John Dykstra

John Dykstra started his Oscar-winning career in the special effects industry helping out 2001 effect wizard Douglas Trumbull on the extensive optical and model-work on Silent Running (1972). In the mid-seventies Dykstra was chosen by George Lucas to head up Industrial Light And Magic, a new SFX facility that would provide the seemingly impossible optical work for Star Wars. The distinguished team Dykstra led went on to win Oscars not only for effects work on Star Wars but for the pioneering Dykstraflex motion-control process developed for the film.

Dykstra stayed in Los Angeles after Lucas moved ILM to San Francisco, working on effects for the original Battlestar Galactica, and contributing sequences to the first Star Trek movie.

Dykstra's move to digital output began with his contribution to the SFX of the original Batman cycle in the nineties, and he went on to further awards and plauidts for his work on Stuart Little, Spiderman 1 & 2 and earlier this year completed the effects work on Hancock...

Did you ever expect to get this famous as an SFX artist?
You don't think about it. When we did Star Wars, it was me and a bunch of my friends, all guys from the fringe of the motion picture business, Doug Trumbull, Bob Abel…we all got together and got this warehouse [Van Nuys, ILM V1.0] and it became like a super-garage. We were all people who were friends and did things together; we rode motorcycles and flew airplanes and surfed and skied. We all had talents because we had all come from film-based environments - Doug Trumbull's facility and Bob Abel's, and a variety of other places in Hollywood. When we came together and did that, we had a great time doing it. I can't think of a better avocation. So if [Star Wars] had been a total flop, it still would have been a raging success for us.

You won a separate Oscar for the development of the Dykstraflex and the electronic motion control system; was that a particular point of pride for you?
Actually it wasn't just me - Alvah J. Miller was on there, and Jerry Jeffress. It was for the facility [ILM] essentially, and that was me and my friends, all of those people. Don Trumbull, Doug Trumbull's father, worked on [the motion control system]; Bill Short; Dick Alexander; it goes on and on. And if you look at any of the written material on the original ILM, you'll see the names of those people over and over again. And it was because we didn't build a company - we built a solution to a problem. And it was a very complex one and they took some huge risks trusting us. We had seven or eight suppositions or hypotheses that had to prove right in order for all that stuff to work. And it was incredibly fortunate and an incredible reflection on the talent of the people and the perseverance of the filmmakers that we were as successful as we were. So yeah, it's great to have an Oscar to reflect it, but the Oscar belongs to all of those people.

Could I ask what software the Dykstraflex ran?
You could ask, but there wouldn't be an answer [laughs]. Oddly enough it was pretty much hard-wired. The whole thing was wire-wrapped. It was TTL logic and there was no CPU to speak of in it. Essentially it was numeric control with a front end on it, that was designed by Al Miller and Jerry Jeffress, and you had knobs and buttons and switches like…[laughs]. It didn't show up on a screen someplace. We didn't use computers for motion control until the first Apple personal computer came out. That was the first computer and that was two or three years, I think, after Star Wars.

Did you ever consider making the move to San Francisco with George Lucas after Star Wars?
No, actually I didn't. I like it here in Los Angeles. And truth be known, I don't think George wanted me up there. I think George wanted people who were more willing to develop a company, and I wasn't that much a company guy. I mean, like an administrator.

Is a project where you just don't know how you're going to resolve the challenges preferable to you as an artist?
The answer to the general question would be 'yes', but I think we all strive to look for ways to do new things. Empirically speaking we always look for new ways to create the image, to make improvements and subtleties, whether it's the reality of the image in terms of how it's lit, the reality in terms of how it moves or interacts with the rest of the scene. So yes, I prefer the idea of going into something with challenges.

