“The computer has become overwhelming,” states John Dykstra (Star Wars) who was lauded this year with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Visual Effects Society. “It’s a double-edged sword. The really good aspect of it is you can build an image a pixel at a time and include enough accuracy in the construction to make it indistinguishable from the real one. The negative part of that is you also have to be selective about what you create. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean that you should. The idea that everything is done on one tool to a certain extent has also taken some of the fun out of it.” Dykstra received a Scientific and Engineering Award at the 1978 Academy Awards along with Al Miller and Jerry Jeffress for inventing the first digital motion-control camera system called Dykstraflex. “The idea that the technology necessary to achieve the shot had to be figured out before you could design the shot made them responsible for each other.”
“Models are terrific and the thing that kept them alive was the artistry of the people who made them along with the production designer,” remarks John Dykstra. “The whole business of the camera being kinetically moved is not something that particularly works well for miniature photography. It’s hard to get because you’re either shooting high speed to scale of the model or you’re shooting at an extremely slow speed. In both cases putting in the anomalies that are part of the film vocabulary in terms of a handheld camera or Steadicam is hard to do with miniatures. It’s much easier to do with the computer. At this point it seems to be a bigger part of the vocabulary than it used to be; that works against models.” Dykstra notes, “When they did use miniatures a lot more time went into thinking about how the shot was integrated into the movie and as a result they are more harmonious with the rest of the film. A feel like that a lot of the work that is done in the computer where they’re emulating miniatures is tossed off in a much more casual fashion. It’s much easier to do and as a result in and on itself is not as well-thought-out.”
To learn more from John Dykstra make sure to read Gojira Reborn: The Making of Godzilla.
Originally published July 19, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
