With the 25th anniversary of The Phantom Menace very much on everyone’s minds, StarWars.com caught up with John Knoll, one of the key minds behind the huge innovations created to allow George Lucas‘ vision for Episode I to come to the screen. Here, he delves into the techniques used to bring the Boonta Eve podrace to life.
Knoll saw the podracers as moving at 500 miles per hour and subsequently ruled out most traditional techniques, including shooting helicopter plates (“Helicopters can only go about a hundred, 120 miles per hour”), using models (“One of the problems was that that kind of speed, any reasonably scaled model, you would pass through it just instantly”), and matte paintings (“Matte paintings aren’t good at communicating travel through an environment, and usually they’re used for a fixed perspective”). Still, he had some new tricks up his sleeve.
“That really only left one possibility after you eliminate the other possibilities there, and that’s, ‘Could we do it with computer graphics?’ At the time, we had never really done photorealistic CG renderings of terrain. We’d done some tricks where we’d taken matte paintings and we’d projected them onto geometry to get some perspective change, and [model maker] Paul Huston and I had been experimenting with that technique of camera projection. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is the way to do it.’”
As a test, Huston made some models of mushroom-shaped rocks out of foam and plaster, then painted and digitized them. After that, Huston and Knoll moved the models into the ILM parking lot, took photos of them from multiple angles, then superimposed those onto the digital version. It worked.
“That gave us something that looked like photography, because it was photography, but it could move in three dimensions. And after, I don’t know, four or five weeks working on this, he had a first shot where he had a photograph of a cloudy sky as a backing. We had a simple ground plane that just had little undulations in it, zipping by with a number of these rocks. He took the same rock, replicated it a number of times, and did a shot of us flying through them. It was pretty stunning. I saw the first rendered sequence of that. It felt like something we’d never really seen before — fully synthetic terrain that had a very high level of photographic realism and the speed, most importantly, the kind of speed and control that we were going to need to do the sequence.”
The defining moment in the whole process came when Knoll showed the test footage to the Star Wars creator himself. “I talked to Paul about doing this test while we were still in pre-production, and when I got the first render of it, we’d already started shooting. So I got a little eight-millimeter videotape of Paul’s test, and I popped it into a video recorder on set and played it back on one of the monitors. That was a really thrilling experience for me,” he says. “It showed that, yes, this idea of doing this with, essentially, three-dimensional matte paintings was going to work. And I showed it to George, and he was very excited. That kind of was the proof that, yeah, this is all going to work.”
Only at Amazon Limited Edition Content - The Rogue Infiltrator Character Pack includes cosmetics for Kay and Nix.
Discover a galaxy of opportunity. Explore distinct locations with bustling cities and cantinas. Race across sprawling outdoor landscapes on your speeder. Each location brings new adventures, unique challenges, and enticing rewards if you’re willing to take the risk.
Experience an original scoundrel story. Live the high-stakes lifestyle of an outlaw. Turn any situation to your advantage with Nix by your side: fight with your blaster, overcome enemies with stealth and gadgets, or find the right moments to distract enemies and gain the upper hand.
Embark on high-stakes missions. Take on high-risk, high-reward missions from the galaxy’s crime syndicates. Steal valuable goods, infiltrate secret locations, and outwit enemies as one of the galaxy’s most wanted. Every choice you make influences your ever-changing reputation.
Jump into the pilot seat. Pilot your ship, the Trailblazer, as you engage in thrilling dogfights with the Empire and other foes. Find the right opportunities to chase, evade, and attack to get the upper hand.
Exploring the galaxy since 1978, Mark wrote his first fan fiction in 1981 and been a presence online since his first webpage Fanta War in 1996. He's contributed to Star Wars Insider (since '06) and Starburst Magazine (since '16) as well as ILM.com, SkywalkerSound.com, StarWars.com, Star Wars Encyclopedia, Build The Millennium Falcon, Geeky Monkey, TV Film Memorabilia, Model and Collectors Mart, Star Trek magazine and StarTrek.com. He is a four-time Star Wars Celebration Stage host, the only podcaster to have appeared on every Celebration podcast stage since the stage began in 2015, the Daily Content Manager of Fantha Tracks and the co-host of Making Tracks, Canon Fodder and Start Your Engines on Fantha Tracks Radio.
- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -
With the 25th anniversary of The Phantom Menace very much on everyone’s minds, StarWars.com caught up with John Knoll, one of the key minds behind the huge innovations created to allow George Lucas‘ vision for Episode I to come to the screen. Here, he delves into the techniques used to bring the Boonta Eve podrace to life.