Back in the days of Star Wars, we kind of walked into an empty warehouse and sat on the floor and went 'how are we going to do this?'. The producers, Gary Kurtz of Fox and George Lucas, took an incredible risk by listening to what myself and my collaborators had to say with regard to how to do this, because we were inventing this stuff from scratch. We have a basic toolkit now, in the form of a computer, and so much of it now is programming. You have to have people who are very talented and very capable to write softwares that will interface with existing systems and produce a final product in a reasonable period of time. Ideally we would just do everything with radiosity, but then you end up rendering frames that take forty hours a piece…although that's getting to be practical based on the number of CPUs you can put to work, and the bandwidth of the networks; but it starts to get a little silly. It gets to be top-heavy.



My parallel for that is from when we used to do optical printing: the definition of visual effects from my early days is two or more pieces of film shot at separate times, that are combined to produce an image that appears to have been shot in a single presentation, right? It was pretty cool when you were just putting two elements of film together; and then you put together three or four elements of film and it was still pretty interesting, but the process is complex, very much like the software process.

So you had to convert the original negative into elements; you had to create mattes and you had to create separations, and you had to put all of those elements mechanically into what essentially amounts to a projector over and over again to create the optical composite. Well, as you increase the number of elements, you get an exponential increase in the possibility for failure. So if we have three elements, it's not so bad, because you can load up a two-headed printer, run one head twice and get all of the pieces onto your subsequent piece of film. With sixty-four, or seventy-five or a hundred and twenty elements, they break down into their individual respective separations and mattes. The problem is that you physically run those things through the optical printer, so they get scratched. Well, when you set about making those elements, you had to 'wedge' them to determine what exposure you wanted to use, and that became the reference for the exposure you used when you made the composite.



Now, imagine one of the elements gets scratched. You have to remake all three of the separations and the mattes, because the registration has to be in the same head. So you have to remake all three of those, and if you're off on the sensiometric aspect of it, then you've got to go back and re-wedge the entire composite. After you get through maybe six or seven elements with their corresponding separations and mattes, one scratch in that many elements with multiple passes through the optical printer is likely to happen. So you get to the point where you get diminishing returns, where you simply can never complete the composite because you always scratch an element.

This must have been a significant aspect of costing and general budgeting…?
Oh, it was a huge problem. The guys who ran optical printers were truly magicians in their own right to be able to make that work out: figuring out the count-sheets, how to put those things together, what mattes had to fit where and when, and which head you could adjust at what point to keep everything in alignment and sync and have colour-matches on the step-wedges that they did for the output.

It's maddening, man [laughs]. I don't have a good parallel for it, but…you understand the concept, right? If you have five pieces that have to be right, you've got a five-to-one chance, thirty pieces it becomes thirty-to-one, and when you get to a hundred and thirty-five…you can imagine.

Richard Edlund frequently says that he doesn't miss the world of photo-chemical effects at all. Do you feel the same way?
Oh yeah, I don't miss it at all. In fact the reason I got out of motion-picture visual effects was because it became so difficult to do multiple-element composites in film and get a realistic-looking result. You always ended up with a compromise. I moved into electronic media and started directing and doing visual effects for commercials because I could get twelve tape machines, run them through a mixing board and do a twelve-element composite in one pass. I had much more flexibility, much more control, and if I got one that I liked, I got a keeper.

Did CGI creep up on you as an artist or were you part of that experimental period before Abyss, T2 and Jurassic Park?
That's really easy - CGI didn't creep up; CGI came with a bang! John Whitney and John Whitney Jr. did The Last Starfighter, and it became obvious that there was going to be a point…it wasn't a question of 'if', it was going to be 'when' we were going to be creating images in the computer, simply because of the flexibility of the tool. I went into doing commercials because I could work with electronic media in a reduced-resolution medium and a much smaller screen, and I could get away with a lot. So I could do lots and lots of crazy trick stuff, really great illusions, without the limitations of film. By limitations I mean that it wasn't presented on a sixty-foot screen with optical printers having to do the composites. What I kept watching for - and this is simple - the moment that you could take film into the digital environment, create a digital negative and output a print from that negative that was indistinguishable from the real negative…that's when it became viable. That happened quickly because of the speed at which computers and visual development in computers accelerated.

