The magic factory

You will have seen Bootleg's work. You probably didn't realise. We visit director Carl Moody to find out how they make the magic happen.

Words: Karl Puschmann

Photography: Blink Ltd

Carl Moody picks up a whale tooth that's sitting on the table, offers it to me and says, "Feel how heavy that is." The brownish-yellow tooth is roughly the size of two fists on top of each other and looks hollow. I take it and am immediately surprised at its heft.

Waiting for my reaction, he grins and says, "You can imagine how heavy that is in the jaw of the whale! It's insane, isn't it?" It is.

Or, rather it would be if we weren't sitting in a room that's filled with insane things. Stuff that boggles the mind is everywhere. In one corner there's a pile of life-sized marble hands holding life-sized marble swords. On one shelf there's a bunch of knocked-over cups spilling solid multi-coloured liquid into the air. Everywhere I look there seems to be variously-sized busts of a former international head of state.

And before I'd even gotten to this room I'd walked past pirate treasure chests, kiwis the size of school children and a scientifically accurate, lifesized replica of a patch of Mars' orange dirt. 

Among all this, I hadn't even noticed the whale tooth sitting on the table in front of me.

Carl is the director of Bootleg Design, a company that makes the impossible possible. For over 30 years, he and his business partner Gareth Pugh have turned other people's dreams into reality. 

"Most people come to us with an idea or concept," Carl says, "but with no way of producing it."

You will have seen Bootleg's work. But whether you noticed or not is a different story. Some of it is big and bold and bizarrely fantastical, like a suitcase that's big enough to walk inside or the Santa Claus statue caught in Marilyn Monroe's famous air-vent pose.

Other jobs are purposefully designed to escape attention, like the architectural recreations they manufacture for heritage buildings such as Auckland's landmark Civic Theatre or Town Hall.

Bootleg has become something of a one-stop shop for anyone who needs something made but has no idea where to begin or how to get it done.

"We've become quite diverse. We're not stuck in one particular area or element," Carl explains. "One minute we're making a giant Santa and the next minute it's a very small hand holding a pie for a TV ad." 

It wasn't always this way. While the business has always been in Uptown and Carl lives just around the corner from the studio, its 1989 beginnings were incredibly humble, beginning with making the in-window foam board displays for video shops and music retailers like Marbecks, Sounds and HMV.

That led to Bootleg being asked to create shop interior displays for fashion labels like Levi's and Bendon. "In the 90s, it was the fashion to create these smaller stores within stores," he recalls.

This work naturally flowed into creating exhibition stands and then attention-grabbing promotional items to draw people to the stands. Soon enough, Bootleg was being approached to manufacture props of all sizes and scales for TV shows, ads and exhibitions.

"We were doing a lot of moulding and sculptural work. We weren't stuck in one particular area or element," he says. "It's not like people can just go to a cabinet maker or an acrylic guy or a foam builder or something. What we've been doing in the past 36 years is bringing as many things together as possible to be able to produce something that may have steel, fibreglass, urethane foam, anything or everything in it, and be able to create the finished look."

Carl says the biggest hurdle to creating someone's dreams aren't the size or scope of a project. Rather, it's the classic pairing of time and money.

"I know it's a cliche to even say that," he shrugs, "but it comes down to that. So many times, whether it be the film industry or an advertising agency, the time's too tight to do the things that they want to do, or the budget's too small."

Then, with a glint in his eye, he grins and says, "The clever part is to make the time and the money work for the job. The problem-solving is fantastic." He picks up the whale tooth again and looks it over. "It's the little things, working all of them out and then doing it," he says, before putting it back down.

"I'm still enthused about the jobs that we do. The hard part is running a business as opposed to just having creative flair. It would be lovely if people turned up at the door with jobs and we didn't have to give a quote or give a time. If we could just produce this wonderful thing that everybody's happy with. That would be absolute perfection."

Bootleg 

Unit 1, 2 Haultain Street

Eden Terrace

Phone: 09 303 3005

Website: bootleg.co.nz