John Knoll holds the position of Chief Creative Officer and Senior Visual Effects Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic. He was promoted to this role on May 23, 2013, after previously being the company's visual effects supervisor. His career at ILM began in 1986.
Knoll is a recipient of an Academy Award, with a total of five nominations recognizing his contributions to visual effects. Beyond his extensive work on the visual effects for the prequels, Knoll personally created the opening crawls for all three films using his own computer.
He had brief appearances in the films, portraying Rya Kirsch in Episode I and also Tannon Praji along with the Coruscant firefighter pilot in Episode III.
His initial published work, Creating the Worlds of Star Wars: 365 Days, became available on October 1, 2005.
He also collaborated with George Lucas on the 1988 movie Willow, where he worked as ILM's animation camera operator.
In 2016, Knoll revealed that the movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is rooted in an unproduced script he had written for the Star Wars live-action TV show. He is also a member of the Intellectual Property Development Group. Knoll contributed to the creation of The Mandalorian, designing a motion control rig utilized for filming scenes of the Razor Crest.
Apart from his involvement in film, he is also a co-creator of the digital image-processing software Adobe Photoshop.
- John Knoll on Lucasfilm.com (backup link)
- John Knoll on Industrial Light & Magic's official website (backup link)
- John Knoll on Wikipedia
- John Knoll on Memory Alpha
- John Knoll at the Internet Movie Database