The Hollywood machine has a way of grinding to a halt that feels more like a scene from a disaster flick than actual reality. Usually, the town is a cacophony of ego and exhaust, but right now, it is eerily quiet. The movie industry is currently sitting in a state of suspended animation, paralyzed by a global pandemic that no one in the boardroom saw coming.
Richard J. Cook is one of the guys who usually keeps that machine humming. He is a visual effects veteran and producer whose fingerprints are all over the blockbusters that defined the ‘90s and the streaming hits of today. He just wrapped the first season of *Locke & Key* for Netflix and is currently pushing his latest indie venture, *Gold Dust*. But for now, the man who helped blow up the White House in *Independence Day* is stuck at home like the rest of us.
We caught up with Cook to talk about the industry’s current paralysis, the evolution of digital trickery and why humans are obsessed with watching the world burn on screen while it is actually happening outside their windows.
**How are you making out during the COVID-19 pandemic?**
Cook is currently navigating the same limbo as the rest of the guild. The momentum of a hit show usually leads straight into the next big thing, but the pandemic has rewritten the rules of the gig economy.
"Well, I am actually currently in between gigs because when we wrapped our last show, which was Jan. 31, I was put in a holding pattern for season two of this show as well as some other Netflix shows I was lined up for," Cook says. "So now because of the pandemic, everything’s on hold and I’m basically living off of savings and seeing what the market does, what the industry’s going to do here as things pan out, and then jump back in when the timing’s right. So basically in a holding pattern."
**It sounds like a lot of us. So what’s the actual vibe in Hollywood like right now?**
The atmosphere in Los Angeles is thick with a specific kind of anxiety. It is the sound of thousands of freelancers checking their bank balances simultaneously. In a town built on "who you know," the inability to be in a room with anyone is a death knell for deals.
"Oh, it’s very tense," Cook admits. "Most people are scrambling to figure out how to do work from home jobs if they’re not already taken care of through some sort of bridge, whether that be employment that continues to pay them for consulting, or if it’s some type of long term contract arrangement where they get paid regardless of the productions that are going on. But outside of that, people are scrambling to figure out how to set up home offices, work remotely, and it’s a scary time."
**Do you do a lot of work from home or do you have to go on set and travel?**
Visual effects is often perceived as a dark-room-and-monitor job, but the reality for a producer is much more nomadic. You have to be where the cameras are to ensure the digital assets eventually match the physical reality.
"Travel. I’m on set a lot," he explains. "I’m on my last show for Netflix, *Locke and Key* season one. I was in the post-production office, so I had to report to an office for that specific show. But in the past I’ve traveled for, whether it be a TV or film project, that one in particular, the one I just wrapped, did not. I think I traveled twice once to Vancouver, once to Montreal just visiting visual effects houses. So that was not a job that required a lot of travel for me, which is good. I like to stay in my home base of Los Angeles."
**Interestingly, you worked on the film Virus. Tell me about that film.**
There is a grim irony in Cook’s filmography. In 1999, he worked on *Virus*, a Jamie Lee Curtis vehicle that blended sci-fi horror with a global threat. Back then, it was just another day at the office. Today, it feels like a documentary.
"Many, many years ago," Cook says. "It’s coming back full circle and was a little bit more sci-fi. At the time, those types of films were something that were far off from our reality and we really weren’t all that concerned about something like that actually happening. So it felt very much in the fantasy world at the time. But circling back, I’ve noticed that *Outbreak* is a very popular film on Netflix right now, which is funny that people would be interested in watching doom and gloom while we’re experiencing a bit of that. But I guess that’s just human nature."
**Hollywood has been foretelling stories for a long time.**
There is a psychological quirk to how we consume media during a crisis. We gravitate toward the very thing that scares us. It is a form of controlled exposure, I suppose.
