John Knoll Quotes

I've always been into visual effects. It was something I took keen interest in before films happened. Ironically, I am a part of 'Raaz 3,' a film that is shot entirely on 3D. It has encouraged me to pursue my dream. Hopefully, if time permits, I will travel to the United States and attend a crash course in visual graphics and animation.

The learning curve is 'The Hobbit' is being shot in 3D.

Obviously, CGI in the last ten years has gone through such leaps and bounds that today, people are looking for these kinds of movies to wow audiences with technology.

Clearly, if we'd had the kind of computer graphics capability then that we have now, the Star Gate sequence would be much more complex than flat planes of light and color.

You've seen how they make movies like Star Wars and stuff. They're never really there. They're in front of a green screen just pretending to be jumping around.

When you take something that's inert, and through motion, give it life, make it appear to be alive, living, breathing thinking and having emotions, that's animation. But when you take something that's live-action, and move a part of it, that's a special effect.

Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.

I've done some effects shots. I've done some compositing. And in 'Just Like Heaven' did a lot of, like, motion control and things like that. But never done, like, computer-generated imagery in action.

I could take my grandma and put her in a cape, and they'll put her on a green screen, and they'll have stunt doubles come in and do all the action. Anybody can do it. They're relying on stunt doubles and green screen and $200 million budgets - it's all CGI created. To me, it's not authentic.

If people want to watch a CG movie, there's plenty out there.

In 'The Greatest Showman,' I'm back doing VFX myself, allowing me to craft exactly how something looks, one frame at a time.

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.

Motion capture has become very specialized but also still just a tool of filmmaking.

Maybe 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona' didn't have a lot of visual effects in it, but most movies have some sort of visual effects.

You hear people say that there's too much CG in movies today, but CG is what allows me to take a green-painted wall in a studio and make it disappear, and then put 100 miles of landscape in. CG, in the right hands, can be a marvelous tool.

The nature of motion capture is only going to work for certain films. It's not going to put any other type of movies out of business.

It's been about 15 years, and I've never really worked seriously in CGI and I thought that here was an opportunity to do the kinds of things that I was not able to do on Ghostbusters.

To me the biggest breakthrough was when we did Terminator 2 that just opened the door for Jurassic and all of the others and that was as big as when we did motion control on Star Wars. But I don't see another big thing coming.

CGI is done after the film is done. It's through the computer. Most of the film is not computer-generated special effects. Most of it is that creature that is in the room with you.

I'm not a big fan of visual effects.

Polar Express is not an attempt to do animation. It is a technology-based film.

The technology actually seemed to come at just the right time to make the Hulk - Mark Ruffalo was really able to play both characters.

Sci-fi films are the epic films of the day because we can no longer put 10,000 extras in the scene - but we can draw thousands of aliens with computers.

Acting on a blue screen is awful.

I learned a lot doing 'Wolverine,' and I was also very fortunate, in the sense that I got to do a huge number of visual effects shots.