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[00:00:00] Intro

[00:00:00] Shannon Tindle: I picked a lens that I really liked from my collection and I photographed real flares like I did back in the eighties

[00:00:07] John Knoll: And I think they look really good and no one would ever know.

[00:00:10] Rob Bredow: That's really fun.

[00:00:11] Shannon Tindle: We need to kickstart that flare box.

[00:00:13] Rob Bredow: I like it. It's the 2025 reaction to the Knoll Light Factory.

[00:00:18] Shannon Tindle: Yeah,

[00:00:18] Rob Bredow: It's a, it's a physical plugin. You plug it into the wall,

[00:00:22] Shannon Tindle: yeah, yeah.

[00:00:23] Todd Vaziri: in.

[00:00:27] Rob Bredow: Welcome to the Lighter Darker Podcast where we talk about the creative process of filmmaking and the art of visual storytelling. Thank you for joining us for this episode.

This is episode 20, our final episode of Season One. So thank you so much for being with us for all these shows. I'm Rob Bredow, SVP of Creative Innovation for Lucasfilm, and I'm here with my co-host, Todd.

[00:00:48] Todd Vaziri: Hey, I am Todd Vaziri, compositing supervisor and artist at Industrial Light and Magic.

[00:00:53] Rob Bredow: and our producer Jenny.

[00:00:55] Jenny Ely: Hi, I am Jenny Ely, production manager at ILM.

[00:00:58] Rob Bredow: And we work together at ILM in the visual effects animation and immersive entertainment industries. And today we have with us two very special guests. Uh, Jenny was pointing out. The only repeat guest we've ever had on the podcast. So welcome John and Shannon. I'll do a quick intro. They don't need intros 'cause you've probably heard them before on our show, but John Knoll is an Academy award-winning and BAFTA award-winning visual effects supervisor, tons of projects.

Of course you know him from, a lot of Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Jungle Cruise. He co-created Photoshop with his brother. Uh, he's been an amazing innovator at ILM for many years and currently working on the upcoming Mando and Grogu film. So, welcome John to the podcast.

[00:01:39] John Knoll: Thank you. I think this is my chance for a do over, is that right?

[00:01:44] Todd Vaziri: Yeah.

[00:01:44] John Knoll: Okay.

[00:01:45] Todd Vaziri: last one, John.

[00:01:46] John Knoll: get it right this time.

[00:01:47] Todd Vaziri: we had notes come on.

[00:01:49] Rob Bredow: And Shannon Tindle is joining us for his second appearance as well. Uh, Shannon was a character designer on Samurai Jack, Mega Mind, Kubo and the Two Strings where he did a lot more than just character designs. He created the award-winning series Lost Ollie, most recently wrote and directed Ultraman Rising.

He's got other amazing things going on. So Shannon, welcome back to the show.

[00:02:09] Shannon Tindle: Thank you so much.

[00:02:10] Rob Bredow: It's good to have you with us again, and it's so fun to bring you both back to talk about our main topic today. So first we're gonna take a couple questions from the mailbag, and we're gonna do a rejection letter story that John Knoll has been kind enough to share with us. And then. The main event today is the lens flare extravaganza. We've talked about lens flares a couple times during the podcast, and I knew it would just take us off the rails. So we saved it all for episode 20. Uh, 'cause we've got, we've got Todd and John and Shannon in the room. This is gonna be a lot of lens flare, geeky goodness.

[00:02:42] Questions from the Mailbag

[00:02:42] Rob Bredow: So Jenny, do you want to get us started with a couple questions from the mailbag?

[00:02:45] Jenny Ely: Sure. Our first question is from Armando Marchetti, and Armando asks, what happens when you have to 3D track a shot filmed from inside a moving car? What I mean is the camera is moving relative both to the dashboard and the environment outside. So do you need to track them separately and how do you composite something beyond the windshield? think Todd, you wanted this one right?

[00:03:10] Todd Vaziri: Uh, I, I do want it because, uh, this is, uh, is something that we've had to come across many times and, and deal with, uh, in many instances. And the one I'm gonna talk about is from, JJ Abrams, Star Trek that we did in 2009. I'm gonna say this because I was in charge of the view screen on the Starship Enterprise

you know, the, the question, Armando's question was about a car. I'm just gonna say this is a Starship. So, uh, in our case, we have actors that were filmed on a stage that was the bridge of the Enterprise. The stage is stationary. The view screen, the border around the view screen is stationary and the cameras moving around steady cam, handheld, crane, whatever. But of course the enterprise is flying through space and, if anybody's dealt with, uh, space shots in computer graphics, depending on how fast, uh, your spaceship is going or what units you're using, you can get really big units really, really quickly. That is something we have to take into account because of all of the math involved with how we deal with computer graphics cameras, but the stage isn't moving and that border around the, uh, enterprise view screen is not moving. So we learned very quickly on various shows. We need to have separate cameras. We need to have a camera with local units. I always call that the stage, camera match move that is relative to the stage. Hopefully the stage isn't moving. If it's on a gimbal moving around, that's a totally different case. But I needed to put graphics on the Starship Enterprise View screen, which was always stationary relative to the set. So that was one camera. And then, of course, the enterprise is flying through space. There's a space battle. There's other planets that may have completely different scale, uh, units because we may be traveling hundreds of miles in a few seconds, uh, as opposed to maybe two feet over two seconds, which would be the stage CMM. Basically, the short answer is, uh, you split it up into separate cameras and you hope all the math works out when you're finally doing the shot.

[00:05:19] John Knoll: You know, I'll say these problems would all go away if we switched to double precision floating point numbers.

[00:05:25] Todd Vaziri: Yeah.

[00:05:26] John Knoll: Uh, and this is something we've talked about a lot, um, inside the company. It's just extraordinarily difficult to do because we rely on a whole chain of tools along the process, um, with conversions. So we're limited to some extent by the applications themselves and then the file formats that we go to, So it's not like we can go in and fix our own tools and, and we're done. We have to fix everybody's tools and all the converters and the formats that get used in between. So it's surprising how long we've been sticking with four byte floating point numbers. It's a, it's a problem all the time.

[00:06:06] Todd Vaziri: It's really funny when we see the visual, uh, and indicators of these errors, these floating point errors where you'd get like this jiggle in the camera or something, and it's like, whoa, what's going on? And I look at the numbers, I'm like, oh yeah, here are the reasons why

[00:06:20] Rob Bredow: Yeah.

[00:06:20] Todd Vaziri: can't

[00:06:20] John Knoll: was, that was a problem in that opening shot of, uh, Revenge of the Sith. It was, uh, you know, a two minute long, you know, sort of CG oner, but, um, we're traveling, you know, in, in real world units, uh, something like 20 miles from the beginning of the shot to the end. And, um, we had to have a whole series of cameras that, uh, kept resetting closer to the origin because. As you point out, you know, pretty soon you're, you have very large floating point numbers and the precision isn't high enough and things are starting to shake around and yeah, it's just,

[00:06:53] Rob Bredow: One of my

[00:06:54] John Knoll: yeah.

[00:06:54] Rob Bredow: conversations to get into is to argue about whether just changing the units to miles, fixes this problem, which it doesn't, uh, just by changing the unit. So the way floating point numbers work, right? It keeps track of the exponent separately from the significant digits. So you can, you can do big numbers, that's not a problem. But to do big numbers and small numbers, precise data, you know, big distances and precise data, like something that's moving millimeters away from your eye in the same. Floating point number that does not work when you only have four bytes per float. So one workaround is keep the camera relatively close to the origin and move the whole world past it. That can work in some cases. another workaround is, uh, split up the cameras and keep 'em relatively close to the origin. So you don't have these artifacts. Yes, if anyone wants to talk to us about higher floating point precision in computer graphics, uh, you've got people who are interested and you know, it's 2025.

