John Dykstra
John Dykstra
John Charles Dykstra, A.S.C.is an American special effects artist, pioneer in the development of the use of computers in filmmaking and recipient of three Academy Awards, among many other awards and prizes. He was one of the original founders of Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects and computer graphics division of Lucasfilm. He is well known as the special effects lead on the original Star Wars, helping bring the original visuals for lightsabers, space battles between X-wings and TIE...
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The tsunami is a critical component in the telling of this story. It's a sensitive storytelling issue.
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Film, as far as I'm concerned, is my area of artistic endeavor, so I never think of a movie that gets released as being all done-it's just when they took it away from you.
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It's funny because I've gone through a long career that started in '75. I've had the opportunity to direct a couple of movies, and I've directed lots of commercials. But I'd say since '85, directing a feature is something that I wanted to do; I just haven't understood the movies offered to me, or it was a case where the visual effects came before the story, which never interested me.
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It's an embarrassment of riches because you have directors who don't better. You end up with so much stuff going on the screen that you don't know where to look, and that's what I consider self-indulgent.
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We still get to blow some stuff up. One of the most enjoyable things about doing special effects was going out and blowing up miniatures.
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We stayed there 24 hours a day. We lived and ate and slept that movie. We were enthusiastic, not just because of the movie, but because we had such a great collaborative team. We had a really good time. It was very much a family.
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It's easy to create something that has a lot of luster, but it's very hard to make something that has a lot of depth.
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If you understand how the real world feels and looks and sounds it is much easier to create a virtual version of the real world.
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Human beings are really attuned to their senses. When you work in film, you are working with the visual and audio senses. An understanding of tactile and other components that go into the creation of those objects are important to making them look real on screen, like a plasma of energy.
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I had done a lot of rock 'n' roll photography when I was in college. I was one of many photographers who worked for The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and all of these rock 'n' roll bands.
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George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.
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In the first Spider-Man, at the end of the movie, Peter Parker had to deny himself a relationship with a girl that he's in love with. The very next thing that happens is that he's swinging through the city.
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I come from an era when we had to figure out how to bolt a camera to a motorcycle or an airplane or dig a hole and find a canyon deep enough to repel into it so that we can capture images that were real.
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As with sound, images are subjective. You and I may not see the same color red as red, but we will probably agree that the image on the screen is a digital image or film image, based on contrast, bit depth, and refresh rate.