JL: It's interesting because a lot of it almost comes down to style these days because the work is uniformly pretty good. Everyone has a lot of stuff figured out and it's hard to fault the work that people are doing. It comes down to style, integration, how it works with the film. It's harder and harder to look at these things just on their technical merit because everyone is doing such a good job. The ideas and techniques are more well-known and people have a good understanding of what they need to do and the work just looks good across the board.

BD: What did you think about Star Trek?

JL: Excellent, especially from the design point of view in the way they created some of the look of the space effects: the nebula and things felt more volumetric and had more of a presence.

BD: And a movie closer to home, District 9?

JL: Yeah, District 9 was like the realism of it -- like a documentary feel: just seeing the big ship hanging out at Johannesburg, the helicopter flying back and forth to it. You felt that was something you would see on a news show if that were to happen. And the way they did the aliens.

BD: You weren't sure they were CG.

JL: That's right: they had a very good performance to them, being really furtive and angry -- they really got into characters.

BD: What are you doing next?

JL: I'm jumping right into Tintin.

BD: Great: I'm looking forward to discussing that.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.