Thomas Knoll

But his older brother, Thomas, saw an intellectual curiosity and determination that suggested a career.
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"The only place he could figure out to do this was on the top of our house," said Thomas Knoll."So, he climbed onto the top of our house, and he actually filmed it on our roof."

These days, the explosions Knoll orchestrates take infinitely more planning and time to execute.

Knoll worked directly with Lucas on the opening scene of "Revenge of the Sith" -- a battle that takes place in the sky above the city-world of Coruscant.
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"It's like right out of `Master and Commander,' where they're just firing canons right into each other, they're blowing the heck out of each other" said Knoll, who invested a year supervising the creation of the scene.

This Napoleonic War-inspired battle sequence couldn't be constructed the old-fashioned way, starting from models.The sheer number of vessels involved -- countless Jedi and Separatist ships fill the screen like so many stars in the night sky -- made that an impractical and costly option.So each ship, with its elaborate exposed machinery and otherworldly contours, was painstakingly created in the computer.

"It takes a long time," said Knoll, sitting in his office at ILM in San Rafael, where the two-year production timeline for "Episode III" is still written, in three colors, on a white board."With all these zillions of little pieces on them, somebody has to make each little nut and bolt on it, somebody has to paint it and decide how it's going to look in the shot."

But once created in the computer, the digital ships can be infinitely duplicated.

Knoll started dabbling in computer-aided effects as a film student at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema and Television in the early 1980s.

Knoll rigged his Apple II computer to a series of motors for precisely controlling a moving camera.His goal was to re-create an animation technique that produced the light corridor in the 1968 classic "2001: A Space Odyssey."He requested permission to use USC's animation stand, a movable, back-lit table with a camera that looms above it and moves along a giant, 12-foot crane.
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Each shot was so intricate and time-consuming that Knoll would take naps as his makeshift motion-control machine went through its computer-choreographed moves.
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Six months after graduating from USC in 1985, Knoll landed a job at ILM.A professor recommended him when the effects house contacted the film school in search of a motion-control camera assistant.Since joining ILM in 1986, Knoll has worked on 22 films.Three of his most recent films, "Star Wars" Episodes I & II and "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," garnered Academy Award nominations for visual effects.

In his spare time, Knoll embarked on a new hobby -- tinkering with software his brother Thomas wrote as part of his doctoral work on computer vision.
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Thomas Knoll remains an independent consultant.

As the work on the latest "Star Wars" movie got under way, Lucas pressed Knoll and the ILM team to create more of the film's otherworldly environments inside the computer, instead of in the model shop.
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It travels from the volcanic planet of Mustafar, where Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker wage a fierce light-saber battle across steams of molten lava, to the tropical Wookie home planet of Kashyyyk (`the third y is silent," Knoll quipped) to the sinkhole planet of Utapau.
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These days, Knoll is spending his spare time immersed in a space adventure grounded in reality.He has worked for five years on a digital re-creation of the Apollo 11 moon landing, authentically rendered with the aid of NASA transcripts of communications and telemetry readings.

It is the beginning of a documentary depicting the historic landing in a way viewers on Earth have never seen.In his office, Knoll, recently screened his film on his Mac.The full-color movie, with its cinematic camera angles capturing the Eagle's thrusters as the lunar lander descends to the moon's surface, is a dazzling departure from the grainy, black-and-white images originally broadcast on July 20, 1969.

"I started doing it for fun, but ultimately, I want to turn it into something that a lot of people get a chance to see," said Knoll.

The embryo of Photoshop began life on the Apple Macintosh Plus belonging to Thomas Knoll in 1987.Thomas and his brother John had been introduced to photography and image manipulation in their father, professor Glenn Knoll's, darkroom and on the Apple][ plus that he would bring home to work on his research projects.While Thomas' interest in photography and image manipulation was primarily focused in the darkroom, learning how to produce black & white and color prints and how to balance colors and contrast, his brother began to take an interest in the computer that his father was bringing home.

By 1987 Thomas had bought a computer of his own too, and had begun investigating the processing of digital images.But came across a problem inherent in the computers of that day.They were unable to display gray-scale levels in the images that he was working with, so he solved the problem by writing a subroutine to simulate that bray-scale effect.This, however was only the beginning of Thomas' work.He continued to write various subroutines and some image programming.

By this time John's work with computers and photography saw him working for the relatively young motion picture effects company "Industrial Light and Magic" [ILM] and during a visit to his brother's home he was impressed by what Thomas had managed to create.The two brothers set about putting all of the pieces of code together and created an application that they called "Display".Once created though the application was pushed further and further, with John, who was now using the application to convert images used in the creation of special effects for the movie "Star Wars", throwing more and more requirements into the mix, soon it was able to save images in various formats and included gamma correction capabilities. Within months the little app named "Display" had become much more than just a bunch of thrown together code and in 1987 was re-named "Image Pro".It was at this point that John and Thomas began discussing the possibility of turning the application into commercial product.
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"John needed software tools to convert images for special effects and Tom would write the program.Then John would say 'I wish I could paint on the image', so Tom provided painting tools."
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Thomas Knoll continues to be involved in the development of Photoshop.