Behind the Scenes

Frank Nel­son talks to United States-based New Zeal­ander Nick Bogle, a movie stu­dio model maker turned fur­niture designer.

Though you may not be able to place Nick Bogle’s name or the face, the New Zealander’s career cred­its read like those of a Hol­ly­wood A-lister.

He’s worked on the Star Wars pre­quel tri­logy – The Phantom Men­ace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith – Men in Black, Pir­ates of the Carib­bean, War of the Worlds, Hulk, The Night­mare Before Christ­mas… and more. He has just fin­ished Mars Needs Moms, a kids sci­ence fic­tion film from Dis­ney due out early next year; now he’s work­ing on another Dis­ney film, Yel­low Sub­mar­ine, a 3-D remake of the 1968 anim­ated fea­ture woven around Beatles music.

White phos­phor­ous over Fal­luja, by Nick Bogle.

To be more spe­cific, Bogle is work­ing on the interior of a model sub­mar­ine for that movie, which explains everything. An indus­trial designer by train­ing, his expert­ise lies behind the scenes rather than up on the big screen.
Bogle, who was born in Howick and grew up in and around Auck­land, has par­layed a design dip­loma from Wel­ling­ton Poly­tech­nic into an inter­na­tional career as a model-maker. He star­ted in Lon­don, where he ran his own com­pany for a while, mak­ing mod­els for advert­ising agen­cies. Since mov­ing to Amer­ica almost 20 years ago he’s worked mostly in the film industry, cre­at­ing small-scale mod­els of people, places and other objects when it’s too expens­ive, dif­fi­cult or dan­ger­ous to use the real thing.

Nick Bogle with comet.

But show busi­ness can also be a fickle busi­ness. Though pro­jects may run from a few months to a year or longer, this is typ­ic­ally con­tract work with no guar­an­tees about tomor­row. “It’s unstable, inter­mit­tent, on/off,” Bogle says.

Adding to the uncer­tainty has been the emer­gence of computer-generated imagery (CGI), soft­ware graph­ics pro­grams, usu­ally in 3-D, enabling film-makers to cre­ate on-screen spe­cial effects that pre­vi­ously depended on film­ing mod­els. The reces­sion is also hurt­ing the industry. In mid-March Dis­ney, blam­ing “eco­nomic real­it­ies”, announced the clos­ure of Ima­ge­Movers Digital. The Cali­for­nia stu­dio, loc­ated just north of San Fran­cisco, will be wound down by next Janu­ary with the loss of 450 jobs.

This is the stu­dio behind Yel­low Sub­mar­ine and though efforts are being made to cobble together a deal that would safe­guard the movie’s devel­op­ment, Bogle has his doubts. “It doesn’t sound like we’ll fin­ish it,” he said. The bot­tom line for many people work­ing in the movie industry is that they need some­thing else to fall back on… in this case it’s Nick Bogle Designs, a com­pany pro­du­cing high-end fur­niture, light­ing fix­tures and fiber-optic art works.

Teak table, back right, by Nick Bogle.

Bogle, 57 this year, may well have inher­ited that multi-talented and resource­ful nature from his father who foun­ded the Uni­ver­sity of Auckland’s elec­trical engin­eer­ing depart­ment, ori­gin­ally based at Ardmore.

“Dad was very prac­tical,” recalls Bogle. “He did everything on our car. We never had a mech­anic. It was the same story for the lawn­mower and everything else. He even used to sew mum’s ball gowns.”

Apart from his own pen­chant for mak­ing things, Bogle had few career ideas when he left Auck­land Gram­mar School at 16. But after four or five years of try­ing vari­ous things, includ­ing a year of graphic design at Wel­ling­ton Poly­tech­nic, he homed in on indus­trial design. After gradu­at­ing, he headed to Eng­land where he sur­vived by clean­ing houses until land­ing a job with a design com­pany in the heart of Lon­don. He went in to show his port­fo­lio and ask about work, was hired on the spot and star­ted the same day.

About a year later he made a career-changing move, join­ing Metro Mod­els as a model maker for some of the city’s major advert­ising agen­cies. He was trained in the use of dif­fer­ent mater­i­als and tech­niques, developed new skills, such as spray paint­ing, and enjoyed sev­eral years of model mak­ing in the “hey­day before com­puter graph­ics”. By then Bogle had met his Amer­ican wife Gail, who was also work­ing in Lon­don, and once they bought a house he set up a home-based work­shop and launched his own busi­ness, Don’t Panic Models.

