The Invisible Skyscrapers Podcast

Episode 13. Captain Magic aka Ross

• Ross Williams • Season 1 • Episode 13

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One of our new recruits this year, Ross is a horror fanatic who joins us on Episode 13. An Adelaide-based magician with the alter-ego of Captain Magic, Ross has studied film, dabbled in special FX makeup, and competes in Texas Hold'em tournaments. Needless to say, he has some tricks up his sleeve and brings some creativity to our team. This episode, he and Brad talk horror genres, trying different things and winding up in jobs you never thought you would, and what Ross has planned for his Halloween extravaganza this year.

Brad:

Hi, welcome to The Invisible skyscrapers Podcast with my very fine guest here, Ross, it is episode 13. Mhu wha ha ha ha. Ross is a bit of a horror fan, which we'll delve into shortly. We're just talking to the team from Adelaide at the moment to see more about them. So take it away, Erika.

Erika:

yes I guess Ross, do you want to share how you ended up in this chair you're sitting in right now?

Brad:

He walked from that office into here.

Ross:

Yeah. Someone bought me a plane ticket and here I am.

Erika:

Here you are.

Ross:

I've been programming since a very young age, eight years old. I started on the old Commodore 64 and just been doing bits and pieces since, and worked for a couple of different developers here and there and now I'm here.

Brad:

There you go. So eight years old was also when you became Captain Magic

Ross:

It was

Brad:

It was. Yeah. Yeah. From, yeah. So anyone listening to this Ross is into magic and poker and horror movies.

Ross:

Yeah. Magic, poker, horror movies and programming.

Brad:

Yeah, exactly and sometimes they can be horror movies too.

Ross:

Yeah. I got into magic because my grandfather did magic and my dad did a bit of magic and naturally I do magic. I guess it's a bit of a family thing and I've just,

Brad:

Wow.

Ross:

just run with it. I've run with it a lot further than my dad or my grandad ever did.

Brad:

Yep.

Erika:

Yeah and you're actually good like you

Ross:

I guess I'm okay. No, no David Copperfield,

Brad:

What's the biggest gig you've ever done?

Ross:

I mostly do, I don't really do stage shows, so I do what you call corporate magic or walk around magic. it's usually, a corporate function or a trade show sort of thing and you literally walk around the field just do bits and pieces of magic for people.

Brad:

It's a bit hard to fly with a tiger.

Ross:

Yeah.

Brad:

Yeah.

Ross:

Yeah, community events, I've done community events where there's been, 2000 people there. They're not all watching me at the same time. It's

Brad:

No. You're just walking one on

Ross:

on the crowd

Brad:

picking people's pockets. Yeah.

Ross:

Yeah. That's it.

Erika:

and the Texas hold'em did that start a bit later than magic?

Ross:

Yeah. I've I've been into playing poker probably for probably say. She's probably been 15 years now. She's been a lot longer than I thought. Yeah. So I lived in Queensland for a couple of years had the local pub or RSL, they call them up there. Started advertising. They were gonna be running poker games that's where I thought, oh, that sounds cool. Let's try it. And just, yeah. Loved it from there.

Brad:

Do you consider yourself a good player?

Ross:

I do.

Brad:

cool.

Ross:

Other people may not. I dunno.

Brad:

Yeah. So do you have mirror shades?

Ross:

No, no cheating. Definitely. No cheating involved.

Brad:

No. So you have a good poker face.

Ross:

Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to think I do.

Brad:

Yeah. So what is it about poker that you like?

Ross:

Oh, it's mostly, it's not really the game. It's more just the social interaction, I think. You know, and the, what they call table talk, talking with the players on the table.

Brad:

Do you do it like the James Bond thing? You play the man across from his hand or whatever he said in that movie, in Casino Royale

Ross:

I haven't actually seen that movie.

Brad:

you need to see it. There's a dude in his eye bleeds and there's all sorts of stuff, yeah. Yeah.