"It’s interesting because we as a human race, like to see pandemics, we like to see things played out on screen," Cook observes. "We don’t like to experience them, but we like to watch them happen for some reason. The end of the world, we’ve got a lot of those movies, right? But when things manifest into reality, it gets a little scary."
**Was there a movie or a TV show that you’ve worked on that felt very real?**
Most of Cook’s career has been spent in the fantastic—aliens, spaceships and magic keys. But every so often, a project comes along that is grounded in the dirt and blood of history.
"Well, I mean most of the projects I’ve worked on have been heavily sci-fi films," he says. "There was a film I worked on, it was based on the book of Esther, the Old Testament book where Esther is a young orphan Jewish girl who saves her people from annihilation. That one felt real, I think more than any of the others because it was an actual historical piece. So it was a biblical, epic historical time period. That was a true story that we brought to life, so that felt real because of that. When you’re in visual effects, especially during the ‘90s most movies, or TV shows, or scifi, or end of the world, or something fantastical where images were not commonplace, you’d see things that were far removed from reality. *Independence Day*, aliens invading earth, so we did a lot of space shifts, and explosions, and war scenes with an alien race."
**Is stuff like that easier than reality?**
The irony of VFX is that blowing up a planet is often easier than making a digital human look like they are breathing. We know what a human looks like. We don’t actually know what a dying star looks like, so we give the artists a pass on the latter.
"Well sometimes, I mean it depends on the type of effect it is," Cook notes. "If you’re doing some type of a creature effect, it’s always going to be harder than if you’re doing just a hard, shiny spaceship or something that’s a little bit easier to marry into the plate. Because the realism is harder on an anatomical level where you’re dealing with a body and structure in terms of you have skin and bone, and dealing with eyes and various things like that, it is always going to be a lot harder than doing something that is inanimate."
**Like many in Hollywood, you’re multifaceted. Tell me some of the things that you do.**
Cook isn't just a guy who pushes pixels. He is a producer who understands the alchemy of making a film from a blank page to a premiere. He started at Vision Art in Santa Monica, a legendary shop that served as a finishing school for the digital revolution.
"I actually started in visual effects back in the early ‘90s out of a vendor called Vision Art that was based in Santa Monica and that’s where I cut my piece," Cook says. "I got into the industry, really learned how it worked from a post-production standpoint, because we had to deal with film editors, and getting the picture locked, sound lock, picture lock, all that stuff was important for a visual effects house to get right. So I learned a lot, worked on a lot of big pictures, $100 million features. So I got to see the large scale production. And then in 2000 I went to work for a small independent feature film company called Generation Entertainment, and actually moved into more of the creative where I could produce, be a named producer on the project and have a lot more say in what was going on, where we were shooting, who we would hire, stuff like that."
That transition from technician to producer is where Cook found his stride. He realized that the technology is only as good as the story it is serving.
"So that’s where I learned movie making from the ground up," he explains. "Learned a little bit of that in college, but that really pales in comparison to experience. So when you go through scripting a project all the way to final finishing and then delivering it to a theatre, I saw the entire process and it was fascinating and I really enjoyed it. So I was able to be a producer on many independent features from 2000 up until even just a couple of years ago when we finished our small indie project called *Gold Dust*, which is actually releasing in a couple of weeks on digital. So still very much in that world. But last year dove back into visual effects when I had an opportunity to work for Netflix on a show called *Locke and Key*. I went back into the visual effects world briefly last year, it was multi fold. I wanted to sharpen my skills in the visual effects industry as well as it was a really nice, well paying gig for a year. So, hard to turn those types of things down."
**The visual effects world must be changing all the time. I mean, technology changes, right?**
In the early days, VFX was about models and matte paintings. Now, it is about data. The move from film to digital changed the workflow, but the move from keyframes to motion capture changed the very nature of performance.
It’s one of those industries where the change from when I got into it to now is so vastly different. Filmmaking as a whole isn’t that much different... Whereas visual effects has changed so dramatically technologically that it does change the art of it... That is a vastly different piece of the visual effects world that never existed before.