We could, we can make this switch. We have enough ram, we could, we could consider solving this problem the right way.

[00:07:52] Jenny Ely: Did you all learn these things like in in school or is this things that you pick up on set or that someone taught you? This sounds very.

[00:07:58] John Knoll: No, this never happens on set.

[00:08:00] Rob Bredow: this is not the floating point. Accuracy is not talked about on set. A

[00:08:04] John Knoll: No, no. This is this. You, you experience this when you're in dailies and you see a render with a ship shaking around, you say, what the heck is going on with that?

[00:08:12] Rob Bredow: start turning into

[00:08:13] John Knoll: Yeah.

[00:08:14] Rob Bredow: un explicitly and then eventually lines as you lose accuracy. It's weird

[00:08:18] Todd Vaziri: Yeah, usually the compositor's blamed and then the compositor feels real shame, and then has to go back to his desk and then he sees these astronomical numbers in his nuke file and goes, oh, okay. Here's the problem.

[00:08:28] Rob Bredow: It was and it wasn't the compositor's fault. It

[00:08:30] Todd Vaziri: not the compositor's fault.

[00:08:31] Rob Bredow: five departments earlier, 12 weeks before. Actually it was in the 1980s when we decided to do a four bit float, or four byte

[00:08:38] Todd Vaziri: Eighties.

[00:08:38] Rob Bredow: When this problem was created. Not solved yet. Okay. You know what? We, we're getting deep into the geekery, like we expect it to, but we should get to the second question 'cause we wanna talk about lens

[00:08:48] Shannon Tindle: The four byte float should be a cocktail. Somebody should make a cocktail. It's the four byte float.

[00:08:54] Rob Bredow: I like it. What would the cocktail be, Shannon?

[00:08:57] Shannon Tindle: I have no idea. Let me, lemme go away and think about it.

[00:09:00] Rob Bredow: Come back to us

[00:09:00] Shannon Tindle: Yeah.

[00:09:02] Jenny Ely: All right. Okay, so the next question is from John Weston. How photoreal do you get while working on the CG elements that go into these shots? Do the animators ever get to see it approximating the final quality, or do they see a low res version?

[00:09:17] Rob Bredow: Yeah, I think the short answer is, it is getting better. The version that the animators see, uh, is closer to the final version than it used to be. And when ILM first started putting CG characters, if you go back to like Jar Jar Binks, the first featured character, that representation, or even all the way back to Jurassic Park, the representation in the 3D animation software was very abstract and didn't even have skin connecting between the rigid surfaces that they were animating. And then you get, eventually get the, the soft bodied skin between it, and then you get, hopefully, some approximation of some of the simulation, or at least the basic gross things, then adding lighting and textures. What we find now is our biggest limitation is do we even know the final textures in time to set it up on the rig so the animators can see it?

But given the power of the computers and how important some of those subtle details are to drive the animation, the better approximation we can get in front of them. Uh, it ends up being really important.

[00:10:12] John Knoll: Yeah, something that's been, um, a great side benefit of the work we've been doing in real time, you know, for the immersive work and for driving the LED volumes in real time, has been that, the renders that we've been working with can be applied to animation, play blasts. so a show I'm doing right now, Mandalorian and Grogu, we're doing very high quality animation play blast that, know, are inheriting the, uh, the look dev on the, the characters that we're doing. And boy, the play blast. You know, you have to wait. Is this a render? Is this, oh, no, this is a play blast. Okay.

No, they're, it's really good. It's, it's really helpful to see a realistic preview of what you're gonna get. Uh, there's all kinds of decisions that, um, that get made better when you see how shadows fall and, oh, that's gonna be dark.

No one's gonna see that

[00:11:08] Rob Bredow: That's

[00:11:09] John Knoll: really,

[00:11:09] Rob Bredow: and

[00:11:10] John Knoll: good.

[00:11:10] Rob Bredow: it really changes some of the workflows too. 'cause you're bringing on not only the texture work, but the lighting work much earlier in the process, which is so, it is more like working on set where all the departments are working together, which is exactly what you want to emulate as much as possible.

Great. Thank you Jenny, for those two questions, and thanks everyone who submitted questions, this season has been great.

[00:11:29] Rejection Letters

[00:11:39] Rob Bredow: That takes us to our feature. This has been our favorite feature to go to, which is Rejection Letters, because so many of our guests have been willing to talk about their getting started stories. And John, I think you may not even know that this feature was inspired by the letter you had posted on your

[00:11:46] John Knoll: Yeah.

[00:11:47] Rob Bredow: arrived here at ILM, which showed, uh, which was a nicely, uh, written letter from Industrial Light and Magic addressed to John Knoll. Um, and it, well, by the name of the feature, you probably get an idea what the content of the letter is, but John had it proudly displayed outside his office, which I thought was an amazing message.

It was actually a really nice message of hope, John. It's like, Hey, you get, you have bad days, and then it turns into, you know, Hey, I'm the creative director of Industrial Light and Magic. It's worked out.

[00:12:12] John Knoll: Um, yeah, so, right after I graduated from USC and, I, you know, graduated December of 84, and in January I saw an ad in, I think it was Hollywood Reporter that ILM was looking for motion control, camera assistance. And, know, I was very excited that, uh, oh, this is my, my chance. So I sent in a resume and I, as you saw, I got this very polite, no thank you letter. It's, you know, very nicely worded. It's, uh, you know, after considering your application, um, we're going with, uh, another option. We're keeping your resume on file and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, I was disappointed, but, um, uh, I figured, all right, well, I'll try again at some point. And continued to work freelance around LA and about a year later, I got a call from one of my instructors, the former instructors at SC, that ILM called looking for camera assistants. And has anybody graduated that would be good for this? Oh yeah. There's a guy who graduated a year ago who'd be perfect for you guys. so I recommended you, if you're interested, call this number. And I, you know, I sent in a resume that was almost the same. It had, you know, I think , three more items on it from that, extra year of, of working, but 'cause it came with a instructor recommendation, that certainly got to the interview stage and then, then got in. So I, I don't know what the lesson is

[00:13:48] Rob Bredow: Persist?

[00:13:50] John Knoll: on that. Yeah, I mean, I figured I would probably reapply at some point, uh, next time I saw a job application, request. But, I wasn't sure I was quite ready yet. Like, I was like, I gotta get more stuff on my resume. I gotta build up a more impressive resume before I'm ready to tackle ILM, you know, that first, oh, there's an ad I'm gonna send in a, a resume and you get the, yeah, no, made me feel like, all right, well, I, I just gotta build up something more impressive here, and it was a little bit before I, I, I was ready to do, like, I wouldn't have, if I hadn't gotten that call, I wouldn't have sent in the resume again right away. I would've worked a little bit longer, but, uh, like, okay, well. it comes with a instructor recommendation, so I should do this. And, you know, that.

Then it was, uh, you know, it was offered a six month gig and like moving all the way from LA up to, to Bay Area for a six month gig. You know, it's true. Uproot everything, you know, give up your apartment, move like everything, uh, first what's not really any long-term guaranteed work, but hey, it's ILM, I gotta do it. And, uh, yeah. So 39 years later, here I am.

[00:15:18] Rob Bredow: It worked out.

[00:15:19] John Knoll: Yeah.

