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.

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.

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.

If you understand how the real world feels and looks and sounds it is much easier to create a virtual version of the real world.

As with sound, images are subjective. You and I may not see the same color red as red, but we will probably agree that the image on the screen is a digital image or film image, based on contrast, bit depth, and refresh rate.

Human beings are really attuned to their senses. When you work in film, you are working with the visual and audio senses. An understanding of tactile and other components that go into the creation of those objects are important to making them look real on screen, like a plasma of energy.

I come from an era when we had to figure out how to bolt a camera to a motorcycle or an airplane or dig a hole and find a canyon deep enough to repel into it so that we can capture images that were real.