The lead character in They Live has a special pair of sunglasses that enables him to see aliens. Resident columnist Mental Roy has a pair that enable him to see crazy people. But how do you tell them apart from everyone else in the 3D industry?
Anyone old enough not to have been able to avoid the 1980s may remember the John Carpenter horror flick They Live. In it, the hero finds a pair of sunglasses that enable him to see that the forces of law and order are not, in fact, composed of upstanding citizens of Los Angeles, but zombie-like aliens. This idea has always appealed to me, partly because it enables Roddy Piper to wear shades throughout the film – dispensing with the need for him to do anything needlessly tricky, like facial acting – but mainly because I’ve always wanted a pair myself. Not to see the zombies, though: I want sunglasses that let me see the crazies. Or rather, to tell the good crazies from the bad ones.
I think we can take it as read that anyone working in 3D must be wired up a little differently in the head. Unless, of course, an obsessive, all-consuming devotion to a job that demands long hours, pays peanuts, and which most people regard as little more than making kids’ cartoons counts as normal behaviour. But some people stray beyond the bounds of eccentricity into frothing-at-the-mouth mania.
Consider now the story of one of my friends. Having been a foot soldier in the CG trenches for more than a decade, he decided to relocate to the country. Arriving in a part of the UK that we shall call, to spare the blushes of anyone living there, the Arse End Of Nowhere, he was surprised to hear of a local start-up studio advertising for a new head of 3D.
The basic premise – to make straight-to-DVD movies – seemed reasonable, so he went to check out the company, which was located even further up oblivion’s back passage. On arriving, he discovered that the site wasn’t so much a facility as a farm, and that the 3D department wasn’t exactly a department, more a caravan. Weighing up the charms of a winter spent in someone else’s mobile home against forms of employment with less risk of pneumonia, he suggested that the studio boss simply outsource the work. The answer was a resounding ‘no’, because – mark this – he wanted a department on site ‘to impress clients’.
My friend surveyed the surrounding acres of windswept desolation, stuck at the wrong end of a five-hour train ride from the nearest commissioning editor, and interrupted only by the occasional sodden sheep. He looked at the caravan again. Then he decided that whatever Arse End Of Nowhere Productions ended up creating, it was less likely to be Aeon Flux than Police Academy 4: Citizens Aeon Patrol, and went straight back home.
The thing is, the studio may succeed. When Peter Jackson began shooting Bad Taste during weekends off the day job, few would have started saving to buy shares in Weta Digital. And when Robert Rodriguez raised $7,000 to fund El Mariachi by volunteering for medical research, the result was less likely to be a working relationship with Quentin Tarantino than anaphylactic shock.
But most madmen with a vision and the determination to succeed against overwhelming odds aren’t Jackson or Rodriguez: they’re simply mad. Mad in the sort of way that suggests that in order to fly, you don’t need wings or an internal combustion engine: you just step off a cliff and deny the laws of gravity. Normally, this doesn’t require anything more complex in response than a faint smile (and, possibly, a mop and bucket). But when their vision involves your own financial future, it all starts to get more complex.
And that’s why I’m sitting here, wearing sunglasses at work. My department head thinks that I’ve just had another night out on the liquid violence with the lads from roto. But you, I – and possibly Roddy Piper – know the real story.
(Originally published January 2008)