[00:15:20] Rob Bredow: Worked out for both sides.

[00:15:22] John Knoll: I was, I was gonna say, I, you know, when you brought up the topic of, uh, of rejection letters and these kind of stories I thought of Something where maybe there's a, better lesson to be learned from it. And early on, when I first started VFX supervising at ILM, I had think I had done Spaced Invaders and, uh, I'd done, Hudson Hawk and some television commercials, and there was a, a feature film that had a small effect sequence in it.

And, uh, I was being pitched as the supervisor on it. And I went down to meet with the, the director along with another effects supervisor who was kind of acting as my backstop and, and mentor. And I didn't really like the script. I didn't like the, subject matter or the, the sequence that we were bidding on and, in the meeting. I think that came across that I just didn't have a lot of enthusiasm and wasn't bubbling with ideas of like how this was gonna be great and we didn't get the show. And it, I'm pretty sure it was 'cause of my own poor performance in that, that meeting. And what I learned from that is I'm just, I'm not a good actor and that I, have to genuinely have some connection with a project that I'm working on, that there has to be some aspect of it that really appeals to me that gets me excited creatively or technically there's something I can latch onto that really gets me motivated and ex excited.

'cause I can't fake enthusiasm for things that I'm not enthusiastic about. So I, I've been a little bit more careful about what I say yes to and not, because I know that about myself. Like I have to really like it.

[00:17:10] Rob Bredow: Yeah. that's really smart

[00:17:12] John Knoll: So if I show up to a meeting, it's 'cause I really like your project.

[00:17:15] Rob Bredow: That's right. I remember when you lit up on this project, uh, on Mando and Grogu. It was because I was, you know, you've done a few Star Wars movies. I was like, is this gonna be an interesting thing for John? And it was like, in the first five seconds of the conversation, uh, you were completely lit up.

So I, I love it. You're enthusi, you're mostly enthusiastic for projects, so that's always fun.

[00:17:35] Jenny Ely: And we're happy you showed up today.

[00:17:37] Todd Vaziri: Yeah. Thank you.

[00:17:38] Rob Bredow: Yes.

[00:17:39] Shannon Tindle: He is, he's Are you? I'm sure you're in it now, huh?

[00:17:42] John Knoll: Oh yeah, yeah.

[00:17:43] Shannon Tindle: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:17:44] John Knoll: We're having a good time on it. It's

[00:17:45] Shannon Tindle: Awesome.

[00:17:47] Lens Flare Extravaganza

[00:17:47] Rob Bredow: Well, that takes us to our lens flare extravaganza. And I, I think most of the listeners to this podcast at least, are gonna have a high level understanding of what a lens flare is, but just in case, 'cause we're probably gonna get super geeky, super fast here. a lens flare is the way light inter reflects inside a lens.

And the classic representation of it that you might see is when you, um, photograph something bright like the sun. And you get those rings of light that kind of cascade across the lens, and they move as you move the lens around. That is a lens flare. It's not the only thing you're gonna hear about in this next 45 minutes of lens flare fun. Oh, if you're watching on YouTube, Todd's making one in his

[00:18:24] Shannon Tindle: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:18:25] Rob Bredow: Um, yeah. So we're gonna, we're gonna dive into all sorts of different effects and, and, uh, you know, I thought it might be fun, John, to, to start with your Lens Flare plugin. What was the name of Oh, Knoll Light Factory.

[00:18:38] John Knoll: Yeah.

[00:18:38] Rob Bredow: uh, that was early nineties.

[00:18:40] John Knoll: Yeah. Well there's, there's sort of a, uh, long story behind that. Um, I was working on, uh, a film called Hook Steven Spielberg's, Peter Pan movie

[00:18:50] Rob Bredow: I already

[00:18:52] John Knoll: and.

[00:18:52] Rob Bredow: Like this story.

[00:18:54] John Knoll: There was, you know, there, there's a problem that happens on a lot of films where because of, uh, uh, the way they're scheduled, VFX supervisor needs to be onset, um, you know, doing quality control on that, answering questions and making sure we get everything shot right while work is proceeding back at the facility.

And you kind of need to be two places at once. And so one of the ways we've often dealt with that is brought another supervisor on to help with either the onset work or the, the work back at the facility. And Eric Brevig was the supe on that show, and he asked if I would come on and keep an eye on, on the work going through ILM at the time. And, uh, I, after, uh, he finished plate photography, um, and he came back, I stayed on sort of as his, his associate supe for a while. And, Eric had decided that he wanted Tinkerbells flying around, she's this, you know, bright point of light. She's a lens flare. he had had somebody wedge every lens that we had in at the company, to look at all their flare characteristics. And he picked this 50 to 300 millimeter zoom that was, you know, 'cause the zoom lens has, uh, you know, a hundred, uh, glass elements in it made for these really complicated flares. And that's what he really liked. And we're gonna do all our Tinkerbell shots with that lens. And so one of the assignments I got was, um, get all the lens flare elements shot for, for Tinkerbell. And I wasn't shooting them myself. I was, uh, supervising. I. Uh, and I had an artist that was, uh, doing 'em on an animation stand, and I had shot lens flares back when I was a camera operator many times. And, uh, I had a little rig for doing it that was made out of a, 250 foot, uh, film can. and I put a little quartz lamp in it and, um, you close the thing up and you have a hole cut in it. You put a piece of, uh, black wrap on it, and you poke a tiny little hole with, uh, a needle in it so that you're just seeing the filament of the quartz bulb, uh, just as this tiny little thing. And, if you need a bigger flare, you can, you can poke a little bit bigger hole so you can sort of control the brightness, both with exposure and, uh, you know, how big a hole you're using. and I had this method that worked pretty well for shooting really nice flares, uh, you know, blacking out the whole rest of the room. So all you were seeing was the flare. And for whatever reason, we were having a lot of trouble just getting through all the, flares. It sometimes taking two days to shoot one element.

list I had of all the shots I needed to do, and I was never gonna get through all these. And so I started thinking, um, about how hard would it be to write a program that just makes these directly, and we were compositing these shots all digitally, and I thought, what if I could just render 'em right into a frame buffer?

And, uh, and then, you know, they're, they're right there. There's nothing to scan. It's just super direct. if you just gimme screen coordinates, I can, I, I'll, I'll do that. So I got a scan of one of these flares that, uh, that Eric really liked and I started writing a, a little program that would just render these things out.

And there were a number of primitives, uh, you know, ramps and circles and anti-alias lines and, a bunch of things like that. And I did this, very ad hoc, uh, duplication of the, flare that was the Tinkerbell flare, and that's how we cleared the log jam. I think about half the Tinkerbell shots and hook were done with that, flare generator. and shortly after that, uh, Star Trek six went into production and the opening shot of that movie, there is this explosion. It's a Praxis explosion. It's this beautiful flare. It was done with a Nikon 105 millimeter prime. And, we were pretty far along with the composite on it. And the director was objecting to, a couple of the reflection elements that were in the, the flare said, you know, it's kind of confusing.

It looks like maybe it's a spaceship or something. Can, can you just get rid of that? the problem was, well, it was a built in characteristic of the flare, and I think Scott Farrar was supeing that show. And he asked, Hey, I saw what you did on, uh, on Hook. Could you write a lens flare generator that, uh, copies everything about this flare that we like, except get rid of these two little reflection elements. And so then I did that one. It was another kind of hardcoded thing, and I wrote a version of it as a Photoshop plugin. After that. it shipped with Photoshop 2.0 I think. Um, I started seeing that there was a real utility for being able to generate these flares rather than always have to, you know, send 'em to the camera department to photograph. So I started writing a, a tool kit for, you know, build your own. So there's an editor and you can kind of stack all these primitives and they're all parametric, so you can adjust a bunch of parameters about their color and brightness and thickness and all of that. And by stacking 'em all up like that, you can build up a lot of complexity and, you know, get a flare.

