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Our Graduate is one of Hollywood's Secret Talents
Paddy Eason- the Man Behind the Scenes

Paddy Eason has created and supervised visual effects on a list of films longer than the average dissertation, with everything from Mission Impossible to Muppet's Treasure Island.

He's shaken hands with Brad Pitt, been trod on by Kate Winslet and digitally removed Julia Roberts' underwear in Notting Hill. He's also helped create the famous Guinness-'Surfer' advert and has put pixels to plastercine in most of the Wallace and Gromit films. He may be unknown to you and I, but Paddy is famous in his field and has even been nominated for three BAFTA awards.

Paddy took up the MA in Computer Visualisation and Animation in its first year of running at Bournemouth in 1989, following a degree in fine art at Sheffield Hallam University.

Despite choosing such a technical course, Paddy says he was never really interested in computers. During his teenage years he went to Christ's Hospital boarding school, otherwise know as 'Rock School', where the uniform hasn't changed since the school started in 1553, with many children still wearing the long, yellow socks originally designed to repel vermin.

He's shaken hands with Brad Pitt, been trod on by Kate Winslet and digitally removed Julia Roberts' underwear in Notting Hill.

"There was a little bunch of cliquey kids that were all into their ZX81's and their BBC Micros and stuff. I looked at that and thought it really wasn't my thing, and I had a funny feeling it was too late to get into. These kids had their own computers and their dads were teaching them how to programme them, and I thought, I've kind of missed the boat here."

But only five years later when finishing at Sheffield, Paddy realised that it's never too late. He stumbled across the course at Bournemouth by chance, and though the course was demanding, like most students, he also found time to enjoy the finer things in life.

"The course was new so there wasn't really any set way of doing things. What I remember is people got pretty nocturnal. We would work through the night and then spend the day on the beach. It was good."

Paddy's course fees were paid by the Computer Film Company, who he lent his expertise to for a number of years after graduation, helping to send heads rolling in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow and remove Tom Cruise's face in Mission Impossible Two.

"It was the perfect time to get into it because it was quite a small industry. Nowadays every company has piles of CV's. I was probably just lucky with the timing."

I do think to do a course is great because of the interaction with other people, and also some industry people who you might gain access to, who you otherwise wouldn't

But despite the competition in the industry today, partly due to the fact that much of the software can be mastered in the safe confinement of a dingy teenager's bedroom, Paddy still thinks a course is worthwhile.

"There's room for both, but I do think to do a course is great because of the interaction with other people, and also some industry people who you might gain access to, who you otherwise wouldn't." Despite his huge success, Paddy says he has never been ambitious and is quite happy to see something he's worked on for six months flash past on the big screen in the blink of an eye.

" I always try and bear in mind how many people there will be watching it. If you're a musician and you do one song in front of 50,000 people then you'd make sure it's perfect. This is what you've got to think of when you're sat in a dark room tweaking individual frames. If people want to get into this industry they need to be ludicrously patient and literally be able to spend a month looking at five seconds of footage."

It's hard to imagine that anyone, whose job is so much behind-the-scenes in nature, could possibly get much bigger, but Paddy has now gone freelance and hopes to have more creative control over the visual effects in even bigger movies.

Wherever he gets to in his ever-growing record of achievement, Paddy says that Bournemouth "was the beginning of the whole thing."

" I'd like to work on not only a good film but also something that everybody has seen. One that your mum's seen. Not just a secret hit. It would be nice to work on one that is genuinely massive".

Not satisfied with his latest project, the Oscar nominated Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which has been massively enjoyed not only by mums, but grannies, toddlers and everyone in between, Paddy perhaps is more ambitious than he lets on. But wherever he gets to in his ever-growing record of achievement, Paddy says that Bournemouth "was the beginning of the whole thing."

"Bournemouth people are peppered all over the place. People will definitely look at a Bournemouth CV because they know so many good people have come out of it. Certainly in the UK Bournemouth is the number one place. It's got a very good reputation."

Story by Crystal Wilde
BA (Hons) Multi-Media Journalism - 2nd Year Student

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