"Yeah, absolutely," Cook says. "So, it’s one of those industries where the change from when I got into it to now is so vastly different. Filmmaking as a whole isn’t that much different, but the technology’s a little different where, for instance, you’re shooting on digital cameras instead of film, but that doesn’t change the art of it. Whereas visual effects has changed so dramatically technologically that it does change the art of it. It changes whether we’re doing key frame animation, or motion capture, or ultimately, now we’re looking at literally capturing the movement of an actor and changing their face to be somebody else, creating digital characters. That is a vastly different piece of the visual effects world that never existed before."
**Visual effects can be very different film to film. Is there something you’d have to do to prepare for each film that’s different?**
Preparation is everything. If you don't plan for the effect on set, you spend ten times the money fixing it in the bay. On a show like *Locke & Key*, that meant knowing exactly where the physical house ended and the digital one began.
"It depends on the type of film it is," Cook says. "A lot of times if we’re doing a sci-fi, you’re going to use a lot more of the compositing tricks, set extensions, things like that where you read about *Star Wars* for instance, their original feature films were shot basically all on camera and then visual effects were applied later and minimally at that, it was a lot of different compositing of models and scale explosions. Whereas nowadays when we prepare for something, we really start more with what the effect is, what we’re trying to achieve, how to shoot it for that effect. And a lot of times we will change the sets based on what the cost is. For instance, on *Locke and Key*, this show that just came out on Netflix, there’s a mansion called Key House, and instead of building the entire exterior of the building, they built only the first two floors and the rest was a green screen or a blue screen."
It is a shell game. You build what you can touch and you fake the rest. But the faking has to be seamless, or the audience checks out.
"It was actually green and they would paint just the top of it, so that we had some clean edges to drop our CG top of the house on it," Cook explains. "And it was deemed to be cheaper that way. So they didn’t have to build the whole thing. So we just did it in the computer and that changes dramatically the setup for all those shots, every time the camera catches a glimpse of that green at the top of the set, we know we got to make that a visual effect and drop the house on top of that. The planning is very important, and the cinematographer and the director have to coordinate which way the camera’s pointing and how high it’s tilted up and all of that matters. So if they catch a little bit of that green, we either have to push in or we have to make that a visual effects shot and the cost goes up. So that’s just an example of how the steps can change and how the prep changes based on what we deem we can do in the computer later on. And it works, it amortizes nicely over multiple seasons."
**Is there one defining effect that you would say is your ultimate effect that people would recognize in a film?**
If you want to talk about "Information Gain," look no further than *Independence Day*. People remember the big explosions, but the real technical breakthrough was how the dogfights were handled. It wasn't just animation; it was a simulation.
"Oh gosh. I often go back to *Independence Day* because that’s a show that won an Oscar for best visual effects," Cook recalls. "And one of the reasons is because the visual effects house we were particularly working with at the time, or I was working for, had a lot of brand new technology and one of which was what we now call a flocking software, where you have multiple characters doing something on screen, CG characters, in this case those characters were planes, F18s, or alien fighters, and they were dog fighting in the air. And for the longest time, Roland Emmerich was pushing for as many planes and just an epic battle in the sky as he could get, and a lot of these visual effects houses just couldn’t handle it. Because back then it was a lot of key frame animation. It just took too much and time is money in visual effects."
The solution was a piece of software called Sparky. It changed the way the industry thought about crowd scenes and aerial combat.
"We had a technology, it was actually called Sparky, and it was a particle generator, and some of the smart guys at our facility were able to figure out ways to make those planes and alien attackers basically take on the movement of those particles and then they wrote scripts and figured out how to have certain planes fire at others, and certain planes blow up, and others evade or dodge fire power," Cook says. "It ended up becoming such an amazing effect that I think that’s what tipped the film in the favor of winning that Academy Award. So I would say those dog fight scenes in *Independence Day* are probably the most memorable and something I’m really proud of. I was at the time working with that company as a digital coordinator, but working my way into the visual effects producing role on that film. So it was a really neat time to rise the ranks and be on a big picture like that, and get rewarded the way we did with that Academy Award."