That's just the way you want it. And that sort of turned into that, Lens Flare Pro or Light Factory plugin.

[00:24:18] Rob Bredow: That's amazing. I loved using that and I definitely overused it. I, I think I'm one of

[00:24:24] Todd Vaziri: We all did.

[00:24:26] Rob Bredow: in the

[00:24:27] Todd Vaziri: all.

[00:24:28] Rob Bredow: who leaned into lens flares way too heavily. let's talk a little bit about lens flares in real lenses. I mean, Shannon, in addition to being a, a writer. A director, a producer of movies, you're also quite a photographer, maybe you could share your, people can see your photography. But you know, people seek out these lenses that have some of these nice flaring characteristics. Um, and you're among those people.

[00:24:52] Shannon Tindle: Yeah, some, some people don't. Some people like more and I, I've got some nice newer lenses too, but I like character lenses. I was just showing earlier, I got probably one of my smallest lenses and one of my biggest lenses smallest is a, is a, version two, Leica 35 millimeter Summalux.

[00:25:09] Rob Bredow: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:09] Shannon Tindle: And it's got a beautiful flair, but it's got that wide open, it's got that, what they refer to as the Leica glow.

And there's nothing

[00:25:15] Todd Vaziri: Hmm.

[00:25:16] Shannon Tindle: that I've seen that kind of mimics it. And, and I've got some really crazy photos here. You just gotta know. You gotta, and this one actually, you couldn't even, I had to modify it to be able to put a UV filter on it. Because it didn't have, uh, thread mounts and, you know, on the lid the way the later versions did.

So I love this one and it's got, it just, it's just really appealing. And then

[00:25:38] Rob Bredow: that blooming characteristic in

[00:25:39] Shannon Tindle: it,

[00:25:40] Rob Bredow: it flares.

[00:25:40] Shannon Tindle: yeah, it blooms and, you know, you get your other artifacts too. You get your purple fringing and things like that. But I don't, I don't care about that. It's lovely. And if you shoot black and white, you know, and yeah, there's no purple fringing. And so, uh, and then I have my 50 millimeter, this is a, it's called the Canon Dream Lens. But you can see, I mean, this thing is like, I love this lens so much, and it's

[00:26:05] Rob Bredow: What is, how fast

[00:26:05] Shannon Tindle: a, yeah, it's a, it's a 0.95 and it's a 50. So, as I was saying earlier, the depth of field is like. It's, it's really, it's really tough to focus, but you don't care about it because there's some abstract images that you get.

I was at Disneyland probably about six months ago, and I took this and we were watching the fireworks, and when the fireworks would explode, I had, I had a, I had a focal point. I had it on the back of somebody's head that had mouse ears that actually had glitter on the mouse ears or sequin. And when, when those, those, um, fireworks would go off, the lens flares that this thing would get reminded me of the kind of flares that I remember seeing on, I know we'll talk about this later, like favorite lens flares, but

[00:26:49] Todd Vaziri: Yeah.

[00:26:50] Shannon Tindle: first kind of awareness of a lens flare was in Poltergeist.

[00:26:54] Todd Vaziri: Hmm.

[00:26:55] Shannon Tindle: when the, the, the whole, the whole team is there trying to figure out what's going on in the house and if it's real or not. And then there's that ghost that comes down and I don't know what, what I know. You know, it was an element that was shot. Um, but those just like seeing that and like, man, that's, that's really cool to see that.

And interesting not, not, not knowing quite what it was until years later. And I see the, one of my favorite documentaries of all time, uh, Visions of Light, the cinematography documentary

[00:27:28] Todd Vaziri: Yep.

[00:27:28] Shannon Tindle: and Conrad Hall, who is responsible for, I think the greatest. If you watch Cool Hand Luke, Cool Hand Luke is just a masterwork of lens flair.

And one of the earlier examples of really maybe even the earliest in 67 of, of just like from the moment it opens. It's beautiful, and it's just part of it. It doesn't intrude.

[00:27:52] Rob Bredow: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:52] Shannon Tindle: just part of the narrative. It's part of, and, and I love too that the character's such a rebellious character. And then Connie Hall is like, well, I'm gonna flare the lens.

I'm gonna do all these things you're not supposed to do. But yeah, becoming aware of, of different, directors of photography and then tracking down their work and, and seeing what they, what they've done. But yeah, I, I love a lens. It's got nice character and now you see things where, where manufacturers are going back and reverse engineering to some would say dumb the lens down.

I would say just giving it character. But like, I think it's like the Hawk 70s where they're like, we've got this market. Let's, let's shoot with these, let's recreate a lens. I know Zeiss also did, uh, I think post their, like, was it their Supreme primes

And there's resistance to it because, you know, you've got these guys who design these lenses, who spend years trying to get all those artifacts out and people are like, no man, I want it. I want it, I want it to bloom. I want to get this nice,

uh, you know, artifact. So,

[00:28:54] Todd Vaziri: that, that I, that's what I find so fascinating about this entire discussion. We're talking about character of a lens, the way lights will glare and cause artifacts inside the glass. And for the first, let's say, five or six decades of cinema, that's considered a mistake.

[00:29:14] Shannon Tindle: yeah.

[00:29:14] Todd Vaziri: you would blow a take if you could see a stage light reflected in the lens, oh no, we gotta retake it. Let's flag this off. Let's do this, let's do, almost nobody was embracing it as part of the cinematic language and the, the idea of it being a mistake, as, that, that's, that's where you get into that arguable territory where, you know, um, well the edges of the, you know, I don't want it to, uh, remind me that I'm watching a movie. And that glare, the lens reflections the flare itself reminds you of the artifice of the movie. I'd also argue that the edges of the frame could do that, let's say cutting

[00:29:56] Shannon Tindle: Well.

[00:29:57] Todd Vaziri: perspective could do that. Um, so it's, it's definitely a, a, uh, mushy environment. And then in terms of a mistake. You could say that if there's something, if the camera's photographing something that is supposed to be there, like the sun, like a practical light element that is in the scene, that's not a mistake.

It's just like you're filming actors. But if you get a, a stage light, something, a movie light reflected in there, that's more of a mistake. I, I just, I just think it's hilarious that so long this was regarded as a mistake and now we're considering it. Part of the

[00:30:33] Shannon Tindle: But,

[00:30:34] Todd Vaziri: of

[00:30:34] Shannon Tindle: but there are many dps who still, like Deakins, famously does not like lens flares. And I, I look at it as

[00:30:43] John Knoll: it's a

[00:30:43] Shannon Tindle: understand. Yeah, I, well, I, it's like, do you like impressionist painting or do you like realist painting? It's, it's really that, that kind of thing. And for me, you know, as you said it, Todd and Deakins has, has repeated this, well, it's something that is not natural.

I'm like, except it does, if I get some, if, if my eye gets clouded with tears. It flares And then there's also just the vocabulary of over a hundred years of watching movies. It becomes part of the vernacular, and you don't, it doesn't get in the way because you've seen it so many times and your eyes are used to it and expect it.

So you can watch movies where they don't have it like Blade Runner 2049. Or you can watch films where, you know, you were talking about, you know, JJ Star Trek earlier, which famously like, where you're like putting flashlights, you know, in you're, you're, you're intentionally flaring the lens just off camera.