The cameras that we used on Star Wars and subsequent visual effects were built in the fifties, and the optical printers were just as old. The movements they used were even from the twenties! So this was an incredibly slow process of development because of the mechanical requirement. When we got into digital…there's Moore's law, where the bandwidth and computing capacity doubles every year. Apply that; if you figure that it doubles every year and you could do that with optical printers, you can imagine the growth in visual effects that could have occurred prior to the advent of the computer. But you couldn't. Computers got better incredibly fast. I remember the days when people would come in and say 'Look at this!' and you'd go 'Well, it's not very good', but they'd say 'Yeah, but we did it with a computer!' [laughs]. Well, it still wasn't very good. So we went from that stage to an image that was indistinguishable from real film in about five years.

Someone like Phil Tippett obviously had to reinvent himself totally after Jurassic Park, which he did very successfully…did you feel in the same position at the time?
Absolutely. When I saw the ability to put the film through a process without the generational loss as an incredible advantage. I could take original negative, I could put it in the electronic medium, manipulate it and bring it back out. That was the seminal step. Now I have the ability to improve my manipulation in the digital world. And it's lossless, because you're dealing with digital information, so you're not dealing with analogue where it can go a little bit too much this way, a little bit too much that way. You can be precise about how you handle your colours, contrasts, image size, image softness, fit…all of that.

I came back when I did my first Batman movie [Batman Forever], and I thought okay, we can use computers to do some of this stuff now. It was very limited in what the application was, and we still did a really huge amount of that stuff mechanically and with miniatures. But what it allowed us to do was design shots that were significantly more innovative; before, we were limited to how fast you could move the camera and how quickly you could stop it, and whether or not you could carry depth-of-field in order to make a miniature look full-scale - meaning whether or not you could get enough light. So we were working in this world where we were hamstrung by the vagaries of reality; in the digital world, you have no such problems.

You crossed over with total success to digital SFX - does an artist like yourself, with a background in photo-chemical effects, have anything unusual to bring to CGI work that computer-bred artists don't have?
I think that standing with one foot in both worlds is an incredible advantage. There are two reasons: one is that there's still stuff that is better done with miniatures and real photography than with a computer. People who've come up through the computer world, only using computers, don't have the experience with…I guess what it is is ingenuity. We had to be ingenious - we had to create illusions. We had to make something look like it did something rather than actually having it do something. In the computer you can make anything do anything. In those days you had to think of things in terms of the 'Occam's Razor' approach to making it happen. I think computer-effects tend to become very top-heavy, very complex…sometimes to the film-maker's disadvantage.

Were there new challenges on Hancock for you, or did you feel that it was all within your experience as soon as you read the script?
Well, it's always an effort to come up with a new look for a description that you've heard before. It used to be that the script invariably had a line someplace in it that was 'unlike you've ever seen before' [laughs]. That was a standard writer's euphemism for 'You've got to come up with something great for this!'.

It seems to me that the focus at this point has become interpretation of what's written on the page, as opposed to simply a mechanic of getting it done. It used to be that we had to figure out how to fit the camel through the eye of a needle. And now we can do that. So it comes down to whether or not fitting a camel through the eye of a needle is what best tells the story.

So in every script that you read, no matter how much material is in it, the challenge - at least, the personal challenge that I like to make - is to come up with something that's in the unique interpretation of that written word.

How does that manifest in a practical way in a film like Hancock?
It's an interpretation of the character. [Hancock] is an oddball character - that idea of a ner' do well superhero is kind of a strange combination of things, sort of an oxymoron. So the idea was to bring across, along with the personality of the character as played by Will Smith and directed by Peter Berg, to come up with some visuals that would interpret or evoke that same sense of an oxymoron.