He chose the quirky name for good reason. “You’re work­ing in a panic industry,” he says. “Everything is always needed tomor­row. It’s high stress work.” Even on his latest pro­ject Bogle reports occa­sional 80-hour weeks and hav­ing to crash on mat­tresses at work.

The busi­ness thrived but when the UK eco­nomy tanked in the late ’80s, knock­ing down advert­ising agen­cies and photo stu­dios, Bogle and his wife decided to bail out. By then they also had daugh­ter Ava, born in 1986, who is now an act­ress and play­wright liv­ing near Los Angeles.

They arrived in the U. S. in 1991 and settled in Mill Val­ley, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Fran­cisco, an area that Bogle recalls “looked a lot like New Zea­l­and.” Impress­ive model-making cre­den­tials landed Bogle his first job in the movies work­ing on The Night­mare Before Christ­mas, a film made using stop-frame anim­a­tion, also called stop-motion.

In this painstak­ing pro­cess, mod­els are repeatedly moved infin­ites­imal amounts by hand and pho­to­graphed frame by frame in each new pos­i­tion. Run­ning all those frames in a con­tinu­ous sequence then cre­ates the illu­sion of the mod­els mov­ing on their own.

Bogle, who worked on Night­mare for about six months, was part of a team mak­ing more than 200 foam rub­ber and latex fig­ures, each about 30cm tall, rein­forced with wire and even ball-and-socket joints so they could be bet­ter manip­u­lated and hold a vari­ety of poses.

One of Bogle’s pro­jects was a snake, about a metre long, that had to slither out of Santa’s sack and around a Christ­mas tree. To help make the move­ment real­istic, Bogle fit­ted mag­nets inside the snake and had it “move” across a metal floor. Today it still clings ten­a­ciously to his fridge.

Next he joined Indus­trial Light & Magic, the award-winning spe­cial effects com­pany foun­ded by Star Wars cre­ator George Lucas, then loc­ated in San Rafael, only about 15 minutes from Bogle’s house.

In 14 years con­tract­ing with ILM, Bogle has cre­ated everything from the inside of an alien’s head, boats and land­scapes, to build­ings that were blown up and oth­ers that were flooded. Lorne Peterson worked with him for much of that time and was impressed by the New Zealander’s range of abil­it­ies and atten­tion to detail.

Peterson was among the first model makers at ILM, join­ing in 1975 to work on Star Wars. He recently retired after 33 years in the busi­ness, the high­light of which was a spe­cial effects Oscar for Indi­ana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He reck­ons Bogle pos­sesses a rare com­bin­a­tion of mech­an­ical, engin­eer­ing and aes­thetic skills. “Aes­thet­ic­ally he’s really strong,” says Peterson. “He’s def­in­itely the per­son to deliver that final kiss of quality.”

About 10 years ago Bogle and his wife, an author who also works as a grant writer for a children’s museum in San Fran­cisco, moved to the small, rather altern­at­ive, coastal com­munity of Boli­nas which has a his­tory of attract­ing cre­at­ive people. That’s where Bogle now designs and makes fur­niture, using clas­sic woods like wal­nut and cherry to cre­ate arm­oires, tables, desks, book­cases, bar stools and other custom-made pieces that fetch between US$5,000 and US$10,000 each.

He also cre­ates dif­fer­ent styles of light fix­tures and has begun exhib­it­ing and selling framed art­works that com­bine graph­ics and fibre-optics: he has been using an LED to light the fine fibre strands and is now exper­i­ment­ing with solar energy.

Moa room chan­deliers, by Nick Bogle.

Look­ing back over the years, Bogle has seen CGI gradu­ally sup­plant­ing model mak­ing. “Com­puters are tak­ing over a lot of the things we used to do. There’s def­in­itely less work around now,” he says. “In the past there may have been 50 people in a model shop. We’ll never see that again.”

Still he remains optim­istic and is buoyed by the suc­cess­ful Lord of the Rings movies in which Weta Digital used hybrid pro­duc­tion tech­niques, com­bin­ing com­puters and mod­els. “That’s had a huge impact on our world,” Bogle says.

– Frank Nel­son

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