Kate Walshe makes monsters for a living.
She works at Millennium Effects in Aylesbury, near London, creating prosthetics and visual effects for television and film. The studio has produced all the monsters featured in Doctor Who since its 2005 reboot. Reporter Liam Geraghty spoke with her on The Business.
Kate told Liam that the stage was set for her interest in monsters and things that go bump in the night from an early age.
"My brothers were quite a lot older than me and would watch horror movies. They’d watch Alien and Nightmare on Elm Street, and we had this weird sort of '70s setup in the house where there were no real doors on the ground floor…I could see into the sitting room, and I would just sit and watch the horror movies my brothers were watching. So, I was always sort of vaguely interested in horror from too young an age."
Kate studied film in DIT, and worked as an editor before moving to the UK for a more specialised course. As Liam put it, this world of special effects, prosthetics and animatronic monsters is a far cry from her childhood in Newbridge. She told him she feels lucky to be in the position she’s in.
"When I was growing up, the idea of this as a job was a very, very slim reality. I assumed everything happened in Hollywood."
Listen back to the full conversation with Kate Walshe on The Business here.