Ross:

But there's Def definitely a lot of what we call Hollywood involved in playing poker, you know, when you're trying to bluff your hand and get the other person to fold. When you want them to call cause you know you've got the winning hand. Yeah. It's definitely on the bucket list to go to Vegas. I've done, obviously I've done tournaments in Adelaide. I've done tournaments in Melbourne.

Brad:

Monte Carlo. I'd like to do that. Yeah, go to go one of those casinos in Monte Carlo. I think Australian casinos have too many poker machines in them

Ross:

Yes they do. My, my early background is filmmaking. so I come from doing sort of filmmaking and special effects makeup, and I was looking for a job and a friend got me, a friend of a friend, got me a job at University of South Australia in their audio visual department. and I was there for seven years and basically what we did there was we looked after all of the lecture theatres and shoot rooms. So projectors, TV screens, and the whole AV sort of system. And then from there, I just naturally migrated to one of our vendors and worked for them. Basically you're doing the same thing, but designing AV systems for a whole range of clients. Classrooms, schools, boardrooms for corporates, through to large stadium designs.

Brad:

I got into AV, I went into, there was a local electrical retailer here and I've still got the camera it's just up there. And I walked into, I was only new in a business. I walked into this retailer and walked up to this cabinet, went, that's not a normal handy cam. That's one of those new DV handy cams and I got very excited about it and one of the owners, there was a family that owned this business, got talking to him about it and saying how excited I was to see this particular camera. Anyway, about a month later, he rang me up and said, so are you gonna come and get your camera? And I said, what?, I can't afford that. It was like 10 grand. Like literally the business was only turning over probably 40 or 50 grand at that stage. He said, no, you can pay it off and that's how I got into AV. Anyway, bought this camera, didn't know what to do with it and then the same family rang me and said, oh, now that you've got that camera, do you make TV commercials? I never made a TV commercial so I said, yes, and that's how it started my interest, in that space.

Erika:

Do you wanna delve also into the horror component cause you also kind of like horror.

Brad:

Probably not to the same extent that Ross does. I certainly know the directors he talks about and stuff like that. My family teases me about Blade.. I love blade. I'm a bit of a blade fanatic. There's not much to the blade movies, but good old Wesley Snipes running around as a vampire with his leather gear on excites me in a good way. So what's your favorite genre? Are there genres in horror?

Ross:

Absolutely. And I love zombie films. I have zombies tattooed on my legs so I'm right into that and yeah, I don't know, just from a young age, I've always been fascinated from horror movies and from there I actually got into doing special effects makeup.

Brad:

Yep. So that's where Robert Rodriguez does his thing. Isn't Zombies.

Ross:

Yeah. He does that. And

Brad:

what's that really classic horror. Well it's not really a horror movie, is it Army of the Dead? What's that one where the dudes running around with the chainsaw attached to his arm?

Ross:

Oh, Evil dead?

Brad:

Dead.

Ross:

Yeah. Yeah. With Bruce Campbell.

Brad:

I actually do like that. It's funny movie

Ross:

love evil dead. It's a great film.

Brad:

So if you could work in that space, would you?

Ross:

A hundred percent. I actually went to university and started doing filmmaking. For whatever reasons I never ended up finishing it and, and yeah, I've just done sort of private work. And

Brad:

tell us about the names of your pets.

Ross:

My pets, well, all of my pets are named after horror characters. So I've got two dogs, Chucky and Annabelle. We've got two cats, they are named Georgie from IT, so the young child in IT and I have a mental blank as to my other cat's name.

Brad:

Riley

Ross:

What did I call my cat? I don't, I've got a complete mental blank as to my other

Brad:

my youngest son fred is terrified of the IT clown. Absolutely terrified. Just he.

Ross:

oh, Ripley. Sorry. Ripley from Aliens.

Brad:

Yeah. Actually I really like Alien too. Yeah. Classic movies. Yeah. So if you were to pick if you were to pick some sort of dream thing to do being involved as an extra or makeup artist or something like, would you do it?

