Make-Up, John Knoll & Evan Pontoriero

Welcome to a look Inside The Holocron. A collection of articles from the archives of *starwars.com that  are no longer directly available.

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Evan Pontoriero’s path into Star Wars began with childhood experiments in homemade laser blasts and early computer art, eventually evolving into a multidisciplinary foundation in fine art, commercial design and emerging digital tools. His fascination with sci‑fi visuals, early exposure to TRS‑80 computers, and inspiration from films like TRON shaped a creative trajectory that led him toward 3D composition, animation and computer graphics.

Additional thematic or archival notes
Pontoriero’s journey reflects the expanding digital frontier of the prequel era, where artists blended traditional artistic training with rapidly advancing software and hardware. His work on Episode I’s animatics team demonstrates how motion‑capture, 3D programs and flexible pre‑visualisation techniques empowered filmmakers to explore movement, atmosphere and storytelling long before final effects were produced. His experience also highlights the shift from solitary creative ambition to collaborative filmmaking, discovering fulfillment in contributing to a team shaping a new mode of digital production.

A Little Lighter on the Mascara

March 24, 1998

Episode I March pick-ups, Day 3.

“Makeup!” The familiar call goes out above the production crew of Episode I, and the appropriate expert is called in to fine-tune the appearance of a star. Kevin McCarthy appears, and goes to work on a famous face. He’s using a brush two inches wide, daubing it in a can of gray paint. A couple of quick strokes and the star is looking much better–nice gray splotches all over. The star is R2-D2. Kevin is doing droid makeup.

Kevin McCarthy is an on-set painter for Episode I, making plaster and concrete look like ancient stones and desert planet stucco and adobe. He and the other painters have done such a realistic job on the expansive sets of Episode I that they look real even in person. Touching up a droid, even a famous one, is only a drop in the paint bucket for Kevin, but it’s an important job, especially during this week of pick-up shots.

R2 has to change his appearance this week, to match his appearance during different points in the film. At one point he looks nice and white and clean; later he looks scorched up like he’s gone through re-entry. And other times he’s merely got a comfortable haze of gray weathering. As we shoot individual pick-up shots of R2 looking around from a fighter’s droid socket, or waddling through a door, he’s got to blend in with the footage shot months ago. Kevin uses a set of reference photos and a sure hand to restore R2’s appearance to any previous phase. The weathering paint simply washes off between ‘looks.’

What does the droid himself think of all this dressing and re-dressing? Hard to say. His beeps and chirps don’t get dubbed in until later. “He’s very cooperative,” Kevin admits.

John Knoll, Visual Effects Supervisor

June 19, 1998

In order to bring George Lucas’ vision of Episode I to the screen, the visual effects teams at Industrial Light & Magic are pushing themselves like never before, exploring new territory in the effort to capture on film entire worlds that have never existed.

As ILM plunges into this project, John Knoll is one of three Visual Effects Supervisors for Episode I. Along with fellow supervisors Dennis Muren and Scott Squires, Knoll keeps in constant contact with George Lucas, Rick McCallum, and Doug Chiang. Knoll is facing a tremendous amount of work, but says that he is looking forward to the opportunity before him.

“We’ve captured the necessary plate shots, the filmed backgrounds,” Knoll says. “Now our job is to create the additional effects elements at ILM, and then assemble them to make it all look seamless. To tell you the truth, this is the fun part.”

Fun, for Knoll, involves tackling challenges for which the technology doesn’t even exist yet. “There’s a major scene towards the end of the film that is significantly more complex than anything that has been done before. To do it, we’ve had to write a whole new set of software. That took about a year.”

Director Lucas is focused on his creative vision, not on effects technology, which leaves Knoll gasping for breath at some of his orders. But that’s only making it more interesting, he says. “One of the big joys is that George thinks nothing of the complexity of the effects when he hands over direction to us. When we get the impossible ones, we just kind of gulp, and say, ‘Yikes…OK, well, we’ll figure it out.’ On most of our projects there is usually something new and different, some kind of stretch. We try to push the envelope a little on any good project. On this one it is that challenge times twenty. It is really exciting. A little scary at first, but now we’re in the stride of it, and it’s great. We’re working through all the problems.” Does Knoll have a closing comment about his Episode I experience so far? “Yeah,” he says. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

Evan Pontorioro, Animatics Artist

June 30, 1998

Evan Pontoriero started in visual effects work when he was very young. “That is,” he laughs, “I scratched laser blasts onto my friend’s Super-8 movies. I have always liked magic, special effects, and space films, and science fiction visual effects work combines all that.” Evan is presently hard at work on Star Wars: Episode I, pre-creating effects shots as part of the small animatics team led by David Dozoretz. Today Evan works with fantastic hardware and software, building shots that are sent to ILM as blueprints for the finished effects work. But years ago, he was exploring the world of computers for the first time on Radio Shack TRS-80’s. “It was with those TRS-80’s that I first realized the creative possibilities that computers held. I did simple ASCII art, that kind of thing. But it hooked me.”

