by Joshua Griffin

(report contains spoilers)

Josh back again here with a report from the master of visual effects, John Knoll.

John was introduced to solid applause from his friends. His session started with an Episode III status report - his part in the film was complete two weeks ago. He is writing a book from the Star Wars movies discussing the environments, and showed some exclusive and unproduced photos from his research creating this new book.

Then, we were on to Episode III.

He showed the technology behind the elevator sequence in the opening of the movie, how they used a new computer program they deveoped to make it much easier. He also showed how they converted the set pieces like the Invisible Hand cockpit into the finished product. They typically captured principle photography, made an unextured CG model, textured everything, then lit and populated the rest. The finshed shots looked stunning.

He showed some before and afters, like Count Dooku being filmed on entirely green screen, the Jedi Temple set only being a few feet tall and the view from Padme's veranda. The opera house was quite an undertaking, Lucas had an idea for this scene late into the reshoots, so the set was totally blue. They built a model, and combined it all into an amazing shot. Same process for the Utapau set as well.

Other shots from the set included Mustafar sets like aa control arm that crashed into the lava. Most sets consisted of not much at all - which was can attest to seeing the Knollvision series.

Alderaan's complete set was about the size of a car door, though the scenes in the movie are quite stunning. The crowd loved just how small of an object could be turned into an entire planet. In fact, Tatooine consisted of a green room with a green ramp someone could stand on (like the Luke twin suns pose).

He also showed us the filmed version Bail Organa's office, which was ultimately cut from the movie. He did think it would make the cut on the DVD so be sure to look for it there.

He moved on to Star Destroyers and the Tantive IV, and talked about how exciting it was to work on these Classic movie sets. He also mentioned the opening space battle running time is now at 5 minutes and 30 seconds, and he played a clip of the reflections in the cockpit glass.

He showed a bunch of errors ILM did as well - all of them were hilarious! There was a scale error with helmet over a clone pilot - it was huge! The invisible face of Yoda was funny, and Grievous with 4lightsabers but no textures on the CGI model also got some laughs. The opera scene had an error - it was a "little too spectacular" with huge flashes of lightening and so on overwhelming the screen. There was a couple of funny Yodas, too ... one with no expression and one with a HUGE expression. There were a series of cape accidents as well which were hilarious, Yoda with a cape over his head, Grievous' cape gets stuck in the door. SO funny!

Lastly he also had a few jokes. Like bunny ears on Grievous and Palpatine playing online poker when Anakin enters his private chambers. There was this funny blooper with Obi-Wan getting tossed through a target and the best one was iClone - a silouhette of a clone on a pink background with him jammin on his iPod. Hilarious (the Mac icon was a Death Star in the shape of an apple)!

All in all John is a stellar presenter with tons of original content and a great show. No wonder his session was packed. Now, if we could just find out if Yoda really farted or not ... just kidding. JG