I think that's true of the way he flew - his erratic flight patterns, his non-graceful positioning during flight and the whole kind of cadre of things that we had to come up with for him when he hit the ground. He made holes when he launched, he left debris behind…that kind of thing. It involved coming up with stuff that was fun and had a sense of humour to it.

Did it involve much collaboration with Will Smith, seeing as you're contributing to his performance and persona?
It's a collaboration in every way. The movie is Peter Berg's movie, it's his vision of what he wants to have happen there, and - as with all directors - he then collaborates with all of the people working on the film to come up with a way to express that visually. Understandably we used Will for as much of the material as we could, so that he was actually on screen interpreting the character. SO much of the material that you see is blue-screen of Will Smith doing his own interpretation of what Hancock would be like if he were flying or whatever. So he has that input to begin with. And that creates the paradigm for what we do for virtual versions of the same character, in terms of how he moves and positions himself…his head position, whether he looks or doesn't look.

If another effects company needs a virtual Will Smith in two years' time, is that a model that you're going to be selling on to them?
Never. Built-in obsolescence. When we set out to make a film, we have to use techniques that we're uncertain of, or we will have an obsolete film when we're finished. That's changing significantly with the advent of digital imaging, but the truth is that some of the things that occurred in the more physical world of optical printing are also true of digital imaging: you push to the limits each time to invent a new 'look', or a new technique to create a look. With computers, you write code. The code, just like the operating systems and the computers themselves, becomes obsolete at an incredible rate.

So the model that we created for Will Smith for this movie will probably not be applicable in two years...no, 'probably' is wrong: it will not be applicable in two years, because it will either be the wrong kind of geometry, or it will be what we call 'heavy' geometry - where you have to put in too many vertices to define a very detailed surface, and you create this geometry that's incredibly heavy. The parallel for that is that we used to make everything out of polygons, little geometric forms that were linked together. And then they came up with spline technology, NURBS, and that allowed us to make much more complex characters with smooth and detailed surface with much less computational resource.

And that's continuing to happen. This stuff keeps re-inventing itself, it keeps being put together in different ways - different rendering systems, different kinds of shaders, all that stuff, all those complex components. You've got to remember, you're creating this object from whole cloth. So it's going to change - it changes with every show that you do. And reverse-compatibility is not hot in this particular business. You can use old models, but you end having to limit what you can do with them, with the ability of the software that you're currently using, to interpret.

Could I ask what software was used, for instance, for Hancock? We're familiar with the likes of Maya and Lightwave, but I presume you use custom-made applications…?
Well, okay, you can ask, but I won't tell you [laughs]. No, Maya is the primary software that was used on Hancock. Renderman, I believe, is the rendering engine that was used, although we render different things using different engines depending on what the final look has to be on screen. There are very few facilities that do cutting-edge visual effects that don't write their own plug-ins, and one of the beauties of Maya and Wavefront, one of the advantages of their software is that the architecture's open so that you can create plug-ins to take what they have created as a foundation and develop your own architectural interpretation. Which means that you can do new ways of shading, new ways of animation and create your own GUI, so that you've got the elements and tools that you want your animators to work with. There are so many interfaces now, what with motion-capture and all the other elements that come into play, that you really have to be agile when it comes to software. Taking stuff off the shelf and having only things that will plug in, without interpretation, produces relatively obsolete material.

We've been talking a lot lately about how impossible camera moves can make good CGI look fake, and yet at the same time artists are putting back real-world limitations such as camera shake, to 'ground' the shot in available technology. You yourself invented a virtual 'spider-man camera-operator' for Spiderman's CGI, so do you think that kind of visual limitation is necessary?
We were trying to make cameras do impossible things before the advent of the computer. We managed to make a lot of that happen by varying film speed, using different photographic techniques, miniatures, maxitures, time-lapse photography, weird lenses...you name it. So we were cheating even then, there's no question about it. I think the concept of camera moves is an important one. I don't like to make camera moves that are impossible in and of themselves. I like the idea of doing something in a camera-move that's impossible, but I like the basis of the camera moves in general to be from reality. An advantage with me of coming from the photographic world is that I know what you can do with a camera.

