Recap: What We Learned from Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll's Appearance on ILM's "Lighter Darker" Podcast

With the surprise announcement of a second season of the Disney+ documentary series Light & Magic this morning, we thought it’d be a good time to listen to the latest episode of “Lighter Darker: The ILM Podcast" featuring guest John Knoll, a visual effects supervisor at Lucasfilm’s in-house VFX studio Industrial Light & Magic.

In episode 14 of “Lighter Darker," hosts Jenny Ely and Todd Vaziri welcome guest John Knoll, who has been working with ILM since the mid-1980s. Notably, Knoll is the co-creator of Photoshop and has won an Academy Award for his effects work on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. He was most recently the visual effects supervisor for Star Wars: Skeleton Crew on Disney+. The trio started off their conversation by talking about Knoll’s entries in Stephen Colbert’s green-screen challenge using footage of Senator John McCain. His entries in that contest resulted in him getting a job offer from The Colbert Report’s digital department, which he had to turn down because he was already employed by ILM.

The hosts asked Knoll to pick a favorite effects shot of his, and his choice was a shot from Dead Man’s Chest featuring Orlando Bloom’s character Will Turner. The shot utilized a motion-control system and a miniature Black Pearl ship, and Knoll says he still believes it to be completely convincing. For a shot that did not work as well, he picked another shot from Pirates in Elizabeth Swann’s bedroom. Knoll says in post they realized it was shot the wrong way– that the background should have had a different exposure– and he has some regrets about it.

Next the conversation turned to Skeleton Crew, and specifically John Knoll’s contributions to the show. He talked about his initial discussion with ILM’s Rob Bredow about a then-upcoming series, Knoll agreed to head the effects department because of the connection to the Mandoverse and producers Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni. Knoll then met with Skeleton Crew creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford, and the first question he asked was, “How early can I show something?" He says he prefers to get early feedback than to wait until later in the process after a lot of money has been spent on a shot. “It was really nice to be able to show things in these early states, early enough that I could just steer the boat in that direction and not do major rework on something that’s in a finished state."

Vaziri, who worked as a lead VFX artist on Skeleton Crew, talked about how pleasant it was to get feedback from Watts and Ford during the process. Knoll said the entire season required 3,200 visual effects shots. Comparatively, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace was just under 2,000 shots and Episode III - Revenge of the Sith had 2,400 shots. The Mandalorian seasons 2 and 3 had 4,000 and 4,500 shots, respectively. Knoll said that Jon Watts is a fan of doing longer, single shots rather than multiple shots of coverage.

Interestingly, they then talked about how it’s decided which shots will be done on the Volume using ILM’s StageCraft technology and which sets will be built or scouted out in the real world. Knoll says a scene usually needs to be more than two pages long in order to shoot it in the Volume. “The sweet spot is a seven-page scene," he adds, as there is an up-front cost of building the 3D environments for StageCraft. Port Borgo was a partial set against the LED screens on the Volume. It was redressed to be four different parts of the spaceport: “We got good value out of that one." Originally the plan was to build more of At Attin practically, but the budget reality forced them to economize. They ended up building a street, a sidewalk, one lawn, and two driveways. Most shots on that planet included a visual effect.

They debated the pros and cons of lens flares and talked about how they used a lookbook of shots from Spielberg movies like E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind for reference on the show. The outer space shots were accomplished using a combination of miniatures and CGI, as usual. Knoll compared this show to what they did on season one of The Mandalorian, where Jon Favreau was fairly picky about how much reflection the Razor Crest ship should have. A miniature was built for lighting tests, and the model was detailed enough to use in motion-control shots for the show itself. “The tricky thing was that it all had to be done ultra-ultra-cheap. We couldn’t just go back and ask for a whole lot more money to do this. It had to be a garage operation." Knoll worked weekends and figured out the bare-minimum motion-control requirements for the shots they needed. He used a code he had written 35 years earlier to make the system work.

Knoll built a somewhat more complex motion-control system to shoot the Onyx Cinder ship in Skeleton Crew. It needed more complicated controls because of that ship’s rotating engines. 24 shots of the miniature made it into the finished season. They also talked about the approach to droids, specifically SM-33, for which a bunraku-style puppet was created. “It seems to work pretty well, and the paint-outs aren’t too bad." The puppet was used for 75% of SM-33’s shots (which also helps keep costs down), and the rest was accentuated by CGI. “When SM-33 is in the Onyx Cinder cockpit and driving the ship, we didn’t have a good way for the puppet to do that, so in those cases we just left the arms off and photographed the arms and torso. The arms were CGI, and in most cases I don’t think people noticed."

Knoll then took questions from listeners, such as one about KB’s headset. A complication involved KB’s hairstyle changing when the visor goes up, so when the visor moves it’s entirely CGI, including the hair. Similarly, 70% of the time Neel was accomplished using an animatronic head, but there were trickier environments to do that in, so an entire CG head was added in post. From there they talked about directing children for effects-heavy film work, especially considering the limited hours that children can be on set. Adult doubles were used for distant shots at the beginning and end of the production day. At no time were the kids ever allowed to be more than three feet above the floor, and for the speeder scenes they shot in front of a blue screen to make it look like they were traveling through an environment.

Another question covered whether effects artists preferred scenes shot at night because it’s easier to hide the effects, and both Vaziri and Knoll pushed back against that idea. “With daytime, there’s plenty of light, so you can see things that you need to see. Nighttime, almost by its nature, is stylized, so it’s difficult to make that look naturalistic and not like you’re looking at an illustration. Everyone tries to find a version that works for their show." Knoll credits cinematographer Sean Porter for coming up with creative ways to do naturalistic night lighting. He says effects work, such as on the movie Pacific Rim, are actually more difficult because of the lack of light and other weather conditions.

The final segment on “Lighter Darker" is remarkably similar to the one I’ve personally been doing on Laughing Place’s Star Wars podcast “Who’s the Bossk?" for five years. The hosts and guest talk about media they’ve been enjoyed recently, and their choices in this episode were Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, David Fincher’s Panic Room as a companion piece to that film, Penn & Teller’s art documentary Tim’s Vermeer, and the British detective TV show Father Brown.

You can listen to “Lighter: Darker: The ILM Podcast" by visiting Industrial Light & Magic’s official website.