VFX Artist - John Knoll

My guess was that most people were going to research Joe Letteri (Who has worked on LoTR along with The Hobbit) So I decided to do two different artists who had done older movies that I was very fond of as I was younger and growing up. Along with Janek Sirrs, John Knoll are my favourites. Unlike Janek there is a lot more information on John as some of his features are little more well known. I've pretty much seen every film that he has worked out give or take a few. Born ins 1962, a widely known and established visual effects artist and Check Creative Officer at Industrial Light and Magic (Now you know right?). Another fun fact that I DID know being a huge techy, is that he is the co-founder (Along with his brother Thomas Knoll) of the now Adobe owned Photoshop. Something I didn't click on at first but have now is that he also the creator of 'Knoll Light Factory' built into the Red Giant Suite, a brilliant lens flare plugin that I have personally used many times.

In his early days he was given some great chances to work on titles like Empire of the Sun and of course some of the older Star Trek Films! He worked as a 'Motion Control Camera Operator' mostly until he eventually took flight to higher work. As his career progressed we saw him working on bigger films, what I love about him is I found out that he did many collaborations with other visual effect artists; this is awesome because they're really stretching each other limits and combining ideas to come up with the best solutions, a great work ethic.

In the 90's he finally became a visual effects supervisor taking films like Mission Impossible and Star Wars Episode 1 at the end of the decade (Which isn't surprising since he worked most of the other Star Wars movies even Star Wars IV in 1977.). Basically by the time we had reached the new millennium he would go on to work on pretty much every big film produced. Star Wars, Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince, Pacific Rim and a favourite of mine Deep Blue Sea.

A movie he largely worked on was Pirates of the Carribean (all three). By the time we had reached the second and third the amount of CG was massive, he would of definitely had his work cut out for him. Again with Avatar seeing some of the VFX breakdowns of this movie make my head spin, to be able to supervise project like this you need to be very versatile and have an integral mind. His most recent work is of Pacific Rim, which reading that it took somewhere between 80 - 90 hours per frame, yes frame to render out is crazy. It just goes to show that if you're passionate about your trade you work hard you can be working for 50 years and more, this guy is almost legend.