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Special Effects
Oscar winning visual effects guru, John Cox is holding a two day workshop on the Gold Coast
A quiet, unassuming Gold Coast commercial park may be the last place you'd expect to find an Academy Award, but there it is. Glinting in a glass cabinet, Oscar stares across the boardroom of John Cox's workshop behind Surfers Paradise. The golden statue (a legacy of Babe) keeps good company: assorted props from Nim's Island and Peter Pan, an alligator that tried to kill Rhada Mitchell in Rogue, Rhada Mitchell herself (in two sizes) plus a zebra from Racing Stripes. It's only a smattering of creatures that have been developed under his watch for TV, film, theme parks, galleries and advertisers alike.
Cox discovered his passion as a young teenager watching King Kong (1933) when "a light went off". Soon after, somewhere between the 10th and 14th time he lined up to watch Star Wars at Hoyts on George Street in Sydney, he had found his calling. "I had a hole inside of me. What they were doing, I wanted to do. But there was no pathway - it was an impenetrable jungle," he says of a pre-internet, pre-video age when computers were things that took people to the moon. A decade of experimentation with library books, Super 8 film and assorted modelling techniques led, perhaps not improbably, to a career in stop-motion animation that would eventually attract the attention of Hollywood.
Cox's big break was working with Phil Noyce on the set of Dead Calm. "It was exciting working with Sam Neill and Billy Zane who everyone knew. Nicole Kidman who no one knew," he adds with a poker face. Before you can say "Did you know there's a five metre alien in your office with four arms and rugby thighs" (which there was), Cox had worked with industry heavyweights that notably included George Miller. "I was developing some animatronic kangaroos for a film that never got made," says Cox. "Then Kennedy-Miller called, they were working with some pigs at the time, and said ‘we want you here'. That's how that came about." Which then, of course, led to the Oscar sitting in his cabinet.
It was the dawn of the digital age that freed Cox from the dreary mechanics of stop motion - making a camera do what you wanted it to do - to concentrate on sculpting; the creation of a creature. Ironically, the acceleration of digital techniques has all but put an end to the modelling that Cox so loves. The age of animatronics, creature craft and stop-motion has been swallowed alive by cheap digital rendering, usually outsourced for a tenth of the price with programmes any graphic artist could own at home. "Chinese universities are producing some 10,000 artists a year," he says as we speculate on the neutralising effect of market forces. "Now, most of the work we do is digitally erased," he says. "We still create costumes and models to enable them to ‘act' and set scenes - but it's all removed from the final cut."
Amid dire predictions for the future of his craft, Cox remains oddly upbeat. Perhaps the pressure is off, perhaps there's still a glimmer of hope for the determined artist. Because for every new digital benchmark set by an Avatar there's a Wallace and Grommit or Mary and Max for whom the age of creature modelling will never be over. It's these directors and producers who still look for guidance and inspiration from people like John Cox, as he once looked to Ray Harryhausen. It seems that no matter how grown up digital effects make us feel, we still like to see the occasional thumbprint in the final reel.
John Cox's Creature Workshop is holding a 2 day workshop on Monday, April 19 and Tuesday, April 20 from 9am to 4pm at JCCW, Molendinar on the Gold Coast. To book or for enquiries call 07 5564 9992. $550, including GST (cost includes materials). For more on John Cox check out his website.
