Any tool can be used for good or bad. It's really the ethics of the artist using it.
If you were a new guy at ILM, they put you on the night crew - my shift was from 7 P.M. to about 5 A.M. In my free time, I was working on an idea with my older brother, a software engineer getting his doctorate at the University of Michigan. Ultimately, it developed into Photoshop.
You can hardly turn around and not see something that was done in Photoshop.
There are things that I am nostalgic about from the 'good old days.' I loved motion control cameras, actually. I love the way they sound. I used to do a lot of miniature work, and it's still warranted, but it's done less often, largely for budgetary, schedule, and flexibility reasons.
As Lucasfilm is developing IP and we're working on our projects, we should be using those films to advance the ball further down the field and to make things better for the rest of the company and the rest of the industry.
Eighty percent of my job is to ask the question, 'If this were real, what would it look like?'
A spacecraft cockpit interior is a set where there are a lot of little techy bits, control panels and graphics displays, and other things that are kind of a job to manufacture well.
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.
Every film tries to advance the state of the art, at least a little bit. Brand new techniques? A lot of them are just evolutionary: we're just building on something that's like something we've done before and just trying to do it a little bit better or make it a little bit more realistic.
On every show, there's some amount of work that is brought to some state of completion - or even finished - and then cut out of the movie.
I've been on lots of movies where we've done a lot of planning of sets - how much you build, and is this big enough, and will this get us what we need? - just with foam-core models.
There's no reason to think Disney is going to stop wanting to make 'Star Wars' movies if there's quality and there's interest. It has unlimited potential. It has a huge number of characters, worlds... It's a massive playground.
If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that's a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It's very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it'll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven't really seen since the '50s and '60s.
'Baby's Day Out' is maybe not a great movie, but... No, I've enjoyed and learned things from every project I've worked on. That was an important step in my career at ILM.
A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game.
I think it's an important part of the visual effects supervisor's job to get really deeply embedded in production and keep us all focused on trying to generate the best result. I'm not proprietary about, 'I would rather do this effect than let physical effects do it.' No, let's do the smartest thing for the movie.
I just have this very simple idea about the rebel spies in the opening crawl of A 'New Hope' who steal the plans for the Death Star.
In animation, you can often defer decisions or make changes later.
Visual-effects shots should flow into the rest of the live action, and you shouldn't be able to see a difference.
Something we often struggle with on pictures is the right way to shoot live-action elements that are for an environment that's very complicated from a lighting standpoint. An example is a starship flying through an environment that's constantly changing.
