EW: How do you think the challenges facing visual effects supervisors have changed over the course of your career?

In the early days, because there was no way to create images from “whole cloth,” you had to figure out how to move a camera to capture images — either via miniature or a bigger scale than real. You were essentially an engineer who brought mechanics to bear on the problems that the filmmaker had. You didn't spend much time thinking about the impact of the image that you were creating — it was just whether or not you could create that image. So it was more about process and less about content.

I got out of film visual effects for a long while and directed commercials because I could do things in the video medium on multiple channel compositors. The whole idea for me was the electronic manipulation of images without any generation loss. I didn't come back into film until I could get an image into the computer, do something to it and then put it back out and make it indistinguishable from film. Then I knew I no longer had to invent a new camera system for every movie!

Now it's become much more about content; about the composition of the image rather than whether or not we can get a camera to go fast enough and stop quick enough, or whether we can repeat 753 moves with exact precision. This is a huge change.

We get to apply all the electronic technology from the video environment, with regard to the technical issues of matting, of decreasing or increasing image size or the addition of grain, softness and sharpness, color correction — all of that stuff became available to us in the movie industry. It really changed the role of the visual effects supervisor from being an engineer to being more of a designer. It's been a watershed time for visual effects. We can be more creative than ever before.

Ellen Wolff is a Southern California-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as Daily Variety, Millimeter, Animation Magazine, Video Systems and the Website CreativePlanet.com. Her areas of special interest are computer animation and digital visual effects.