With the advent of digital imaging I made the transition from trying to figure out how to do things to creating objects, characters and the whole cloth. It kind of freed up the analytical part of my brain and I had the opportunity to use more of the creative side of my brain for how things interact with light and integrate into stories.

Once the image was in the digital environment, one of the problems was, we had no means to reproduce the color spectrum, grey scale, and contrast that film produces, without converting the digital file to film, evaluating it, then going back and changing the digital image.

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.

Boy, am I glad there wasn't a fourth episode of Lord of the Rings.

If you can imagine it, we can make it.

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.

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.