Handmade eyes
To play is to learn, so we play and experiment a lot.
Many years ago, I heard that a vast IT company asked their developers to spend 25% of their time on ”con amore projects” - whatever they liked. I am sure that this was not (only) to be nice to the employees. I am sure that someone with a powerful pocket calculator had made very accurate analyses of the cost-benefit of this before making this an official policy. Nice to know when Rasmus spent an extreme amount of time constructing perfect eyes for a sauropod model. These eyes would be situated 4,5 metres up in the air. Nobody could see what jewels these eyes were - and how costly they were. I remember Rasmus anxiously showed the customer the first cast of his experiments, promising to do better, as there was a small error in the iris of one of them. The guy was almost furious when he stated: ”It doesn’t matter! Nobody sees it. They are fine, fine!!!”
But this was fundamental research. The eyes were not the goal of this process for Rasmus. The goal was the process, the inventions, the experience, and the insight into materials and their chemical reactions. These techniques are now the foundation of the methods used when we make jellyfish, Cambrian creatures and even exotic plates for a restaurant (we´ll get back to these plates later).
The ultimate acknowledgement Rasmus got for his eye effort came from Kazu Hiro- the guy in Hollywood that is considered THE BEST when it comes to making eyes. Travelling to the States and visiting special-effect workshops, Rasmus brought samples of his creations, and among these, some eyes he made. When seeing these eyes, Kazu scrutinized them, turning them around and holding them up against the light. Finally, he said: ”hhhhmmmmmmm!!! Very good!!”
Rasmus’ pilgrimage also led him to Holywood special effect giants like Jordu Shell and Steve Wang - people that had meant a lot to us when we were young and hungry to learn, reading Cinefex like a bible (Cinefex was a bimonthly journal covering visual effects in films from 1980 - 2016). Now they were eager to hold his casts of long hairs and bristles, of spiders with microscopic hairs on the tips of their spinning warts - even a butterfly with ultra-thin wings and compound eyes hidden from the naked eye. The novice had become a master.