Evan went to college for business, but decided that he was better suited for a career in fine art. He ended up taking degrees in both fine art and commercial design. It was while he was working on his degree that he first encountered the Macintosh computer. “The Mac immediately opened so many possibilities in art and graphic design,” Evan says. “I saw so many obvious advantages in using the Mac over older methods. But they didn’t like me using the computer in design school.” Evan pursued his interest in computers anyway, building expertise as a computer artist in spite of the resistance he found at the time. (No one is begrudging him use of the computer now.)

“Then the movie TRON blew my mind,” Evan recalls. “The world that created TRON seemed so far away, but that’s where I wanted to be. I had read Famous Monsters and other sci-fi magazines throughout my youth, but when I started reading magazines like Computer Graphics World and Cinefex I really got serious about my interest for the first time.”

Over time Evan found that he had a natural ability with three-dimensional composition. His training in sculpture had given him a good grasp of three-dimensionality, and this background found a new application as he worked with off-the-shelf 3D programs. He decided to take a plunge and moved to the San Francisco area to start looking for a job in the computer graphics field. A variety of projects including visualizations and animation for multimedia projects built his increasing familiarity with the needed software and kept him in touch with the user community. One job led to another, until Evan had worked with industry players such as famous sci-fi designer Ron Cobb and ILM Art Director Alex Laurent. With a partner Evan founded the successful computer game and 3D design company Meshworks, which he ran until Episode I caught his attention. Then Evan met ILM’s Alex Lindsay in a software users group meeting. Alex soon suggested that Evan submit a portfolio for the new Star Wars: Episode I project, and in May of 1997 Evan put together a sample of his best work, including a CG Cloud City shot that looked as if it could have been in The Empire Strikes Back. It was on the basis of this work that he was selected for the animatics team at Skywalker Ranch.

In the course of his work on Episode I, Evan revels in using the broad range of computer art skills he has developed along the way. “I love being able to do it all,” he says. “That’s why I work here. I’m not pigeonholed. I may not be the world’s best at any one thing, but this job puts many difficult responsibilities together and allows us to focus on composition and storytelling, not technical details. It lets us feel more like filmmakers. For animatics to work right, you can’t get bogged down in details like textures and final quality models. The details are important for the final shot to look real, but all that can come later. In animatics you’re working at a different level, to capture movement and feel and atmosphere.”

If he does have a specialty, it is in working motion-capture into his animations-a process which takes data from a live person’s movements and translates them to a CG character for added realism. “I’m kind of slow and meticulous about modeling, so the other guys tend to do more of that since they’re faster. I do more animation, in programs like Softimage.”

The whole purpose of the animatics team’s work is to better realize George Lucas’ vision for Episode I, but this affords the animatics artists great freedom. “Animatics are a good tool for George because he likes to be shown material to react to.” This allows the animatics artists the flexibility to explore, since their initial directives are so open-ended. “Sometimes it’s like, ‘Let’s do a cool shot and see if George likes it.'”

As he sits at his workstation looking out over the Marin hills, Evan is more than pleased with how things have worked out. “Certainly this is a dream job,” he says. “This is my chance to do storytelling, to create shots for this story.” It is a unique position to be in. “Where else can you do this kind of work, without actually being the director?” At the same time he is still on the path that has brought him this far. “I have to be learning to enjoy my position, and there is plenty of learning going on since we are all experimenting with a new way of filmmaking. I’d like to do my own animated short film, eventually. But I still have a lot to learn here.”

Being part of the animatics group has had unexpected rewards as well. “Early on in my career, it was all about me. There was a great pressure to try to do things on my own,” he reflects. “Here I have realized that I could get fulfillment through being part of a creative team. I’ve realized that what I really wanted was to do this kind of work. Being on my own has turned out to be not as important as learning to be a great storyteller.”