And it's all, to me, it's all if it's done right, where it doesn't disrupt the narrative and it actually, maybe you wanna disorient the audience, maybe you wanna throw 'em off. Maybe you just wanna be a little bit more painterly with it, as you would with more vintage lenses. You know, it's a choice and I think the narrative.

Should, should drive what those choices are. And it's like, one of the things we're looking at on, on my next film, I'm doing an animated John Wick film. And in those films you get those, you, they, they flare the lenses and there's some things that they couldn't do when they were, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to decide how much I can say, this isn't about story, it's just about more about approach that I want to take is, is like when you are freed from. For example, I think John Wick four was shot with the Arri Alexa LF, because when you shoot at 65, pulling focus with the speed that they're shooting that action, it's just really hard to do. But one of the things I was saying is if we chose to do that in an animated film, we don't have to worry about any, any of that.

We can frame by frame. It can be exactly what we want it to be. And that's where you have that, that real control. As long as it feels like something that is part of the natural fabric of the narrative. So you know, you can get all, you can get. If the story's great, you don't care.

[00:32:58] John Knoll: Yeah, there's, it's, in my opinion, it's a style book choice.

[00:33:01] Shannon Tindle: yeah.

[00:33:02] John Knoll: there's no right or wrong answer to this. It's just what is your preference? And, you know, as long as you're being consistent and true to yourself over the course of a, a movie that, It's perfectly fine if you're one of those directors that, that likes a really clean image and

[00:33:18] Todd Vaziri: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:18] John Knoll: you know, the embraces the Deakins philosophy of, uh, hey, I don't want to include anything that reminds you that you're looking through a piece of glass.

That's fine. I've also, uh, worked with DP's like Greg Fraser that, uh, they like a lens with a lot of personality because in their mind that's part of the proscenium effect

of, Hey, we're telling you a story and this is stylized story, and you know, that's part of the stylization.

[00:33:45] Shannon Tindle: Yeah, those opening shots in the Dune films where it's really, it's just abstract that, that Greg did. It's like, it's, and it's lovely. It's really gorgeous to see, and it's meant to feel like a dream. It's a, it's a memory of something that hasn't happened yet. So, uh, yeah, I felt I, that, that's a great example of how they employed it.

So.

[00:34:06] Todd Vaziri: dune part one's end titles are nothing but flares

[00:34:09] John Knoll: Hmm.

[00:34:09] Todd Vaziri: on stage. A mirror. It's absolutely beautiful. Shannon, I'm glad you mentioned Cool Hand Luke. 'cause I was like going through, uh, some historical records trying to find some of the first instances of, of, uh, onscreen flares being acceptable as part of like the visual language.

And, and I. In my mind's eye, I always think of the, um, Sergio Leone, uh, spaghetti westerns, the, the trilogy particularly and good, the bad and the ugly, and as having a lot of sun flares, but not, they really actually don't.with the exception of, uh, when, Tuko is kind of torturing Blondie in the desert for, you know, making him

[00:34:48] Shannon Tindle: Yeah.

[00:34:49] Todd Vaziri: days. There's a lot of shots of looking straight up into the sun, kind of like a point of view of blondie

[00:34:55] Shannon Tindle: And you'll tilt.

[00:34:56] Todd Vaziri: flares just

[00:34:57] Shannon Tindle: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:34:57] Todd Vaziri: the place. And I kind of just realized not only looking at that, but also seeing, uh, John's Rango poster. I did a lot of the sun flares for Rango and I realized that that was probably some of my inspiration for some of the Rango flares I made, uh, which is, uh, you know, we're just staring right into the sun and then somebody with a big giant hat occludes it and it's very dramatic. but I, yeah, I had to mention Good the Bad and the Ugly, Cool Hand Luke, like you said, Shannon. Uh, and then the Graduate and Easy Rider coming along those heels where Easy Rider was in particular shot in a sort of documentary style, uh, run & gun approach. And you'd get practicals, you'd get the sun and flaring like crazy.

And then of course, you know, we're off to the races at that point, especially with anamorphic lenses, which have distinct characteristics that sphericals don't when it comes to practical, flares. then everything was out there in the open.

I wanted to talk very quickly. I mean, we're, we have to talk about how flares work with visual effects like John developed, his tool, um. At least for me when it comes to visual effects movies, the first like flares that I became aware of, uh, were from like Doug Trumball's work on 2001 and Blade Runner and, uh, close Encounters all of those movies, particularly Close Encounters and, and, and Blade Runner use flares as a stylistic device, um, on the, the spinners that are flying around on spaceships and things like that.

And I think it's particularly interesting because flares themselves are shot with spherical lenses because of the complexity of visual effects photography. But those movies are shot in anamorphic, which have their own set of different flares. And it's just so funny how, at least in my mind, as a viewer, they all kind of blend together. Um, but they are stylistically different. And I was hoping, uh, maybe John could talk about like. Shooting flares for visual effects elements and how that relates to, uh, the, the spherical lenses and anamorphic lenses and why Doug Trumball at the time made those, those types of choices.

[00:37:13] John Knoll: Well, yeah, I, I think in the case of, uh, of Doug Trumball, I, I think he was to some extent, uh, limited by the available tech at the time. Like him, he had chosen to work in a larger format. So if the film is shot 35 millimeters, he's still doing visual effects work in 65 millimeter. because he wanted a larger format negative that would, uh, better survive optical compositing, uh, without, you know, grain buildup and resolution loss. and anamorphic lenses are particularly difficult to deal with for, uh, shooting miniatures and, and other visual effects needs. Uh, 'cause it's, they're kind of weird. It's two different focal lengths in one piece of glass. And they, have weird characteristics like, uh, as you rack focus, uh, often there's proportion changes like a circle turn into an ellipse and, and that kind of thing. Um, so they, they're hard to work with in that way. so. It's always easier to work with spherical lenses where you can, and unless you have very shallow depth of field or lens flares, know, if you're looking at an in-focus thing, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference. Um, so you get away with it fine. because lens flares were such an important part of the aesthetic of close encounters, you know, there's a bunch of them that are shot in the live action that have these, you know, beautiful anamorphic characteristics. Particularly. I remember there was one that that really stood out to me.

That's, uh, when, Neri is, is climbing up the, uh, the rocks, um, in. Approaching Devil's Tower, and there's a helicopter in the background. It's just right at, uh, at dusk, and points, a, spotlight at him, and you get this amazing, flare. It's got, you know, the blue stripe and all these, you know, beautiful reflection characteristics. you know, that's a big part of the aesthetic of that movie. And then when you're doing all the visual effects work and you're showing all these UFOs with all these bright lights on 'em, and then, you know, they're, they're with the, um, spherical lenses. So they have all these spherical characteristics, you know, round circles and all of that. I don't know, it's different, but, uh, I always just accepted it as, yeah, that's part of the style book. one thing that, that I'll, I'll say is very characteristics of, flares from the seventies and eighties is you see that, um, a lot of 'em have a, a very pronounced red ring around the, the, the source. And that's particularly visible in close encounters and, uh, and Blade Runner.

[00:39:49] Rob Bredow: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:50] John Knoll: and I would get 'em too on the, the lenses that we shot with at ILM, these sort of, you know, Nikkor primes and had an experience. And Todd, you, you would know this, at the beginning of, Rogue One, we were trying to make the, uh, you know, this choice that happens on a lot of films.

