oscar-winning ILM Visual Effects Supervisor—and NASA enthusiast—John Knoll makes spaceships fly in the ‪@StarWars‬ universe. ‪@NASA‬ Astronaut—and Star Wars enthusiast—Kjell N. Lindgren has spent 311 actual days in space. This is their conversation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCqaLQCmLkk  

With the 25th anniversary of The Phantom Menace very much on everyone's minds, StarWars.com caught up with John Knoll, one of the key minds behind the huge innovations created to allow George Lucas' vision for Episode I to come to the screen. Here, he delves into the techniques used to bring the Boonta Eve podrace to life. Knoll saw the podracers as moving at 500 miles per hour and subsequently ruled out most traditional techniques, including shooting helicopter plates (“Helicopters can only go about a hundred, 120 miles per hour”), using models (“One of the problems was that that kind of speed, any reasonably scaled model, you would pass through it just instantly”), and matte paintings (“Matte paintings aren't good at communicating travel through an environment, and usually they're used for a fixed perspective”). Still, he had some new tricks up his sleeve. “That really only left one possibility after you eliminate the other possibilities there, and that's, ‘Could we do it with computer graphics?’ At the time, we had never really done photorealistic CG renderings of terrain. We'd done some tricks where we'd taken matte paintings and we'd projected them onto geometry to get some perspective change, and [model maker] Paul Huston and I had been experimenting with that technique of camera projection. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is the way to do it.’” As a test, Huston made some models of mushroom-shaped rocks out of foam and plaster, then painted and digitized them. After that, Huston and Knoll moved the models into the ILM parking lot, took photos of them from multiple angles, then superimposed those onto the digital version. It worked. “That gave us something that looked like photography, because it was photography, but it could move in three dimensions. And after, I don't know, four or five weeks working on this, he had a first shot where he had a photograph of a cloudy sky as a backing. We had a simple ground plane that just had little undulations in it, zipping by with a number of these rocks. He took the same rock, replicated it a number of times, and did a shot of us flying through them. It was pretty stunning. I saw the first rendered sequence of that. It felt like something we'd never really seen before — fully synthetic terrain that had a very high level of photographic realism and the speed, most importantly, the kind of speed and control that we were going to need to do the sequence.” [gallery link="file" columns="2" size="large" ids="162155,162156"] The defining moment in the whole process came when Knoll showed the test footage to the Star Wars creator himself. “I talked to Paul about doing this test while we were still in pre-production, and when I got the first render of it, we'd already started shooting. So I got a little eight-millimeter videotape of Paul's test, and I popped it into a video recorder on set and played it back on one of the monitors. That was a really thrilling experience for me," he says. "It showed that, yes, this idea of doing this with, essentially, three-dimensional matte paintings was going to work. And I showed it to George, and he was very excited. That kind of was the proof that, yeah, this is all going to work.” [amazon box="B0D18PNXNL"]

With the recent Disney Plus series Light & Magic wowwing audiences worldwide and the 25th anniversary of The Phantom Menace reminding us that high-quality VFX have now been with us for a quarter of a century, this chat with John Knoll on the Team Deakins Podcast (hosted by cinematographer Roger Deakins and wife James) couldn't be better timed. Hear John discuss his early days at ILM, his work for the company which continues to today and much more besides. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 88 - JOHN KNOLL - VFX SUPERVISOR On this episode of the Team Deakins Podcast, VFX supervisor John Knoll (THE BATMAN, ROGUE ONE, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN) joins us to talk about his career and his craft. Despite growing up among an academic family of engineers, scientists, and medical professionals, John fell in love with the fantastic imagery of cinema and television, and he saw miniature work as his way into filmmaking. From cold-calling Industrial Light & Magic at 15 to later working for them, John reflects on his life as one who turns hobbies into professions, and we learn how John fuses technology with art in his work. John reveals, with great clarity, how slit-scans are actually composed and shares how he used the effect to generate the illusion of the Starship Enterprise entering and exiting warp speed. We later discuss the leadership responsibilities of being a supervisor, including giving negative feedback in such a way that elevates a collaborator’s work. Towards the end, we also discuss the enduring appeal of miniatures for audiences and filmmakers alike. In addition to his work in VFX, John (alongside his brother Thomas) invented Photoshop, the popular photo-editing software used around the world. [amazon box="1368095178"]

It's harder to get your second picture than it is to get your first one. —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

The 4th edition of #16BarBookReports will double as the 1st edition of #16BarCinema as I tribute one of my lifelong obsessions: #starwars ! I'll be reviewing #rogueone as film and novelization in my next post. Enjoy, and may the Bars be with you! #StarWarsRogueOne #16BarBookReport #AlexanderFreed #bookreview #bookreviews #StarWarsbooks #starwarsfan #starwarsfans @rogueone @starwars @starwarsrogueone @starwarsfan @starwarsfans #starwarsday #starwarsbookreviews #johnknoll #garywhitta #chrisweitz #tonygilroy #GeorgeLucas @georgelucas (at Star Wars Rogue One)