He’s not only the brains behind the VFX, leading from the front as he has for years at ILM but also the originator of the idea – tell a film about the theft of the Death Star plans, a concept that we saw for the very first time in the scroll-up of A New Hope back in 1977.
Here, Knoll goes into more detail regarding the VFX of Rogue One and the groundbreaking work ILM undertook to bring it to the screen. To read more about Rogue One on the official ILM website, click here.
How was your collaboration with director Gareth Edwards?
As usual, my role is to try to mind meld with the director and to use that understanding to help him realize his vision for the film. You try to get to a place where you can predict Gareth’s reactions to everything.What was his approach about the visual effects?
Gareth brought a documentary style to the film, one that generally eschewed planning things out in too great a level of detail. Sets were lit often so that we could look in any direction at any time, and Gareth would often run the camera for 20 minute takes where he would reset the actors again and again, finding new compositions. That meant that the first time I saw the challenges of a shot was while we were shooting it and it was a little too late to bring in a bluescreen or add some tracking markers. I’ve always tried to make sure VFX maintained a small footprint on set and that we don’t put unnecessary constraints or delays on the shooting. I try to work unobtrusively with the rest of the crew to make sure the right things happen and we get what we need out of each setup. Gareth trusted that we would be doing that and he could ignore the VFX aspects of what we were shooting. If I had an issue, he knew I wouldn’t be shy about bringing it up.
And don’t forget to download our 56th episode of RADIO 1138 where we chat with Guy Henry about his role as Grand Moff Tarkin and screenwriter Gary Whitta about his work on the film.