So what I set about to do was not to design an impossible camera move. Spiderman's a good example: we're gonna create a cameraman for Spiderman, and the paradigm for this is when they used to do sky boarding, where a guy'd leap out of a plane with a snow-board attached to his feet, do a bunch of aerobatic manoeuvres and land, with a parachute. The competitors were always teams; there was always the guy who did the tricks, and the cameraman, because the judges obviously didn't jump out a plane with him and couldn't see that well from the ground.

So this cameraman went along, and his performance was also interpreted, because the judges viewed his film to see how well the performer did. So it became an art in itself to not only stay with the guy while he's doing all of these manoeuvres, but also select the best angle, keep the sun at the right position, make the thing look good.

So I used the sky-diving cameraman as my paradigm for the virtual camera-moves that we did. So I said 'Okay, Spiderman's got a buddy, and the buddy wears a camera, and he has to be able to do Spiderman-type moves while focusing the camera on Spiderman. So for most of the stuff, you can imagine the guy who's with the camera swinging along past Spiderman…we accelerate past him or we go below him or we go above him, but we don't jump there; we don't go there too quickly.

We do it as you would do it if the camera were actually attached to something physical. Now, add to that the part - which I like - which is the 'gee whiz' factor, where we go through the rails of a fire-escape, or we go through one window and come out another - things that you couldn't do if you were actually having a guy be a physical cameraman. But those are accessories and enhancements, rather than the basis for the conceit for how the camera moves. So you get the little 'gee whiz' stuff, but for the most part the idea is based on something that would be a 'real' thing.

Having said that, you've got to remember that movies are always cheats: when Spiderman swings through the city, if you were actually to figure out his physical speed, he's travelling two hundred and fifty miles an hour, which you don't do if you swing. If you swing, you hit fifty-five, sixty miles an hour under the arc. Maybe. But when you do that it makes for a very leisurely swing through the city [laughs], and it's kinda not as exciting as it should be.So we make Spiderman go a lot faster and, of course, we make the camera go a lot faster. But the camera and Spiderman and the movement through the city is limited to their own world - their enhanced world.

Another example: we did a lot of motion-capture to try and figure out if we could get real physical people to do some of the manoeuvres. Well, first of all, almost nobody is strong enough to do Spiderman-type manoeuvres; the whole idea of being able to pull yourself up to where your fist is below your ass and your legs are pointed straight out in front of you…a rope climber can do that occasionally, but the stress of trying to do that under a g-load is almost impossible. So we did, as a perfect example, motion-capture of a guy jumping off from the top of a platform and then landing on the ground, and the idea was to have the CGI Spiderman to use that motion-capture to show Spiderman leaping off the top of the building and then extend the part in the middle and then use the motion capture of the landing for the impact on the ground.

The problem is that the stunt-man's only capable of jumping his own height before he starts getting hurt, and the body-position and the deflection that he has when he hits the ground...the stunt-man would never tell you that he's human, but he is [laughs]. They just looked like they were at the limits of their strength landing at that slower speed, so when we sped the whole thing up, it looked improbable. It looked human. Spiderman is superhuman. So we had to create an animation that showed a different application of musculature, a different centre-of gravity, a different rate with which his body changed position when he impacted and the way he absorbed the impact.

In this case the reality, which is what the motion-capture gave us, gave itself away. It didn't look right. You'd look at it and go 'Oh, he just died!' [laughs]. That's what you have to constantly do - balance. Movies are storytelling, and when you're telling a story, you amplify some things and you leave some things out.

