More About Our Visual Effects for "Skeleton Crew"

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In March 2025, Jenny Ely and I interviewed John Knoll, the visual effects supervisor of "Star Wars: Skeleton Crew for Lighter Darker: The ILM Podcast. Listen to the show here — we also have extensive show notes and photos for that episode at the same link.  Lighter Darker: The ILM Podcast, episode 14 

In the episode, John refers to a shot that he's really proud of in our segment "One Final, One CBB" from "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest", and a shot from the original "Pirates of the Caribbean" that he wished he could have approached differently for his CBB, so I've put those two shots on YouTube so you can see them with your eyeballs instead of imagining it with your ears and brain:

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We talked about several shots that I personally composited on the show, so here are a few of those.

First, the big neighborhood reveal shot:

And a quick breakdown of some of the elements that it took to assemble the shot:

We talked about my "E.T." homage shot, which was this one of Neel and Wim walking back home. I also wrote a little bit about this shot in the blog post, "Skeleton Crew", Neel and Misinformation.

Finally, we discussed one of my KB visor shots:

John talks extensively about his motion control unit he developed to film the miniature spaceship in "Skeleton Crew", and we added a lot of photos to the show notes. But you know what's better than photographs? An entire video, hosted by Adam Savage! It's really good!

watch "How ILM Films Star Wars Motion Control Spaceships!" on YouTube