George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.

Because I come from that old-school optics environment, I know stuff about depth of field and camera movement and things that are not necessarily a part of the curriculum for people who started on a box and have never done anything that wasn't on a box.

Digital imaging has untied our hands with regards to technical limitations. We no longer have to be arbiters of technology; we get to participate in the interpretation of technology into creative content.

You had to make a camera look like it's traveling at 300 mph, but you couldn't make it actually travel at 300 mph so you had to slow everything down and build devices to do that. So you were constantly engineering.

I was involved in the color correction and the digital color correction. In an odd way, you end up making a film many times-the DVD, the archival record of a high-definition master, and so on.

I think that era of mechanically figuring out of how to bring a particular evocative image to the screen was a really important part of my education.

I like engineering, but I love the creative input.