Christian Hogue

Interview from 2011.

Who would you describe yourself as? Who? Or what?

Both, if that’s ok? Yea that’s fine, I have to think about that now. Well I’m basically a frustrated artist who has to make money in the real world, so. And not having studied art, or design, I did quite a technical background out at Massey, and I’ve always done a lot of photography, because that’s my true love, but I couldn’t see any way to make any money out of that back in the early eighties, which was when I graduated, that’s a while back. So basically went to the UK, on a grand tour, thinking I’d just top up the war chest before travelling on a bit, and then got sucked into, ah very early days of computer graphics, at a time when the industry there was rapidly changing. So basically have gone that way, with the digital ways through computer graphics, the really hardcore stuff, right up to much more easy to use stuff now so. Although I still don’t consider myself now as a designer, I do somewhat consider myself to be an art director in the sense that I’m cherry picking various talent, and working with them and putting them into client relationships I think might be appropriate for the client, and then offering technical support as well for the creatives. Because quite often they might be younger designers, I work with quite fresh talent. So at the moment I’m sort of kind of a sugar daddy meets frustrated artist. Kind of like a pimp, a digital pimp. Yea that sort of thing.

That’s amazing. Yea, I’m not really sure what I want to do; even now, you just keep doing the fun things and hope it’ll take you in the right direction. That’s my philosophy anyway.

"Keep doing the fun things and hope it’ll take you in the right direction."

It’s a good one. Yea. Avoid the business things. That’s really frustrating. I did that in the nineties, quite relatively successfully, those sorts of days when there weren’t so many people doing digital, and the equipment was expensive, and the expertise was quite hard to find. So, um, big money, special effects and animation. And I was actually invited to work on Terminator 2, after setting up a small shop in London, for a year. So I went down to San Fran to work on that, and came back with a lot more skills and ideas, and worked that though the nineties but basically got quite bored with special effects. Because its really a craft, rather than an art. Ah, but it’s great fun, seeing stuff up on the big screen, telling your mum you worked on this and that or the other thing. But at the end of the day, you’re really just pushing buttons for either the director, the visual effects supervisor, the art department, ultimately the people who are really designing the creatures. Even these days. I was quite lucky, there was only like thirteen people on staff when I joined so we’re all quite generalists still, although there was specialisation then. But now these companies, special effects companies, there are 600 people or more just for one film, some companies are 1500 staff and it’s all very high client. So you might just be a foot modeller, a digital foot modeller, you know, and that’s what you specialise in doing for the rest of your life. If you’re lucky enough to have a job for the rest of your life. Because a lot of my contemporaries from those days are now sort of like itinerary digital fruit pickers, they go from country to country, where ever the film tax rates are the best, or the Hollywood studios where they send the work is not necessarily Hollywood anymore, so they have to like up stakes and head over to London, or go to Australia, and move around chasing the big films. No job security, they’re all contract or freelance, so it’s quite scary out there. They’ve never been unionised; they’ve never been strong with that. So luckily I saw that and got out of that quite quickly. So we hired some young designers rather than visual effects people in the late nineties, um, one guy in particular, Alex Rudderford, who was at the Me company, we were doing a music video with them. I could see Alex had really good 3D skills, he was playing with very simple 3D, he hadn’t made it move yet, but design wise it was very interesting. So we hired him, and another guy who came out of The Attic, who were really big in those days, Leo Mark Antonio, his family, big old school advertising family, his dad did some very famous campaigns in the eighties and early nineties, and these young guys we basically stuck on our expensive computer 3D boxes, that were for special effects people and they stated to learn 3D and make it move and stuff. The first interesting thing they really did, well they did a couple of short films for the early onedotzero festivals, that kicked off in ’98, something like that, I think they’re about thirteen years old now so yea, and um, so we had a couple of the very first moving 3D, really the first motion graphics, the first motion graphics stuff basically, Alex and these guys were doing, with my company Lost In Space at the time. Funding it in our spare time and stuff. He moved on to um, he knew Chris Cunningham, so he did a little bit of stuff with Chris Cunningham and then next thing we knew we were doing a music video for Autechre, Gantz Graf. That was quite ground breaking in that it was a really big, full 3 and a half minute, a tracks worth of animating 3D in sync with the music, all quite abstract stuff. And again, it’s like visually ‘what the fuck’s this?’ A lot of people hadn’t seen that kind of a thing you know. They might have seen the Terminator Silver crew, the Terminator going, some teapots moving around that sort of thing, but the whole abstract, back to bare bones use of 3D for what it really is was a fairly new concept. So we were really quite lucky to be on that wave of change, and we slowly changed to be more of a creative company rather than a special effects service company, which is quite fun. But still, running a studio in London, with the overheads and stuff was a nightmare. At one point I though ‘fuck it’ I’m not really into shouting at my staff because of the stress of deadlines and stuff, it’s like turning me into a monster. I’d much rather just be doing cool stuff and not having to worry about that. So I wrapped up the full time studio, and basically invited everybody to stay on freelance, then took on some more people because we didn’t have to pay them, we could represent a wider range of talent. So we re-launched Lost In Space as more of digital studio really. One of the first virtual ones. We had quite a few American clients in the early days, they really liked what we were doing and strangely enough the Brits didn’t really get it, it was maybe a bit too avant garde for them, or maybe I just wasn’t spending enough time in the pub with them or something. It’s kind of a difficult market, the UK one. But the Brits were like, they’d see your stuff at a movie or a festival or in a magazine or something and call you up and say ‘oh we really love this, can you do this’ so we’d do that. Sometimes we’d never meet clients, some of them I’d work for three years before I actually going to New York and saying ‘Hi, this is what I look like’. So that’s quite cool. Then eventually realised I didn’t want to spend too many winters in the UK, it was getting really expensive and very beuocritised in the UK, a bit like here really, it’s a bit funny here as well. Anti-slapping and strange things like that happening, and people just getting uptight in general. So in Thailand, if you stay under the radar, it’s very liberal, their kind of society is not overly regulated. So being interested in Asia, it’s a great place to be based, half way between NZ and the UK, China happening. We’ve had some work out of Japan over the years so that’s quite cool. I like Japan a lot but the recession doesn’t make it easy to get work out of Japan. But we did do some stuff for the World Expo a few years back, with the young Chinese animation directress. That was quite fun, and a few other smaller things. That’s pretty much what, and who I am. Well I’m a kiwi, obviously. Just in case that got lost somewhere. 

That’s amazing. Answered the question hopefully?

That was very concise. I though I rambled a bit though.

Nah, not at all. I’ll make sure my phone is still recording. I’m so paranoid. Yea, because I can’t repeat that.