Is there a risk when you start out on a challenging project - such as creating the fur in Stuart Little - that getting one particular aspect right can end up dominating the project?
No, not really. If you don't have fur, you get a big 'fur team' [laughs], and they work on that uniquely. The fur team was over there working for a while, the animators were working on something else, and the clothing guys something else; the pipeline is parallel processing. Could that dominate the process? Yes. But it wouldn't be an intelligent way to do it. So fortunately for those folks at Sony, they had me working on it [laughs] and we worked together with the folks at SPI, who were terrific at handling exactly that kind of logistics and we were able to expand or contract our teams dependent upon the resources necessary to make the shot happen. In each of those cases we did a preliminary shot, which I think is really an important thing to do, where we picked out a representative piece of action from the movie and we completed it before we were even into principal photography. When I say that we 'completed' it, I mean that we ran something through what we considered to be our pipeline. Obviously not all the aspects of the pipeline were completed at the point at which we finished that first shot, and although I had to promise them that we could use the shot in the movie, I knew that the shot would never make it into the movie, because we had to make too many compromises.

What you find out is where the conflicts exist: how does the cloth interact with the fur? Where does the flesh of the body interpenetrate the cloth and cause problems? How does the musculature cause the mesh of the flesh to distort? What kind of elasticity do we have to use? When we did Doc Ock's visage for Spiderman 2, where we took Alfred Molina and photographed him in a variety of lighting environments and a variety of expressions and brought that all together to create a surrogate for his face…that was a huge effort. It took months for us to have that come together with the rest of the elements necessary for us to make the shot at the completion of the project.

Do you feel that the age of the special effects auteur has passed? You were always leading teams, but now the numbers seem to have increased enormously…
Film-making in and of itself is not a singular art; it always requires incredible collaboration, and the final product will reflect the quality of that collaboration, whether it's a happy or unhappy one. I think visual effects is the microcosm of the entire making of a film in that you have a huge number of artists with disparate talents that have to be brought together and have to communicate in an efficient way in order to make the whole greater than the sum of the pieces. I think that that is still the purview of the visual effects supervisor - I like to call myself a designer, but it's interchangeable - and our responsibility is to make sure that the talents of all the artists who are working on the creation of those images are well utilised, and that the images that they produce pay respect to what it is that the producer wants, and the needs of the telling of the story.

Do you feel a little cheated when your particular contribution to a movie like Batman And Robin gets lumped in with other criticism unrelated to your work on the film?
I think that if you're in this business that you kind of have to get over that. You don't do this work because you expect praise for everything you do. You do it because you enjoy the solving of the problems, the interaction with other creative people, and you enjoy the challenges. For whatever reason that your work is recognised or not recognised - and it goes both ways, by the way, as a lot of times work that is not as good as it could be is lifted by the tide of the picture itself...you just don't think about that. And it's kind of a waste of time to think about it afterwards.

So it's not totally essential that you believe in the entire film at the outset?
I have to believe in the entire film, but if the final product is flawed, then aggravating over it doesn't do you any good. You need to learn from your mistakes, but to go 'Oh, we got a bum rap on that…' because the picture didn't do well…it's like saying 'Well, here's an excuse for why I'm not going to try as hard on the next one', or whatever. Your work has to stand on its own merit. And there's the joy of doing it. It pays well when you get to work on the big movies, but the joy of doing it has to be in the doing of it. To do it just because you want a Paycheck doesn't work.

After the success of the Firefox game, I understand that you were involved in game development for a fair period of the eighties. Was this proof-of-concept work that you were involved with…?
Yes, we did some proof--of-concept for a variety of games, and the I'd be hard-pressed to give you the names of all of them. I actually developed a game for Coleco - this is really weird, talk about software and hardware overtaking the market, but Coleco at one point came up with a system that used videotape, and it used the four tracks on the videotape head to put images together and then it interlaced the images to create four possible tracks. I did a videogame for that system called Sewer Shark. You had to fly the Sewer Shark and shoot characters and bad guys and stuff [laughs]. We got the whole thing done, and then Coleco had also gotten into the computer market; they just decided they were going to make a PC, and they overstepped their bounds and basically went belly-up. So my big game, the game that I conceived and created ended up…I don't know, I think they sold it to Activision or somebody.