Ross:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Brad:

Cool. It's a very, it's a very cool thing to be involved in

Ross:

I don't really get to do the horror side hobbies, there's not a lot of work in it and

Brad:

You have, since you've started here, some of the horror into

Ross:

I'm right into the tech and I always have been I think, the horror movie stuff has always been more of a hobby. So for Halloween, we go full out and we actually build walk through maze in the front yard and scare all the kids. It's great.

Brad:

As Erika would attest to living in Alice Springs, Halloween is a very big part of the town because we've had Americans living in Alice since 1960. So I grew up with Halloween when it wasn't a thing in Australia and so when I used to go to other places and people say, what's this Halloween thing, whereas now Halloween's a universal thing. I would say our town goes crazy and it does at Halloween, Alice goes nuts and it is a very big part of the town. And a very big part of growing up. Here.

Ross:

Yeah.

Brad:

Just because there's that influence in the culture. Probably doesn't have quite the same meaning as the Americans put to it. It's more seen as, the kids getting bags and bags of lollies and I live in a street where there's Americans that live and we get inundated. In fact before I had children, we used to have to turn our lights off in our house and hide.

Ross:

Yeah.

Brad:

Just because you'd just be getting pestered Trick or treat

Ross:

Last year with our display, we had people lining up before we opened and it was, five hours of just a massive line of people coming through. It was crazy.

Brad:

Yeah. So cool. Yeah.

Erika:

and what you of the red centre so far??

Ross:

Oh, it's great. It's dry. Definitely very dry, but no, I've enjoyed some of the sights we've been out to. Testing my memory on what they were called, but

Brad:

oh, you got camels. Camels are fun to ride and you're right it is dry. It is a very dry climate, but it also means that it's not too hot. It's a very pleasant climate too.

Ross:

The weather's great right now.

Brad:

Yeah. And what Ricky was saying I said to her that just the, how big your skies are here. Like having lived in Adelaide and lived in other places, then you move somewhere like here and you can almost see the curvature of the earth.

Ross:

We went to the earth sanctuary the night and it's just amazing how much can see in the sky and it's crystal clear.

Brad:

Yeah. Yeah. And the fact that you're so close to town and you've still got the light pollution, but like out there with the boys on that earth sanctuary is just incredible.

Ross:

Mm-hmm

Brad:

think

Ross:

like

Brad:

when you go to the phone with Mac met me properly

Ross:

yeah Yeah absolutely We're just meeting some of the clients. Yeah Mac safe the other day that was eyeopening to actually see what they do and what goes on.

Brad:

And Christiano is a legend. Absolute legend. He's got the patience of a Saint. He really does. Yeah, they're doing good work.

The invisible skyscrapers podcast is proudly sponsored by hut six, innovating a future for all. If you're enjoying the podcast, make sure to subscribe on all of our podcasting platforms and give us a share and follow on Facebook and LinkedIn. And if there's anything you want us to cover in one of our episodes, send us a line or leave a comment and we'll get back to you.

Erika:

we've talked a lot about horror, but on the other side of spectrum do you consider yourself like superman?

Ross:

No, definitely not.

Erika:

but what would your superpower be?

Ross:

Domination

Brad:

yeah,

Ross:

I know

Brad:

it's the same as me.

Ross:

Isn't that what everyone wants?

Brad:

Autocracy is the best type of democracy. Oh, so Trump would say anyway,

Ross:

Yeah.

Brad:

I probably would jump in and say your superpower is the fact that you come from a varied background, so you don't freak out when, cause there's been, because we've evolved as a business, we've gone from a couple of people and then we decided couple years ago we were gonna go into what we're doing and that's had challenges. It will continue to have challenges as we start to work through that. I haven't seen you go white, yet, you might have

Ross:

I'm sure it'll happen.

Brad:

I'm sure it'll happen and even when some of those situations have been not ideal it seems to me that you seem to bounce along pretty easily. Yeah. Would that be fair to say?

Ross:

Yeah, absolutely.