Knoll saw the podracers as moving at 500 miles per hour and subsequently ruled out most traditional techniques, including shooting helicopter plates (“Helicopters can only go about a hundred, 120 miles per hour”), using models (“One of the problems was that that kind of speed, any reasonably scaled model, you would pass through it just instantly”), and matte paintings (“Matte paintings aren’t good at communicating travel through an environment, and usually they’re used for a fixed perspective”). Still, he had some new tricks up his sleeve.
“That really only left one possibility after you eliminate the other possibilities there, and that’s, ‘Could we do it with computer graphics?’ At the time, we had never really done photorealistic CG renderings of terrain. We’d done some tricks where we’d taken matte paintings and we’d projected them onto geometry to get some perspective change, and [model maker] Paul Huston and I had been experimenting with that technique of camera projection. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is the way to do it.’”
As a test, Huston made some models of mushroom-shaped rocks out of foam and plaster, then painted and digitized them. After that, Huston and Knoll moved the models into the ILM parking lot, took photos of them from multiple angles, then superimposed those onto the digital version. It worked.
“That gave us something that looked like photography, because it was photography, but it could move in three dimensions. And after, I don’t know, four or five weeks working on this, he had a first shot where he had a photograph of a cloudy sky as a backing. We had a simple ground plane that just had little undulations in it, zipping by with a number of these rocks. He took the same rock, replicated it a number of times, and did a shot of us flying through them. It was pretty stunning. I saw the first rendered sequence of that. It felt like something we’d never really seen before — fully synthetic terrain that had a very high level of photographic realism and the speed, most importantly, the kind of speed and control that we were going to need to do the sequence.”
The defining moment in the whole process came when Knoll showed the test footage to the Star Wars creator himself. “I talked to Paul about doing this test while we were still in pre-production, and when I got the first render of it, we’d already started shooting. So I got a little eight-millimeter videotape of Paul’s test, and I popped it into a video recorder on set and played it back on one of the monitors. That was a really thrilling experience for me,” he says. “It showed that, yes, this idea of doing this with, essentially, three-dimensional matte paintings was going to work. And I showed it to George, and he was very excited. That kind of was the proof that, yeah, this is all going to work.”
Only at Amazon Limited Edition Content - The Rogue Infiltrator Character Pack includes cosmetics for Kay and Nix.
Discover a galaxy of opportunity. Explore distinct locations with bustling cities and cantinas. Race across sprawling outdoor landscapes on your speeder. Each location brings new adventures, unique challenges, and enticing rewards if you’re willing to take the risk.
Experience an original scoundrel story. Live the high-stakes lifestyle of an outlaw. Turn any situation to your advantage with Nix by your side: fight with your blaster, overcome enemies with stealth and gadgets, or find the right moments to distract enemies and gain the upper hand.
Embark on high-stakes missions. Take on high-risk, high-reward missions from the galaxy’s crime syndicates. Steal valuable goods, infiltrate secret locations, and outwit enemies as one of the galaxy’s most wanted. Every choice you make influences your ever-changing reputation.
Jump into the pilot seat. Pilot your ship, the Trailblazer, as you engage in thrilling dogfights with the Empire and other foes. Find the right opportunities to chase, evade, and attack to get the upper hand.
Exploring the galaxy since 1978, Mark wrote his first fan fiction in 1981 and been a presence online since his first webpage Fanta War in 1996. He's contributed to Star Wars Insider (since '06) and Starburst Magazine (since '16) as well as ILM.com, SkywalkerSound.com, StarWars.com, Star Wars Encyclopedia, Build The Millennium Falcon, Geeky Monkey, TV Film Memorabilia, Model and Collectors Mart, Star Trek magazine and StarTrek.com. He is a four-time Star Wars Celebration Stage host, the only podcaster to have appeared on every Celebration podcast stage since the stage began in 2015, the Daily Content Manager of Fantha Tracks and the co-host of Making Tracks, Canon Fodder and Start Your Engines on Fantha Tracks Radio.
John Dykstra and John Knoll show how the original Star Wars special effects were created on a Dykstraflex at an event at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, California
When you visit any web site, it may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. Control your personal Cookie Services here.
For performance reasons we use OneSignal as a notification service. This saves a number of cookies in order to apply notifcation services on a per-client basis. These cookies are strictly necessary for OneSignal's notification features. It is essential to the service that these are not turned off.
