VFX Research: John Knoll

Finally I wanted to look at John Knoll, another incredible visual effects artist who has again, had an incredible career that includes some impressive films that again are very heavy and laden with CGI. For me, I didn't really know who John Knoll was until I started looking more into visual effect artists and what films they had been doing, and I was pleasantly surprise that I had seen nearly every film, apart from some of his early one, that he had been apart of.

John Knoll, born 1962, is a a well known visual effects artist and also the Chief Creative Officer at Industrial Light and Magic. One fact that I did not know about him was that he is the original co-creator, along with his brother Thomas Knoll of Adobe Photoshop, a surprising fact for me as I thought he was just into visual effects. He has worked with many successful and well-known directors such as James Cameron and Guillermo del Toro and is a legend in the visual effects industry. Along with Photoshop, he is also in the inventor of Knoll Light Factory which is a lens flar generating software, I wonder if  J.J Abrams used this in Star Trek...

Knoll began his career as a Motion Control Camera Operator, an interesting start, and worked on several films such as some of the older Star Trek films and also Innerspace and Empire of the Sun. This will have been an excellent asset to a film such as Star Trek as they will have needed to put emphasis on the different characters in the shot as some of them did look very strange when looking back at them.

During the next phase of his career he began working on lots of different big films that were all very popular and a lot of them crossed over with some of the other visual effects artists that I have been looking at. During the 90s he quickly became a visual effects supervisor and worked on films like Hook, Mission: Impossible, and then also the 1st Star Wars films in 1999. With such a big list of films behind him it was only inevitable that he was going to be big in the effects industry and he certainly proved this in the next 13 years.

In the 2000s he worked on the next two Star Wars films as they appeared and then also began work on Pirates of the Caribbean, something I was thrilled to hear as I am a massive fan of the original trilogy. Since then his career went further upwards, working on films like Avatar and Hugo, which were all very heavy with CGI but again they cannot be faulted for there visuals as they are truly incredible. The last, and most recent film that he was worked on has been Pacific Rim, and what a film this is. So heavy with CGI that your not actually sure what was visual effects and what was real, but it does look incredible, but I mean its robots vs monsters, what could be more awesome?