Founder of Wild Creations, the company behind the ball in Cardiff Castle’s wall, Matt Wild, speaks with Luke Owain Boult about surprising the city, dinosaurs, and Ainsley Harriott.
In an industrial complex in Splott there’s a fairly peculiar scene: a mosasaurus explodes out of the ground. It’s sort of like a marker for what, at least from the outside, be a fairly typical warehouse. Inside is where Wild Creations operates, creating works that put people’s imaginations in reality, and the Willy Wonka of this workshop is Matt Wild, who previously worked on Dr Who. “We’re ‘Wild Creations’,” Matt proudly says. “We’ve been going 5 and half years now. We make props and display sculptures for TV, film, theatre, sporting events. Our main line of work at the moment really is big PR stunts, like the dinosaurs in Waterloo we did for the launch of Jurassic World, and then the ‘Ball in the Wall’ for the Rugby World Cup.”
Back in September, Cardiff’s commuters noticed something a little odd about Cardiff Castle. A rugby ball seemed to have crashed into it. “Cardiff Council came to us; I think it was their idea originally to do the ball,” explained Matt. “We worked with Cardiff Council to look for the best location and what would have the biggest impact, and Cardiff Castle was just fantastic. From our point of view, it was really easy to rig onto, even though it’s a listed building. From a focal point for rugby, the street the castle is on is closed off for games, so you’ve got people there as a captive audience. We drew up all the designs, looked at the angle it was going to be in, pointing towards the Stadium, and went from there really. It’s cast out of fibreglass, and it’s got a steel frame within it. For the rocks around outside – we took a mould of the castle wall to so that it was accurate as it could be, and then cast them. We were working on it for about a month.”
No-one could have predicted what would follow, and Cardiff’s ‘ball in the wall’ soon started to trend on social media. “It was brilliant,” says Matt smiling. “We do these things all the time, and it’s always good to see the reaction. I think this one was around for longer than a lot of the other things we do, and I think it really, really captured people’s imaginations, and actually even the day before it was coming down, there were still people doing selfies in front of it. It’s a lovely feeling because that’s why we do it, to put a smile on people’s face, and I think that one really went further than I’d ever expected. I even saw a photoshopped picture with Ainsley Harriott as the ball… I don’t quite know what the relevance of that was.”
Wild Creations worked hard to make sure that the ball in the wall was a surprise for Cardiff’s commuters. “We had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and had to keep everything under wraps because the big thing with it was the surprise in the morning. We went in overnight to install it, which, helped to create a ‘wow’ in the morning. There were quite a few builders who were working opposite the Castle and had been there for a couple of weeks, and their reaction was ‘How the hell did that get there? That wasn’t there yesterday morning?’ It was great. We don’t really get much like that in Cardiff. That’s what I thought originally, I thought ‘oh well, that’s why everyone’s gone mad for it, it’s something different in Cardiff…’; we do a lot of things in London and there’s so much happening in London that quite often people think ‘oh this is a PR stunt’, whereas in Cardiff I think there was a real ‘wow’ but then actually two, three weeks in the hype wasn’t going down, I think it showed we had done something pretty spectacular.”
Matt Wild, Wild Creations, Info: www.wild-creations.co.uk