"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"
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A little jab hides inside the technical talk: Dykstra is drawing a line between people who learned images as physics and people who learned them as interfaces. When he says "old-school optics environment", he is claiming not just experience but a way of seeing shaped by constraints: lenses, film planes, measured light, the stubborn reality that you cannot keyframe your way out of bad geometry. Depth of field and camera movement are doing double duty here. They are craft terms, yes, but also shorthand for a mindset where visual decisions are grounded in cause and effect rather than menu options.
The repeated "box" is the tell. It is both literal (a computer, a digital workstation) and rhetorical: a box as in a closed system, a training pipeline that produces fluency in tools without necessarily producing intuition about the underlying image-making grammar. The subtext isn't anti-digital so much as anti-amnesia. He's suggesting that when you start inside software, you can mistake the program's defaults for the medium's laws, and your shots will feel weightless because you haven't internalized how cameras actually misbehave in the real world.
Context matters: Dykstra is a VFX pioneer from a generation that built cinematic illusion with practical optics before the computer became the camera. His intent reads like a defense of hybrid authority: if you understand the analog roots, you can make digital images that carry the friction, imperfection, and physical credibility audiences still read as "real."
The repeated "box" is the tell. It is both literal (a computer, a digital workstation) and rhetorical: a box as in a closed system, a training pipeline that produces fluency in tools without necessarily producing intuition about the underlying image-making grammar. The subtext isn't anti-digital so much as anti-amnesia. He's suggesting that when you start inside software, you can mistake the program's defaults for the medium's laws, and your shots will feel weightless because you haven't internalized how cameras actually misbehave in the real world.
Context matters: Dykstra is a VFX pioneer from a generation that built cinematic illusion with practical optics before the computer became the camera. His intent reads like a defense of hybrid authority: if you understand the analog roots, you can make digital images that carry the friction, imperfection, and physical credibility audiences still read as "real."
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