So are we, we shooting on film or are we shooting digitally? we did, uh, we called the Pepsi Challenge where we set up an interior and an exterior scene, a couple of different variations, some high dynamic range things. And we shot them, with the same lenses on a digital body, on an Alexa and on a, uh, Arri, body. So same lenses, same glass shooting, the same scene on film and on digital. And part of the idea was, I was convinced that we could do a pretty good film emulation that part of our workflow is, you know, whatever image we get from whatever source, we linearize it on input, uh, because we need it to be in a linear space, uh, canonical linear space to do our work.

And then we invert that transform on the way out. So there's nothing to prevent us from taking imagery from one type of imaging system, a film camera or a digital camera linearize, and put it out with a different look. So the idea was, Hey, we're gonna shoot with a digital camera. We're going to do our work on it.

We're gonna put it out with a film lut. We have enough information to do that accurately. So we shot this, this test and uh, Todd did all this, this work to, conform our digital, uh, you know, applying our film LUT on it. And then, you know, we added grain and a little bit of gate weave and all the other things to, to make it look like film. And, you know, we succeeded in, in convincing everybody involved that hey, we could do a pretty good emulation. and it looked pretty good. One of the things that was definitely different between the two was in one of the scenes we had a light that was pointed at the camera and it was giving us a flare. once everything else in the scene was pretty well matched, there was, a red glow around the, the, the lamp that was in the film version that was not visible in the digital version. And I'm pretty convinced that's infrared crosstalk.

On the film and that digital cameras have a very sharp notch filter to cut out, uh, the ir because if you don't, you're gonna, you'll, you'll veil the whole frame. And, so I, I think that those red rings are infrared that's, so if you shoot with the same lenses that will produce those red rings on a film camera, you won't get 'em on a digital camera.

[00:42:27] Shannon Tindle: Awesome.

[00:42:27] Todd Vaziri: I haven't thought about that in a while. John,

[00:42:30] Rob Bredow: Yes, yes,

[00:42:30] Todd Vaziri: We talked so much crosstalk talk back then.

[00:42:34] Rob Bredow: Yes. The crosstalk between infrared and the red channel, especially of the film.

[00:42:38] Todd Vaziri: Yep.

[00:42:39] Rob Bredow: So we mentioned JJ Abrams, Star Trek, And Todd, you worked on that show as well. Like we're talking about the classic films, Close Encounters, Blade Runner, that, that stick in our mind.

But I think more recently, that one of the films that I think sticks in a lot of people's minds is having distinctive lens flares and, and, and adding into interior scenes and the things. But you worked a lot on, on the visual effects on that one.

[00:43:00] Todd Vaziri: Yeah.

Um, this is, uh, this is coming at the tail end of a, uh, mid two thousand renaissance of anamorphic pictures. And, uh, JJ in particular loves, uh, the anamorphic, format. So, he and cinematographer Dan Mendel would really, were gonna embrace this, uh, to a, to a significant extent. And one of the things that at least, on ILM side that we were, I was personally concerned about, were how are we gonna make our space scenes look different than all the other space scenes that we've ever seen before?

We're gonna have a lot of space battles, a lot of traveling through space to enterprise. We want to make it look as grand and as beautiful as possible. Um, what, can we bring to the table that would make it different from all the other space movies? And this, the, the, the lesson here is, um, make sure that what you're doing in visual effects matches what's happening in first unit. Because when we started seeing the dailies and the sequences cut together before we were in active shot production, uh, I noticed what they were doing. Uh, and, and particularly on the bridge of the enterprise, but also in other scenes, uh, JJ and Dan would have no hesitation shining practical lights right into the lens. Not just the stuff that's installed on the set, like the actual practicals, but, to the point of having a, a, a flashlight off screen. Pinging the lens from time to time almost, you know, like a little choreographed dance, like a, like a symphony, a conductor every once in a while at a dramatic moment pinging the lens. And once I started to see that in a lot of shots, I was like, wait a second, gonna do what we're gonna, what we haven't really done in a lot of other of our space pictures, which usually, um, we want the cleanest image. We want to be able to tell the story. We want as few distractions as possible. this gave me the chance to like, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna lens flare this up. We're going to,

[00:45:04] Rob Bredow: Let's turn this up to 11.

[00:45:05] Todd Vaziri: We're going, I wanna make it feel like the first unit team

That shot the whole movie went up into space and choreographed all these spaceships and with the same crew, the same, uh, equipment, and the same style trying to adhere to the same style. So that's when we started to embrace that. Uh, with not only, uh, photographic, elements that Roger Guyette shot, but a lot of the flares that I ended up generating and, and others on the show, it us our distinctive look. And we also, not only that, but we were gonna be filming right into Stars, right into Suns. a lot of the, the first shot of the movie is you're just looking right at a, a sun. we knew right off the bat we can establish the visual style and, um, it worked out really well. I'm, I'm really proud of it. Particularly the space jump sequences where space jump sequence where they, um, Kirk, jumps from the Enterprise down to the planet Vulcan.

[00:46:03] Rob Bredow: mm-hmm.

[00:46:04] Todd Vaziri: The, Vulcan Sun was gonna be extremely prominent in all these shots, big action shots, whip pans, zooms, everything.

So I had to build this robust, hopefully portable system that would work within several shots and hopeful and not only not be distracted, distracted, distracting from the action that you're supposed to be following, but would be able to work from shot to shot. And I'm really proud of that stuff.

And, uh, yeah, I, it's, we did just like, you know, in some respects, no light factor. We did create a little, little bit of a monster, because every movie wanted to have that look from after that. And, uh, yeah, we're all kind of coming off of that hangover from, from Star Trek.

[00:46:46] Rob Bredow: it's fun. Fun. I love the flares across the screen. It's so much fun. I love the horizontal lines that you get in that film in particular that were so prominently drawn out on

[00:46:55] Todd Vaziri: Yeah.

[00:46:55] Rob Bredow: I love that style. Okay, so we're running to the end of our main feature. I thought it would be fun for each of you to maybe highlight favorite lens flare from a movie you didn't work on, that kind of stands out in your mind. Maybe a favorite one that you did get to work on that you created. Um, and I guess we do this as a semi speed round. Like you don't have to just like burn through it, but do you know, we'll do this as a

[00:47:17] John Knoll: Hmm.

[00:47:17] Rob Bredow: speed round so we get around with it. Um, John, do you have one in mind?

[00:47:21] John Knoll: since Doug Trumball has been mentioned, uh, I, I'll say that I,He was hugely influential to me when I was, uh, especially just getting started. Uh, huge admirer of his work. And, uh, there's some beautiful flares that are in 2001, you know, the miniature pods turning their headlights toward the, the camera. Uh, obviously Close Encounters of the Third Kind is mostly lens flares. It's just, you know, beautifully shot, really nice stuff. Uh, Blade Runner is all about the flares on the headlights of the spinners. So yeah, big fan of all of that work. It's really nice.

[00:47:59] Rob Bredow: that's great. Anyone that, anyone that stands out in your mind that you on, on a show you worked on, you created.

[00:48:05] John Knoll: On Pirates two. I made a kind of an odd, questionable decision of, uh, uh, we, we were doing a number of matte paintings that needed to have flares or other VFX shots where the sun was gonna be visible and we needed to, to have a flare. And I decided I didn't wanna do 'em digitally. Um, so what I did is I built a flare generator, a physical flare generator. This was a, a box that was, uh, 18 inches by 18 inches, and it was four feet deep. And I put a white, bright white LED at the back of it and, uh, set up a camera, digital still camera on a motion control pan tilt head. and we, you know, tracked where, where I wanted to have a flare in the same way you'd do it if you were doing one digitally. Uh, but then I had that driving a pan tilt head, and, uh, I photographed. Flares for pirates two. I think there's, I did it for a half a dozen shots, uh, and I picked a lens that I really liked from my collection of lenses, and I photographed real flares like I did back in the eighties and put those in the shots.