**Funny enough, Independence Day and the Star Trek films are on my self-quarantine list to watch. So now I have something to look forward to when I watch Independence Day again. A lot of people would be jealous because you got to work on a Star Trek film.**
Working on *Star Trek* is a rite of passage for any VFX artist. It is a franchise built on the back of technical innovation, and *First Contact* remains the high-water mark for the *Next Generation* crew.
"Yeah. It was a neat experience," Cook says. "There’s a lot of Trekkies out there, trekkers, however you say it, that it was great to be able to interact with the crew, and we got to work with Jonathan Frakes who’s very popular on the *Generations Star Trek*, *Star Trek Generations* series back in the ‘80s, ‘90s, but he directed that film, actually. He’s one of the stars but did a fantastic job, really sweet guy to work with, and that was cool to be immersed in that show. We only did a few shots on the show, but we were very involved and it was a lot of fun because we get to interact with a lot of the crew and we were able to take a lot of their models and things back then they were still building models like physical miniatures that we would then extend into the CG world, whether that would be a set extension, or create a ship flying up into the sky, or whatever the effect was."
Cook also spent time in the trenches of *Deep Space Nine*, specifically working on the shapeshifting effects for Odo. This was the era where digital "goo" was the bleeding edge of the industry.
"So it was a fun experience and really enjoyed working on it. And I also worked on *Star Trek: Deep Space Nine* for a while," he adds. "And I personally was an animator on many episodes as a 2D animator taking the Odo character, who was a shape shifter, he would turn into this gold goo, and that gold goo would flow into a different shape, and then it would morph into some other creature, or a thing. We were able to take that, bring goo from our CG department and then morph it back into whether it was taking it from the actor to the goo or to the goo back to the actor. We got to do a lot of different cool effects. And that was back when that effect was a new thing. So that was fun to see and be a part of."
**Now let’s talk about your new film Gold Dust. Firstly, tell me about the movie.**
Moving from the gargantuan budgets of Netflix and Paramount to an independent project like *Gold Dust* requires a different kind of hustle. It is about maximizing every cent and relying on the talent of the director.
"It’s a fun film. It’s great for kids and adults," Cook says. "I think it’s got that dual demographic that adults can enjoy, but kids will just get a really good solid laugh out of, because it is silly, but at the same time it’s got a strong moral message. And I think it’s a solid film. David Wall did an amazing job directing, well he wrote it, he directed it, starred in it, and he produced with me. So it was a just an honor to work with him again. I had worked with him on a project a few years before that and I’m also working with him on developing some new screenplays as well. But it was an honor to work with him. He scoured the desert for two years before production to find locations. And when he did, they were just fantastic."
Wall’s dedication to the aesthetic of the film is what caught Cook’s eye. It is a desert-soaked narrative that pulls a rabbit out of the hat in its final moments.
"So we’ve got amazing locations. We got really good talent, young, fresh, new talent, some veterans, some brand new," Cook explains. "So it was a real interesting mix. But the way David leads a production and pulls out the best out of these actors is just amazing to watch. And then when you see it on the screen when it’s all done, it’s like, ‘Wow.’ Because that’s a real tough, you read the script and you laugh, but it’s, ‘Wow, this is crazy. Where’s the story going?’ And then he pulls it all together in the end, literally the last scene of the movie. And it’s just fun to just see all that craziness come and coalesce into a really solid moral message. It’s neat to see that. And so he’s very talented. I loved the film, I loved the script and that’s why I helped him make it, and really, really think he did a fantastic job with what he had to work with it. It’s a fairly low budget, but you wouldn’t know that necessarily watching the finished product. So very proud of that project."
