A Quote by John Knoll

Visual-effects shots should flow into the rest of the live action, and you shouldn't be able to see a difference. — © John Knoll
Visual-effects shots should flow into the rest of the live action, and you shouldn't be able to see a difference.
I don't necessarily think there's a difference in terms of how the film industry and the ad industry view visual effects. If visual effects (or the lack thereof) are used as a tool to strengthen an idea, they're great. If they are meant to carry more of a load in the absence of a concept, they're a waste and a distraction.
Animation remove you from a visual reality - if it was live action, you wouldn't be able to see through the person's mind. But animation takes a step away. It creates a very stylized landscape, but at the same time it is the form that is best able to address the reality of being alive and being in pain.
I'm a big fan of fiction film where you have a story and you have to transform that into a visual language, basically working with actors and also transforming that into how you pronounce that in the visual language of the shots, the construction of the shots and the lighting. All of that appealed to me from the beginning of my career at the university. When I graduated from the university, I wanted to deal mainly with that, with the visual aspect of the movie.
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.
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.
Everything today is such a massive visual show. It's very rare to get a film where the characters are raw and real - and you can take people back to where they are watching live cinema. With character-driven action. Not visual-driven action.
For ages I thought I'd wasted my career doing visual effects, I wanted to be a filmmaker. And then I've learnt at the end of it all that actually visual effects was probably the best training ground I could have had.
I do what I do because I believe in the country that we live in. I believe we are making a difference in stemming the flow of terrorism into Australia... I want my children to be able to live as everyone does now without the fear of getting on a bus and having it blow up.
The most important thing is that you have to have the visual effects working for you, instead of you working for the visual effects.
I enjoy 'Life Aquatic.' I think that one, from a visual standpoint, is just such a fun, visual movie to look at, whether it's the shots of the ship cut down the middle, that set where you can see everyone in each of their rooms doing whatever and moving about - something like that, I could watch that on a loop for an hour.
As soon as you're finished shooting, you have to go into the edit room and choose all of the shots that you're going to commit to because the visual effects vendor has to get it because they'll spend months on it. So, you're editing out of sequence before you've gotten a film for the movie and the performances.
The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it's an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography.
I think for most people, the audience probably couldn't tell the difference, but I know they [shots of visual effects] can be better. And the people working know they can be more precise. I'm still doing another round of sound mixing and color timing, pretty technical stuff. I think the movie [Life of Pi] is really presentable, nothing was left out that would take you out of the movie. I just need to perfect the job and I still have two weeks to go [to deliver final cut to Fox].
I was very intimidated by the visual effects world. But I began to realize that you don't have to know everything. You have to be able to talk about story.
Although shooting action-packed movies is a physically hard job and I repeat movements over and over, those action scenes alone, regardless of rest of the story, gives visual pleasure to viewers. They also give some satisfaction to me as an actor.
Live-action has always been my focus and my passion. I love voice-over, and I definitely could see myself doing some voice-over, as much as I could, and even if I ended up doing only that for the rest of my life, and I could be successful at it, that would be great. But I think my real dream is to do films and live-action films.
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