Tristan McCallum’s favourite movie as a kid was Alien.
“It was the first movie that had a big impact on me,” he tells David Farrier. “I got to sit up with Dad and watch it when I was about eight. That was life-changing. It was like, ‘Wow, I want to make stuff like that’.”
Fast forward to adulthood and Tristan McCallum was standing next to Alien star Sigourney Weaver on the set of Avatar.
“I was like, ‘I can’t believe this is happening!’ I gave her her mask at the start of the day. You are as close to the storytelling at some times as the camera and the director. You are just one step out of frame.”
Tristan, 34, has had many job titles, from prop-maker to mechanist to the very epic “swordsmith”. In short, he’s responsible for making actors look cool. Whether he’s helping create Matt Damon’s mechanical exoskeleton in the sci-fi blockbuster Elysium or the giant swords in The Hobbit – Tristan is there to make sure film and television stars have the tools they need to kick ass.
But after years of working at Weta Workshop as a technician, he realised he needed more.
“The moment I realised I wanted to be an engineer was when I was working on a project in China. I was there with a very talented mechanical engineer who was basically MacGyver.”
With MacGyver at the front of his mind, Tristan dived straight into a New Zealand Diploma in Engineering (Mechanical Engineering), realising it would push him onto even bigger and better things.
“I didn’t even know what engineering was! And I think if you ask a lot of people, ‘What does the word engineering mean?’, they can’t tell you. Well, it comes from the same root as ingenuity or ingenious.”
He pauses. “What engineering does is it qualifies you to understand things about the real world more completely than pretty much anybody else. That puts you in a really good position, no matter what you find yourself doing.”
His main fear going into the diploma was something that had haunted him back at school: maths.
“I didn’t really take it past the age of 15. As soon as I could drop it, I did.”
But Tristan quickly found his studying groove.
“I loved it – it was very liberating. I’d been working for six years at that point and I hadn’t really had a chance to relax and be on my own time. I was on my own terms when I started studying and I loved that.”
Along the way, he found out maths wasn’t such a horror-show after all.
“It turns out I was really good at it! It was just hard work at school … and I was quite lazy. That’s the honest truth. The thing about maths is that you just have to work at it. It doesn’t come naturally for anyone.
“It’s like doing weights or long-distance running – the more you do, the better you get at it.”
Tristan McCallum.
With the NZDE in hand, Tristan’s career went from strength to strength. Despite being terrified of maths at school, his new skills went straight to use, whether it was using calculus to figure out how much film gear could be loaded onto a plane in Kazakhstan, or simply finding a better way to make a sword.
“I did a lot of work on the hero swords that were used in The Hobbit, and some of the dwarf weapons. They just got so much screen time! And with all of the posters, you had the sword right in front of the actor’s face,” Tristan laughs. “When you see that, and it’s 220 feet tall on a billboard down the end of Cuba Street, it’s just like, ‘Wow’.”
For Tristan, working with Sir Peter Jackson was simply another childhood fantasy fulfilled.
“When I was about nine, I played my grandma Bad Taste. I said, ‘This guy is going to be really famous one day.’ And she said, ‘No, I don’t see that happening!’ And then a couple of years later, there was a newspaper article about how he’d picked up the contract for King Kong and my grandma wrote me a letter saying, ‘Oh, this is that man that made that horrible movie you played to me!’”
After working on everything from King Kong to Superman Returns, Tristan made a bold move – leaving his home at Weta Workshop.
He and his fiancée Mary Pike moved to Ireland to set up their own studio, The Workhouse. Jobs have been non-stop, from blockbuster films to huge new TV shows.
“I am just off the back of a couple of jobs with Netflix – Marco Polo season 2. We were in locations all around Eastern Europe!”
Reflecting on his career to date, Tristan says studying was one of the best decisions he ever made. And he can’t stop, currently completing his Honours in Mechanical Engineering.
“The Diploma in Mechanical Engineering I did in New Zealand is so well thought of over here that students can go straight into an Honours degree.”
And while business at his own studio is booming, he’s already looking to the future. Recently, those exoskeletons he worked on during Elysium have been playing on his mind.
“It’s funny you mentioned Elysium because next week, I am going to a surgery where they are actually implanting a device to straighten up a scoliosis.”
It’s a case of the skills he learnt working on a sci-fi film being used in an entirely different field – medicine.
“A lot of the design engineering stuff that I have learnt is really applicable across the board. You are making a product, the product has a purpose, and what engineering does is help you identify the purpose really specifically and then figure out how to make it do that right.
That philosophy applies if you’re designing a vehicle or if you’re designing a spinal implant for someone.”
For Tristan, the importance of engineering is all-encompassing. In his mind, not only do engineers make the world, they could be responsible for saving it.
“The next 20 to 30 years are going to be pretty tough on the human race. And they need people who are basically prepared to commit themselves to some pretty big problems. At the end of the day, it’s engineers who are going to save the world.”
For more engineering stories, visit maketheworld.nz
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