**Well I hear there’s a guy that does visual effects that’s involved with the film, right?**
Even on an indie budget, Cook couldn't help but bring in some heavy hitters. But the nature of the work on *Gold Dust* was different—it was "invisible" VFX. It wasn't about aliens; it was about atmosphere.
"Well we got it. We actually had a few guys that I pulled from past projects and some that were new young guys that knocked out quite a few shots in just a very little time," Cook says. "I mean I was used to digital sky replacements taking weeks and these guys on their laptops will just take these shots and change them into, for day for night for instance, where we shot during the day, we darken it down and then we replace the sky to put stars in there. They would do these shots several times a day. They just kick them out and they look fantastic. The film has a real magical quality because of the way we shot it and the quality of the visual effects. It just really came together. The young talent out there today is amazing."
There is a generational shift happening in the industry. The tools that used to require a million-dollar server room now sit on a college kid's lap.
"They grab their laptops and do this stuff and it’s just second nature to them," Cook notes. "The older I get, the harder it is for me to navigate from one part of the screen to the other. And these guys are racing all over the place with their mouse and keyboards and it’s neat to see that. But yeah, we had a lot of great talent and the visual effects turned out fantastic. It’s what we would call invisible visual effects because there isn’t a whole lot of explosions, or there’s no sci-fi element to it. So you’re not really going to see any visual effects that you could point out. But the film overall has a lot of visual effects in it where we’re changing the skies out, or we’re painting something out, or creating just a certain mood based on how it looks as opposed to digitally inserting something. So it’s one of those films where you look at it and you’re like, ‘Yeah, it was pretty much shot all on camera,’ except for the exception of one shot at the very beginning where you see this old ship off in the desert. We didn’t have the budget to build a giant ship like that. So it’s a CG implementation on that one and it’s pretty obvious, but everything else looks like it’s just shot in camera."
**You talked a little bit about the humour in the movie. You could probably sit there and do science fiction all day without thinking about it. But humour, I bet it’s a little bit harder.**
Comedy is a precision instrument. If the timing is off by two frames, the joke dies. It is far more temperamental than an action sequence.
"Humour is difficult because it translates differently for the audience," Cook says. "For instance, American humour doesn’t always work overseas or vice versa. I think comedy is, in a lot of ways, more challenging than drama or other, obviously action flares and things like that where the acting is second place to the effects or the action. Whereas comedy, you got to get it right and it’s all about delivery, and you can write something down on a script and you can laugh, but you get that to the screen and sometimes it just doesn’t translate, doesn’t work for a number of factors. So you have to have someone who’s very strong in their convictions about the comedy that they see it through all the way and are able to maintain that integrity of the joke. It’s very difficult to do that. David does it brilliantly. I like the dry humour he has, so I get it, I watch it and I laughed my head off. Other people may not, but I do think that if you understand the movie going into it and the type of humour it is, you’re going to really enjoy it. And it’s something that I think David did a brilliant job executing."
**I saw on IMDb that it might’ve had a different name, but you stuck with it.**
The business of titles is often a legal minefield. *Gold Dust* almost had a name that would have invited a very expensive letter from a certain mouse-eared conglomerate.
"Well it was *Pixie Dust* at the very, very beginning," Cook admits. "And that was something that we thought we’d run into some trouble with Disney on. We changed it to *Gold Dust* and ultimately had no trouble there. But yeah, every now and then you run into issues like that where you may have the right to do it, it doesn’t mean you should. You never want to fool the audience into thinking that this is something that’s not. So, pixie’s just too associated with Disney. So we wanted to steer clear of that. But that was the original screen play naming."
**In your career, you’ve only been on camera in one production according to IMDb, Gone Are The Days. Do you like being on camera?**
Producers usually stay behind the monitor, but Cook took a brief detour into the frame for a Western. It wasn't exactly a Method acting transformation, but it was a fun day at the office.