And I think they look really good and no one would ever know.

[00:49:12] Rob Bredow: That's really fun.

[00:49:13] Shannon Tindle: We need to kickstart that flare box. You can get your own built.

[00:49:18] Rob Bredow: get your own John Knoll flare box. I like it. It's the 2025 reaction to, uh, John Knoll, the Knoll Light Factory.

[00:49:27] Shannon Tindle: Yeah,

[00:49:27] Rob Bredow: It's a, it's a physical plugin. You plug it into the wall,

[00:49:30] Shannon Tindle: yeah, yeah.

[00:49:32] Todd Vaziri: in.

[00:49:34] Rob Bredow: Shannon,

[00:49:35] Shannon Tindle: Uh, so, so I have a couple from, from mine. One I even in the, I storyboarded like the first six minutes of Kubo

[00:49:44] Todd Vaziri: Hmm.

[00:49:44] Shannon Tindle: and when Kubo was walking down from his cave, I fully painted that board and I, there's a app called Lens Flare and I added. A golden anamorphic lens flare in that. And the shot in the movie looks almost exactly like my storyboard.

So that one I was proud of because I, I put it in there and the shot looks exactly as I boarded it. Um, and then there's one from Lost Ollie, which you guys did. And of course, Hayden Jones supervised, where ollie, it's in the episode 1, 1 0 1 when he's running to the, to escape the shop. And when he leaps there is a lens flare there,

it blows out just for a second as he's crossing the light and it's just beautifully done. Uh, and then from, uh, movies, uh, that I like, the specific shot that I think of in Cool Hand Luke is

[00:50:32] Todd Vaziri: Mm.

[00:50:32] Shannon Tindle: Beginning when the cops show up

[00:50:34] Todd Vaziri: Yeah.

[00:50:34] Shannon Tindle: and you see their lights are flaring, the lens and their headlights are flaring the lens and it's just.

Beauti and he's a silhouette. It's just beautifully done. Uh, and then as a, just the effects, uh, where it was just an optical, uh, thing was again, in, in Poltergeist when those spirits are coming down the stairs, it's just, uh, it's pretty ra and I think some en raiders too at the end, right? Whenever the chest is open.

Those are pretty, those are pretty amazing, uh, as well. So.

[00:51:03] Rob Bredow: Great. Todd,

[00:51:05] Todd Vaziri: Uh, for a specific flare, I was gonna, John stole mine. The, uh, 2001, the pod, uh, slowly

[00:51:12] John Knoll: Hmm.

[00:51:12] Rob Bredow: rotating

[00:51:13] Todd Vaziri: until eventually all four headlights right at camera. Uh, just a nice little bit of verisimilitude. They're not flashy at all, but they, you know, lend, uh, so much realism, to all of the things that are going on in 2001.

then, um, from, just as a whole movie, the One Lens Flare anamorphic movie. If you wanna study lens flares, you gotta study Die Hard. Nobody needs another reason to watch Die Hard.

[00:51:41] Shannon Tindle: Yeah.

[00:51:42] Todd Vaziri: uh, you know, here's another one. And there, there's just so many beautiful shots in that movie. Where if you took still frames, like if, if you were one, to a lot of screenshots of movies to analyze them, like, I don't know of me, there's a lot of shots in that movie where you take that still frame and you're like, I don't even know what movie this is from, because it's just dancing light all over the place.

But it's a shot of Hans Gruber, it's a shot of John McClain, um, to absolutely beautiful stuff. And, uh, so yeah, Die Hard. And then I'm, I'm really proud of what we did on Star Trek,

[00:52:13] Shannon Tindle: Yeah.

[00:52:13] Todd Vaziri: in 2009. really beautiful stuff. I'm very proud of what we did.

[00:52:17] Shannon Tindle: When the vault opens in Die Hard and the Ode to Joy is playing, it's like I still get pumped whenever I see it. Yeah.

[00:52:25] Rob Bredow: It's great filmmaking. much fun. that has been a fun lens flare extravaganza.

[00:52:33] John Knoll: Wait, wait. Hold on one Before we move on, I'm

[00:52:36] Rob Bredow: yeah.

[00:52:36] John Knoll: talk about just, um. Do not comp something on top of a lens flare. Okay.

[00:52:44] Rob Bredow: Thank you.

[00:52:46] John Knoll: Note

that the flare happens in the lens. So if you comp something over a lens flare, you're saying it is between the lens and the film.

[00:52:55] Shannon Tindle: Yeah.

[00:52:55] John Knoll: Don't do that.

[00:52:56] Todd Vaziri: there's a proper order of operations.

The

last thing is the lens and, okay. And John

and I were just trading screenshots from oh I dunno the original Star Wars and the

Han Solo Yeehaw moment of him coming into, uh, save Luke the falcon is back backlit sort of by the, the sun, which is, we don't really ever see the sun in the original trilogy. If you look really carefully, actually, you don't have to look that carefully. the falcon is comped over the lens flare element. Technically not correct. It's a Yeah. But,

[00:53:28] John Knoll: It's technically not correct. Un unless the falcon is between the lens and the film

[00:53:32] Rob Bredow: It's a very small falcon.

[00:53:35] John Knoll: could, could be.

[00:53:36] Shannon Tindle: We're dealing in subspace, so.

[00:53:37] John Knoll: Yeah.

[00:53:38] Rob Bredow: right.

[00:53:39] The Martini

[00:53:39] Rob Bredow: That is the perfect way to head into our martini. Thank you for the wisdom, John. The extra wisdom there. Uh, Todd, why don't you kick us off with your martini?

[00:53:48] Todd Vaziri: Sure. Um, those of us in the film industry, we're sometimes in our bubbles with what our discipline is, whether it be costumes or cinematography or visual effects. And a lot of the times we're like questioning like, why did the director do this? Why did the director do that? Uh. All of these choices.

It's like, why if they only had done this, if only they had done that. Well, I read a book recently that gets into a director's head, called Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick, uh, amazing filmmaker, Ed Zwick, Legends of the Fall, Glory, so many other great movies and TV shows. And he goes into extraordinary detail as to how he gets involved with these projects, what is he's passionate about. And the, the meta commentary from my perspective is reading it is, you have no idea what is going on to make a movie happen that all of the compromises, all of the deals, all of the. You know, we have to deal with this in order to get this and prioritizing what is most important to you from a storytelling perspective, from a logistical perspective. Um, it gave me great insights into some of the movies that I love. And Ed Zwick's a great storyteller. Uh, so Ed Zwick's book Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions.

[00:54:59] Rob Bredow: Very fun, uh, John Knoll.

[00:55:01] John Knoll: Uh, my martini for this week is, know, I'm a big fan of, watching artisans at work. Um, I love seeing the process. It makes me appreciate art more when I, I kind of see the thought process and see how people work. And, I think last time I talked about the Tim's Vermeer, uh, so I've got another painting one for you.

