2008-10-23
SCULPTOR | Jamie Beswarick Friday, July 28, 2006 - [小草]
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SCULPTOR | Jamie Beswarick
Friday, July 28, 2006
How did you become a sculptor? What were you doing
before Weta?
I probably started sculpting when I was ten. I grew up in
the South Island in Timaru. I started messing around at home - big influences
at that stage would have been Return of the Jedi (laughs) - just the creatures
and aliens. I did art right through high school, and then I went on to do
foundation and visual arts which was a one year polytechnic course. Then I went
on to do craft design, but unfortunately I became sick so I had to pull out. A
year later I did a study in visual communication and then found out about this
place, so I don’t actually have any qualifications (laughs). Basically I was
self trained from observation, figuring stuff out for myself – I mean there was
no-one to actually teach you sculpting anyway. I got into Weta, when I was in
tech’; I put together a sculpture piece that I did in a week, and I had photos
of other work that I’d done. I sent that up to Richard while they were working
on Hercules and Xena, they were also finishing up The Frighteners at that
stage. About two weeks later I heard from him and he flew me up and I started
work. I’ve had two months off since I started - I think I’m into my ninth year
here (unbelievable laughter).
What subject matter is most exciting for you to work
on?
Anything that is creature related really, because it’s sort of the biomechanics of everything. It’s quite fun to try and make something infeasible – feasible; to make it real. I’ve mainly worked on the creature stuff throughout Rings and for Kong. When we started Kong the first time around, eight or nine years ago now, I designed the raptor – the Venatosaurus. Basically this time round I specifically concentrated on Kong - getting his likeness in the face, with Miles Teves and Rob Baldwin figuring out the look, which took a bit of time. We got to spend a lot of time on Kong, because we had to make sure we really nailed him and got the face to the standard Peter (Jackson) wanted to see. Then it went into the digital realm and it’s been slightly tweaked even more. The main thing with Kong too was that the face was so much more complex, so much more detailed. There was a lot to mentally get around because the features, within reason, were humanoid but then you had to start understanding how things would move, like how the nose is going to move. Bill Hunt did a lot with me on the expression studies, contributing heavily to that. It seemed to be laborious; it just went on and on and on – which was good, but it was just amazing how much was involved with getting Kongs face, and that was before the digital stage.
Why work at Weta? What do you enjoy about working here…for nine years?
I’m not in a hurry to leave New Zealand if I can help it. It’s just a really good environment to work in. It’s pretty relaxed and co-operative. It can be stressful, but the other bonus is that a lot of the jobs we have worked on, you feel relatively assured that they’re going to be a good product at the end of it as oppose to being stuck putting your best work into something, only to have it become a ‘B’ grade legend that you kind of see in a garage sale. Wellington is a great place to live.
Is there anyone or anything that influences your work?
People like Alan Lee, definitely, he has always been a huge influence really. It was amazing to actually get to work with him – quite surreal. John Howe as well. There are several other miscellaneous sculptors right throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century who’ve done some pretty amazing work, who are sort of highly overlooked. I’ve always been inspired by them and I didn’t even necessarily know who they were for quite a while until I got older.
Your most important project or piece to date?
Probably Gollum, purely because of the impact of the finished product, it worked out quite well. Also working with Bay Raitt on the look of the face was quite interesting, just to see his point of view as well. It was very interactive; we went back and forth between the digital and the physical sculpt. So it was really nice to be able to see how that side of it was actually achieved. He did an incredible job in the end.
Tell me about your interest in Zoology.
Purely because of being a creature designer I suppose, and being interested in animals and animal anatomy and locomotion and so forth, I didn’t take biology very far though. I’m very interested in dinosaurs and early mammal stuff as well, from the point of view that they’re existing examples of animals that have lived and look quite diverse and different from what we have now. It’s quite an inspiration to see these creatures - I mean I’d love to just go and spend time sculpting a whole lot of paleontological extinct animals and so forth. Also my fascination of early man and evolution, it just follows right through with my own work; I’ll start evolving an idea and try to think of the actual rational evolution of a thing to make sense of it and try to figure out basic organ layouts and muscle.
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