"I enjoy it for the novelty," he says. "I am not an actor, wouldn’t want to be, but I enjoyed sitting on a horse in a Western just to do it because it was fun. It was a one day experience. My daughter owns horses so I was able to just practice on one of hers and then getting to set and jumping on a horse, I felt pretty comfortable. But yeah, it was a three seconds scene in the movie. Just because it was fun and the director’s like, ‘Yeah, you should get in there.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay.’ So it wasn’t any career change or move on my part, just having fun."
**I totally get that. I was an extra in 2012 in Vancouver when they were filming it and you know, just to be onscreen for a couple seconds was fun enough. Right?**
"Right, right," Cook agrees. "And well in a film like that, it’s fascinating to watch everybody work. And Roland Emmerich is a great director. I really enjoy working with him. And there’s just a lot of cool stuff you can experience as an extra on a big movie set."
**Of all the films you’ve worked on, is there one that you would have loved to have had that little three second piece in?**
There is one regret in Cook’s travel log. *One Night with the King* was a massive production in India, a visual feast that he had to manage from afar.
"Well, I probably would have been interested in being in *One Night with the King*, which was that biblical epic I was telling you about earlier, which was shot in Rajasthan India," Cook says. "There was 1,500 extras, there was animals, we had camels and elephants, and I mean it was just a fascinating, the costumes were amazing. The locations were phenomenal. I unfortunately was not able to be a part of that production. I was really a producer, producing from the US though at that time, managing the money in the budgets, and then post-production as we got the dailies back. But I was actually pretty ill at the time so I couldn’t travel. So I do regret not being able to be more involved in the production on that or even being an extra in it. Because I heard it was just a phenomenal experience for everybody involved. So that was probably one I was like, ‘Oh shucks, wish I could have been involved on that one a little bit more,’ but I was very involved overall on the entire project from budgeting all the way to final delivery and pretty proud of that one. It’s an epic movie so if you have time, check it out, it’s called *One Night with the King*."
**I wanted to talk about Locke and Key before I let you go. What do you think makes that show work so well? Because it became a Netflix hit right away.**
*Locke & Key* succeeded where other adaptations failed because it had a pedigree. Between Joe Hill’s source material and Carlton Cuse’s leadership, the show was built on a solid foundation.
"Oh well it was originally a Joe Hill graphic novel, and Joe Hill’s got quite a following," Cook says. "I mean *Locke and Key* is no unknown IT, people know about it. It’s got a lot of fan base built in. So we had that going into it. But I got to tell you when I first started and when I read the script, I thought it was phenomenal. So this was very well written. Carlton Cuse, the show runner, is incredible at pulling a team together to get the scripts to a place where they’re just, they hit all the right beats, they hit the right points, everything is understood clearly. The execution of the screenplay was phenomenal. The directing, the acting was really strong, and of course the cinematography, and I’m biased, but I think the visual effects are outstanding."
The production was a race against the clock. Cook was working on the show until the very last second, reading reviews while the final renders were still cooking.
"So it all came together," he adds. "We had a perfect team of people both on production and post production to really make that what it was, because it could have taken a sour turn and not been nearly as good if one of those links in that chain broke. And I felt like we really had a solid standard for all departments on that show. And it just came together beautifully. So, and we did extend our schedule so that we could allow the visual effects houses to really shine and finish the project. Ran into some trouble, some of the visual effects group really difficult to pull off. And we were able to solve that by extending a little bit. So I was actually going to originally wrap on the show in November and I went all the way to the end of January, literally seven days before its release I was working on it."
"It was fun to actually have the reviews come out because we had sent it to the press already," Cook continues. "So we were reading reviews while we were still working on it, which is a unique experience. Usually you wrap a show and months later you hear how it does. I liked to hear positive reactions to it even before I was off it. The quality, I think ultimately is what’s going to cause that thing to just keep going and going. They’re already green lighting season two. Once everything calms down with what’s going on right now, they’re going to jump right in. I may or may not be a part of that, just depending on whether I’m on another project at time. But they actually need a visual effects producer. But a great show to work on with great people and really enjoyed working with Netflix."