And that's, a show that, uh, you can see streaming on Amazon Prime if you're in the US. it's called Portrait Artist of the Year. it's, it's sort of the same format as. The Great British Baking Show where you have a, you know, every week you bring in a number of contestants who are all, have a series of challenges and you know, they progressively cull it down to, a winner. But, um, watching these artists, uh, under a strict time deadline, uh, do a portrait, there's a landscape version of it as well that, uh, that's just as fun to watch. But all these different artists with all these different styles and approaches and they all paint differently. Some of them do preparatory sketches and, others don't, just watching them work and, you know, having them talk through their thought process, I just find delightful.

So it's a fun show.

[00:56:21] Rob Bredow: That's great. We'll link to that in the show notes. Jenny.

[00:56:25] Jenny Ely: Yeah, so I'm, uh, got a book this week. And probably to nobody's surprise, it's a DC novel. 'cause I love DC particularly Batman. So, um, Batman Resurrection is a novel that was, it came out last year. It's by, John Jackson Miller, who's written some Star Wars novels and some Star Trek novels. And so, uh, Batman, 1989, Tim Burton's Batman was my gateway drug into Batman and the whole DC universe.

And Batman Resurrection takes place right after Batman, 1989. So it picks up right after the Joker has died. And there are, it goes pretty deep into the aftermath and the trauma of the attacks that the Joker did and how, like the, the poisonous gas that he released and

[00:57:05] Todd Vaziri: Hmm.

[00:57:05] Jenny Ely: you know, the cosmetics kerfuffle and all that.

But it also introduces, um. villain, which is very exciting, in a very exciting way. I won't spoil anything 'cause it's interesting to watch it evolve. But, um, it's really, it, it's great. It feels like it takes place in the exact same universe of the movie and it's got great characters, great writing, super fun.

So if you're a Batman fan, particularly if, um, Batman 1989 as your Batman, I recommend it.

[00:57:30] Rob Bredow: Excellent. Thank you, Jenny. Shannon.

[00:57:33] Shannon Tindle: Uh, I like double shots, so I'll get a double. So the, the, the first, uh, being this amazing organization that I've been supporting for a while called LA Taco. If you don't know about LA Taco, they find the best tacos and old school eats in and around Los Angeles. And they also report on underrepresented communities.

And every year they have this event, I was just there over the weekend, LA Taco Madness, where they have the 12 best taco trucks. Uh, and they, and, and you go and you can have. A lot of fun just eating tacos downtown with amazing people. And the folks who run it are incredible and it's just a great organization to support because they report on things that other folks don't. So I love me some LA Taco.

And then just because I like gadgets and pretty gadgets, there's this company, I dunno if you know about 'em, called Colorware, and they will customize gear. So I had my, these storm trooper out.

[00:58:25] Rob Bredow: Nice.

[00:58:26] Shannon Tindle: this is like a, this is like a, a metallic white that I, 'cause I lost, I love my Sony headphones and I lost mine, uh, traveling a few weeks ago.

So I was like, oh, good excuse to buy some new ones, but pay more for them. Uh, and, and, but they also, they make this awesome Apple Pencil Pro that looks like an a pencil. And it just, it's, it's, everybody looks at it and they're like, oh, what do you, how'd you get that pencil stick on the side of your iPad?

I'm like, it's my Apple pencil. But they painted to look like a number two pencil. So, uh, so yeah, LA Taco and, Colorware. Those are my, that's my double shot.

[00:59:00] Rob Bredow: Those are great. mine is maybe boring, but I keep running into people who are not using a password manager app. one of 'em that I've been using lately is the Apple Passwords

app. You can pick any of them,

[00:59:11] Todd Vaziri: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:11] Rob Bredow: you can pay for them or you can use it for free. You don't even have to be into the Apple ecosystem to use the Apple Passwords app. You can get it to work on Windows Cross platform free, and I think everybody knows what they do. They put in your passwords for you. and they remember them. So you can use really complicated passwords and then Apple's, ecosystem. Also, I think if you're paying 'em at least $1 a month, which I pay well over that, um, will give you the ability to use hidden, uh, login names. So you can give every website a different email address and it just takes care of it all behind the scenes pretty seamlessly for you. So if you haven't bothered, go ahead and install it in all your web browsers on your phone, on your computer and it will save you so much typing and time. Uh, and the apple password's. One's pretty neat if you're on a Mac 'cause you can just use your fingerprint to get into everything. And once you start going down that path, you do end up with a lot of logins, but you have a lot anyway.

And it will make your life more secure. So

[01:00:03] Shannon Tindle: That, that sound, Rob, that was delivered as if we were all just called here for this meeting. But there's one person who hasn't been protecting their passwords and you're like, I'm just telling everybody my martini shot for the week is like, check your passwords. But there's somebody who's sweating, John's got like beads of sweat or he's like, oh my God, he's gonna bring this up now.

[01:00:23] Rob Bredow: I haven't been using password 1, 2, 3 as my

[01:00:26] Shannon Tindle: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:00:28] Outro

[01:00:28] Rob Bredow: Well, I wanna give a special thanks to everybody and this is not the regular boiler plate. I'm gonna do a longer boiler plate 'cause this is the end of season one. And, um, I'm just so grateful for John and Shannon for joining us for this very special episode, also for everybody who contributed to making season one. Such a success. So thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing about us on social media, uh, and everybody who took the time to write us a message.

We've read all of them even though we didn't reply to all of them. We really do read all of them. To be honest, Jenny reads all of them and I read most of them. But, um, thank you so much. We wanna thank Industrial Light and Magic for hosting us. And I wanna specifically thank Jenny Ely who has produced this show.

She's worked her butt off to make this happen. She had not produced a podcast before this, and we just threw her in and said, you'll probably figure it out. And she did and she excelled. So thank you Jenny, for all your very hard work.

[01:01:18] Jenny Ely: Thank you.

[01:01:19] Rob Bredow: Today's episode is edited by David Dovell and we wanna thank everybody behind the scenes, and there's a longer list today 'cause we've got the PR team led by Greg Grusby. Ian Kintzle, Andrea Zavala and Ella Greig on the PR team. Thank you so much for all your hard work. We wanna thank our incredible artists who've made so many of those ads and things you've seen posted on our socials promoting the podcast. So, Leigh Zieske, Chelsea Castro, Casey Straka, and Hannah Puente. Thank you so much for your hard work. And then if you like the, intro music, which I do, I wanna thank again, Khatsho Orfali who created that theme song. And then Ben Charles, Ben Todd, and Pablo Helman who contributed original music that you've heard under the outros. And then, Chris Hawkinson, who really helped us figure out this show. He served behind the scenes as a creative producer. He edited a ton of the episodes himself, um, has really been the heart of, uh, one of the, one of the people who helped make this show a success. So thank you all and thank you for those of you who I didn't mention who've also helped on the show. 'cause uh, everybody chips in in different ways. Everybody wears a lot of hats here at ILM. And, uh, putting together a show like this has been a ton of fun.

[01:02:26] Todd Vaziri: So much fun.

[01:02:27] Rob Bredow: um, yeah, Todd and I have been talking about this for more than 10 years, and it was really fun to get to do this show this

[01:02:35] Todd Vaziri: Absolutely.

[01:02:36] Rob Bredow: Thank you, Todd. I didn't, I

[01:02:37] Todd Vaziri: You're very welcome. This has been a blast.

[01:02:40] Rob Bredow: yes. It's been so much fun. We had a, we've literally had a Google doc that we've been collaborating on for 10 years of things we would do in a podcast. And, uh, just about a year and a half ago we got started with this. So, that is a wrap on season one. Thank you for listening to The Lighter Darker Podcast and follow @ILMVFX on social media for exciting updates on what is coming next. And until then, may your Pixels be both Lighter and Darker.