The great thing about Coleco's idea was video-resolution; of course at that time none of the video-games were video-resolution, so it was a realistic, high-quality image that you were playing the game in. When they took that continuous tone video image and tried to convert it into a six-colour, six values of grey image, it didn't work [laughs]. It didn't have enough detail or bit-depth, so the game turned out to be a waste of time. I haven't really been involved with videogames that much subsequent to that…

I was wondering if you took an interest in the future of videogaming….
I like playing 'em…? The thing about videogames for me is that it's not a field that I've spent a lot of time in, and -like so many other things - if you're not 'there', people don't come to you. You have to have a presence there, and my Sewer Shark game having failed [laughs] I went 'Okay, enough of this!'. So I got back into the movie stuff. And I really enjoy working on film. I enjoy working on commercials too. Commercials have gotten to be incredibly sophisticated and, as they were for the motion picture industry in the eighties, a lot of times you see images in commercials that start affecting things in motion pictures, so it's a cool kind of cauldron…

What about directing? The IMDB has you down as doing Tortoise And Hippo…?
Yes, I am. We're still working on that. The script is currently being written and we're waiting with great anticipation to see how this is going to exactly turn out.

Will it be a full CGI film?
Yes. Well, actually, that's not true - we'll probably shoot live-action plates and put CGI characters in. And the CGI characters will be photo-real, so you'll believe that a tortoise can talk.

What other projects would you like to get off the ground?
Oh boy…I've got a whole cadre of stuff that I'd really like to do. The trick is that it's very difficult to get a film off the ground. You have to have bankable actors and even bankable actors are becoming questionable in this day and era. The thing that I want to do more than anything is to work on visuals, and so anything I do is going to be something that uses that as my value-added to bring me the director's slot, if you know what I mean. They're not hiring me to be a director because of my incredible dramatic skills [laughs].

A project that I love that I don't know if it will ever be made is called The Star's My Destination. I'd love to see that made into a movie. I think that's a great story. So it's that kind of stuff that I'm interested in, and I'm talking to people but, you know, you have to have conversations going with lots and lots of people in this business, because so many of the opportunities fail.

What's the special effects film of this year, or recent years, that's really impressed you - apart from your own, of course..?
I have to pick a film? There's been so much good stuff out there…you know what I really liked from recent years? Pan's Labyrinth. I thought that was really great - incredibly evocative. And it's a lot of mechanical stuff, you know? If you can do it live, or if you can do it with make-up, then by all means. It's more instinctive. You're on the set, interacting with stuff, and that's what I thought was really interesting about that film, and I think Guillermo Del Toro's work always has that kind of quality to it.

I also thought Transformers was really good, I really enjoyed the action in it. Golden Compass was great and it was recognised for the work that went into it. It's really tough, because there are movies - and there are several of them - which are seamless, where the effects don't show, and they always get the short end of the stick, because when you get asked that question your mind immediately goes to the big blockbuster films.

What are the two or three shots you've done in your own career that really knocked your socks off, where you didn’t anticipate how well they'd turn out…?
The opening shot in Star Wars. That was one of the first things we did, and it was proof of the system, so if anything ever really gave me a great jolt of pride and relief at the same time, it was seeing that three-foot long Stardestroyer. We'd convinced them that we were going to build these little models and use tilting lens-boards and ultra-slow cameras and motion control to make these tiny little ships look big, and when we saw the dailies on that shot, I thought 'It's going to work!'. That was really cool. That was a great shot, and I remember that experience to this day.

I like a lot of the stuff in Stuart Little. I'm trying to think of a specific shot. Stuart Little, albeit not a blockbuster…the integration of that character into the movie, I think the team at Imageworks just did an exquisite job of seating that character into that world. I was really proud of that work as regards integration, lighting and all of that.

For Spiderman, I think probably the closing shot from the first film is one of my favourites.

John Dykstra, thank you very much!