**Netflix has really changed things a lot. Are you in the Netflix world? Is that a different entity from Hollywood altogether?**
Netflix isn't just a platform anymore; it is the new studio system. They are spending money at a rate that would make old-school moguls faint, but the goal is the same: content dominance.
"Well, it’s just like any other studio, as they get more and more into content creation, which they are heavily into, I mean, they’re running at a loss just to create content to compete with the other, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon, now Apple, lot of these mega companies are pouring billions into content each year," Cook says. "So Netflix has to keep up with that. The landscape’s changed, but the business hasn’t, it’s really just the same. It’s just different players. So before you’d have Fox, and Paramount, and Universal, and Sony, and all these major studios, which still exist and they’re still there, but now we’ve got new players like Netflix and Amazon. What would be considered streaming platforms are now actual studios in and of themselves. They hire studio executives, they manage like studios."
The distribution model is where the real disruption lives. No more "opening weekend" jitters in the traditional sense.
"They allocate budgets, spend money on production, and then instead of dropping them in the theatre, they just put them on their website and rock and roll," Cook explains. "So from that perspective, the industry’s completely different because now they don’t have to spend millions on advertising theatrically, and creating the prints, and doing all that you had to do to get a movie into a theatre, which is very expensive. Now they just have put a banner ad on the top of their website, make it available for streaming, and rock and roll. So they really changed the industry from that perspective."
**I bet as an industry guy though, there’s nothing better than seeing your work on a big screen.**
There is a bittersweet element to the streaming era. Artists spend thousands of hours perfecting the colour and resolution of a shot, only for a teenager to watch it on a cracked iPhone screen while riding the bus.
"Actually, yes, it really does change it for us," Cook admits. "It’s sad to think, and we do this now even in this day and age where we’re delivering for two audiences. And when I worked on *Locke and Key*, some people have big home theatres or projectors, and so we want it to look amazing in 4K for them, so we’re doing it to that quality. But it’s disheartening in a way to know a majority of the viewers are going to watch this on a tiny little screen, whether it be their phone, or their laptop, or their iPad because they’re going to miss so much the detail that we painstakingly put into the project. But that’s just life."
"We do all this work to get colour just right," he says. "And then it compresses down when it streams and you lose all that and it’s like, ‘Ah, this was a beautiful shot on, in the colour bay when we were tweaking it for hours on end,’ and now they’re looking at it and it just looks like any other shot. They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s painful.’ But that’s the way of the world. That’s how consumers are consuming. We have to just be prepared for that and understand that. But we still do it to a very high standard 4K HDR that has all the resolution and colour space of any film going to a theatre."
**With that theatre in mind, my last question, what was your reaction the first time you saw your work on a screen?**
The first time you see your name in the credits is a drug that never quite wears off. For Cook, that moment happened in the early ‘90s, a time when the credits didn't require a ten-minute commitment to read.
"Yeah, it’s going to be in those early days," Cook remembers. "Back in the early ‘90s, there was a few films I remember specifically I worked on a film called *Cliffhanger*, didn’t do a whole lot for it, but it was just a Sylvester Stallone film. And I remember seeing that for the first time on the big screen and thinking, ‘Wow, I get to be a part of that.’ Or I was a part of that, and then saw my name in the credits and I think it was career altering for me since back then you didn’t have that many credits. Now you have *Star Wars* or *Marvel* movies and you’re sitting there for 10 minutes with 10 rows of names you have to squint to see. But back then, the names weren’t quite as many. So your name’s a little more real estate on the screen, but it was fun to see that one, it was one of the first ones I got to be a part of. So that was a neat experience.
