Meet Bastiaan Koch

Today we’d like to introduce you to Bastiaan Koch.

Hi Bastiaan, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Thank you so much. I’m honored to be here and share a piece my journey so far.

I have been a cinephile my whole life. At age seven, I began experimenting with stop-motion on my parent’s Hi-8 camera. In high school, I collected rare anime and banned VHS tapes and then rented them out to my friends. At university in London, I studied industrial design and animation. Then, I got my first film job in Soho by sneaking into the Motion Picture Company (MPC).

I felt like James Bond, making my way past the three-person reception and security guards in a suit (which I thought would help me blend in but nobody actually wears in the VFX industry) and made my way up to the sky bar. There I sat and showcased my A3 (printed) portfolio to anyone important looking. I knew that if I applied through official channels, I wouldn’t pass any of the entry-level gatekeeper criteria.

Luckily, someone admired my initiative and gave me a job on a Danny Boyle movie. Not only did I get to work directly with Boyle, I also had the privilege of learning from his production designer Mark Tildesley (No Time to Die) and get on set regularly.

Even though I was only paid £49 a day, I was so happy I broke down crying. I was 21 and loved cinema so much (and still do), I would have worked for free! Over the next year and a half, I worked my way up to the position of Model Supervisor overseeing 15 artists. I was a bonafide VFX artist and pinched myself as I got to work on increasingly bigger productions around London’s VFX studios.

Eventually, I set my eyes on LucasFilm’s legendary VFX studio; Industrial Light & Magic, in California. It’s one of the best studios in the business. To land a job there felt impossible. For VFX artists, it’s like trying to get into Harvard. I knew I needed to get better. Much better. So, I took every second of overtime I could get, worked 16+ hour days, and learned as much as I could. Within three years, I was sitting at my very own desk at ILM. Again, I cried when I got the job offer. But within that moment, I also felt empty. I realized that life really is about the journey and vowed to never again set a singular finite life goal. Now, I’m always striving to learn and do more while enjoying the process.

The following 12 years with LucasFilm were incredible. I learned from the founders and pioneers of VFX itself as well as legendary directors like Steven Spielberg, JJ Abrams, Michael Bay and Guillermo del Toro and I was part of 3 Oscar-winning and 5 Oscar-nominated VFX teams. Along the way, I had saved enough money to start my own production studio— Marauder Film — and made the jump.

Marauder now has multiple shows in development where I write, produce and direct with an incredible team. Each project is deeply collaborative. We work with streamers, writers, publishers, rights holders and other production companies on film & TV projects that span the full cinematic gamut from live-action, anime, graphic novel and video-game adaptations to original content. I am also a VFX Supervisor at FuseFX’s growing Atlanta studio on the upcoming Netflix limited series “A Man in Full” and Hulu’s original series “Class of ‘09.”

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
My greatest career challenge began in 2019. I pitched my Sci-Fi series to Netflix and they loved it. A dream come true, right? Kinda. Little did I know that this would begin a three-year journey that would be both exciting and excruciating — and would ultimately lead me to a complete, personal metamorphosis (the good kind, albeit painful).

After a 9-month long negotiation, my show was slated to become a Netflix Original, but its ultimate fate was still uncertain. The process of making a series is long, and while I knew a million things could go wrong—no one anticipated the pandemic (or the effects on steamers coming out of one). The stakes in my life at the time were higher than ever. I knew I had to find a way to get comfortable in the discomfort of constant pressure and facing the unknown.

There was also the creative challenge of holding on to my original vision while balancing resourcing limitations and new ideas coming in from producers and writers. As the creator, director and executive producer, I felt conflicted from the get-go. I wanted my show to be greenlit (obviously), but I also had to walk this double-edged sword of figuring out where to hold firm on your ideas and where to let go.

After 17 years in the business, I’ve seen a lot of lives ruined by the pressures of Hollywood. Personally, the stress became so palpable that I had to completely change my lifestyle to accommodate what I was going through.

So, I decided to put myself in an even more challenging environment — the cold, dark San Francisco Bay. Every day, I woke up at 5:00am and went for an open water swim in the frigid waters.

That whole experience was life-changing. Physical fitness was just a small part of it. Swimming allowed me to connect with myself—and nature—before the world woke up. Was there unknown? Of course. But I learned to overcome it by way of embracing it. The tides are ever-changing, sometimes pushing me well off course. There are Great Whites and playful seals that bumped me regularly. There were speeding fisherman who nearly ran me over. And there was that unbelievable cold that I fell deeply in love with. The cold that everyone thinks only a masochist could enjoy, but few realize that every swimmer out there (without a wetsuit at least) is actually a hedonist — embracing the cold that makes you feel more alive and more connected.

After these morning swims and a long sauna, the world, its colors, its sharpness (and mine), even my focus was heightened to a degree that made everything else seem absolutely elementary — including my work stress. I realized that the stress was not coming from Netflix or anyone else, it was self-inflicted. It was my fear of what the show might become, not what it could become.

I leaned into this discovery in many ways besides swimming but all of them are based on the same tenet I now live my life by; The greatest challenges we will ever face are in our own minds.

I had this belief that life was supposed to be pure careless fun all the time. But the reality is that making big moves in the world is hard and comes with responsibility. Learning to deal with that pressure and stress (both internal and external) by squashing my resistance to hard things makes life so much easier. It makes us resilient, patient and forces us to level up. It made life fun for me again.

We’d love to hear about any vivid memories you have from when you were growing up?
I have many happy memories from my childhood, but perhaps the most vivid is being physically attacked by about 30 preschoolers simultaneously on my first day of school in former East Berlin. Germany was recently opened after the fall of the wall and we had just moved there from Atlanta, GA. I had absolutely no concept of how hated I was for being an American or why. It began my deep interest in history and geopolitics that tends to show up in some way in my written work. That was pretty heavy, but mostly, I remember skateboarding with my best buddy around Luxembourg. We had a handycam with us at all times. We took turns filming each other. We also made stop-motion videos with our Dragon Ball figurines. We laughed until we cried and we loved watching our own movies more than anything else.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.marauderfilm.com
• Instagram: @emperorkoch
• Youtube: https://youtu.be/Bmq6MIeEQ-0

Image Credits
Cinematic stills credit: Marauder Film Selfies, portraits and swim shots credit: Pavlo Fedorov