Brad:

Yeah. Yeah. Cause you know, the benchmark I use, which Erika thinks is funny, as long as you're not dead and bleeding on the ground, everything else is good, not, everyone feels like that and sometimes that does get me into trouble with the engineering team

Erika:

And I guess you've come to Hut Six back from the audio visual world What kind of made you want to come back the first place, back to tech?

Ross:

It's something I've always enjoyed doing and I think in terms of that sort of AV engineering role, I'd reach the peak of what I could do.

Erika:

And do you wanna master more skills or

Ross:

yeah, absolutely. I wanna learn, what the cutting edge technology is in terms of web development and app development.

Brad:

And particularly cause the geographical issues that we face with internet connections and stuff like that. Some of the things that Luke's gone into like angular and stuff like that may not feel cutting edge, but not a lot of people are doing it, that sort of offline stuff and it's interesting that most people wouldn't even know for a moment that internet access isn't available, Telstra keeps telling us there's 90% of the country's covered. What they're not saying is that it's one and a half Meg, if you're lucky. In those 90% areas. So that is a significant challenge when you're doing what you do. Yeah. and how do you two kind of keep abreast of what is happening in the industry Oh, I've. I'm on Reddit all the time.

Ross:

Yeah,

Brad:

it's not true.

Ross:

I get a daily tech email, which tells me yeah

Erika:

Okay yeah.

Brad:

no I just, I go down rabbit holes and I look stuff. So I'm often exploring stuff and looking at new ideas and you probably see when I forward emails through, into JIRA and stuff it may not be something, but it's always a point of discussion. I like to have points of discussion, even if it's look that's really crap, cause, I don't know as much as what you guys know. I do think there's no point sitting still and it's easy to get comfortable. You look at the conversations we've had in the last week, to talk about getting rid of websites completely when that was the basis of what we did 10 years ago, everything we did was around a website, whereas it's just not the case now.

Ross:

Pushing that boundary of the technology, I think, providing something to clients that, others can't provide or don't know how to provide. they haven't yeah, yeah.

Brad:

And what I would say to that is with that technology, and I talk about their superpowers, with that technology comes that ability to do something that people don't see and being happy with the fact that they don't see it, but it just works. That's what I like us to be pushing down the road off that it's light for them. It's heavy duty for us, but it's light for the person on the other end that they, that barrier to through literacy technologies, socioeconomic, whatever it happens to be, isn't there anymore. They can just use it.

Ross:

Yeah

Brad:

And I think the IT industry suffers a bit from let's make it difficult because then we all have to have this shared knowledge of how to use it. I think we should make it simpler as simple as we can. Being episode thirteen, what's your favorite horror movie of all time?

Ross:

My favorite horror movie of all time is called Dawn of the dead, it's by George Romero, Who unfortunately is no longer with us. But yeah, and again, zombie film. And I, love all of his films and his, all of his dead films as they're called,

Brad:

you need to go to Mexico, I think,

Ross:

Mexico to their festival.

Brad:

Yep. Day of the Dead. And that's also in another James Bond movie too. I like James Bond. This is a dirty little secret I've got yeah. When I was 12 growing up in Alice Springs, we didn't have television, we had the ABC for about four or five hours a day. I don't even think I was too old, maybe 10, and so our public library was this little wooden building, and they had this whole section of all the James Bond books, paperbacks. I read them all, more than once. So I was very, I'm very much a James Bond, bit of a n aficionado. And also just like Amy, I'm also a closet Elvis fan. Sad ay?. So misogynistic heroes But yeah, no, so when Daniel Craig came out with their first James Bond movie having had to put up with Timothy Dalton and all the rest of the nonces that were James Bond, I was pretty happy. Made a very good James Bond there you go. We'll close it there. Episode 13, Day of the Dead, James Bond, Elvis, new tech. And we'll sign it off from there and we'll talk to more people along the way. Thanks for listening.

Ross:

Thank you.

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Brad Bellette

Host
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Erika Hamilton

Co-host