Q&A: Kristyn Hume

Visual effects artist, The Wrestler

How did you get involved in the movie?

The project initially began as just the movie’s title sequence. Later on, we added in the game, too. My brother, Randall [Furino], is a videogame programmer, so I tapped him to help me with the project. He taught me the basics about sprites and backgrounds. I made all the elements in Photoshop and handed them off to him and he made it an actual game. I don’t know how any of the coding stuff works. I think it’s some sort of voodoo computer magic.

The game is actually playable, right?

Yes, we decided the best thing to do was to let the players control the actions for a certain amount of time. When the time was up, or one of the characters reached a certain amount of points, it would automatically move into Randy The Ram’s power move, the Ram Jam, and end the game. That way, the actors could play it, but it would always end the way it needed to end. [Yet on the day of shooting, problems with the vintage controllers meant the actors didn’t end up playing it themselves.]

Were you surprised by the interest in the game afterwards?

I was at first. But we’re at the point that stuff from the ’80s and ’90s is all over the place. And since we’re such a tech culture, it’s unsurprising that vintage tech would become so popular.