fxpodcast talks to ILM’s Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor John Knoll about Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, and more broadly about what it means to continue the visual language of Star Wars nearly five decades after the original film changed cinema.
Knoll’s connection to Star Wars is unusually deep. Few people have been so closely involved in so many different technological eras of the franchise, from the optical and miniature legacy of the original films, through the prequels and the digital turn, to Rogue One, virtual production, and now the theatrical expansion of The Mandalorian. What makes the conversation especially interesting is that Knoll does not treat these as separate eras so much as a continuing ILM problem: how to make impossible images feel photographed, physical and emotionally grounded.
