hi adam savage in my cave beautiful san francisco day it is roughly four o'clock in the afternoon
and i am taking questions from tested patrons uh today's question is on the subject of my
employment at george lucas's legendary effects firm industrial light magic and this one comes
from matthew winchell matthew says as an 18 year old looking for a career in animatronics
do you have any experience did you have any experience with animatronics at ilm
and he adds that he is making a full-scale fully functional bb-8 um full marks for your ambition
matthew uh i like everybody else was astonished when we first saw bb-8 in the trailer uh and then
learned that it was um in many cases a practical bot that is beautiful um and it's amazing to me
that lucasfilm could go into force awakens thinking we're gonna make a new robot that
everyone loves and succeeded it just totally blows my mind but of course you got a similar
team you've got doug tang you got ben bert you know these guys are making beautiful stuff i
did get a chance to work on some animatronics at industrial light and manage in in at industrial
light magic and they were the animatronics for the world's greatest macguffin r2d2 yeah yeah
um i'm not sure if we can show this picture that i've got but if we can
here it is that's a picture of me working on r2d2 so this is for a sequence in episode
i actually can't remember if it's episode one or two but at any rate r2d2 goes to the outside of
the queen's ship that silver ship that looks like the blackbird and he uh uses his little proboscis
to like bypass a power coupler or something like that and the outside of the ship and for this mike
lynch was running this job uh don bees was the head of the r2 group and he was working on the
arm mechanics because there was a box there was a bug there was a box at ilm of all of r2d2's arms
seriously and like don's come on over here and he opens up the box and it's like
it's like the the arm that he fought yoda with it's like the data coupler from empire it's
all of the arms you have ever seen r2d2 stick out of his body or sitting in this
drawer so don was working on that and there was an r2d2 built back in london
in the early days that had pneumatics that could do a two to three leg conversion
for the uninitiated r2d2 is both a two-legged and three-legged bot in its two-legged formation it
stands upright and that is the most that is if whenever kenny baker was performing inside r2d2
that is how he was performing so whenever r2d2 is on three feet kenny's not in that r2 there's no
room for him but when he's standing up like this and he's doing this that's kenny baker performing
r2 um for all the driving shots he can't drive standing up he'd probably fall over from the
momentum so he has the center leg that comes out and creates that r2d2 keep on trucking stance
um and this was one of the very few times they wanted r2 to go i got a little light
kick there we go they wanted r2d2 to actually do i didn't fix it they wanted r2d2 to do the
two to three leg conversion on camera and there was this london r2 that could do that
so don gave that to me to man to manage and fix difficulty it was press fit air fittings
and they were british which means they were metric and the difference between metric and
imperial press fit air fittings is significant yet imperceptible right
so you could be holding a piece of hose that looks and feels in every way identical you could be
holding a piece of imperial hose that looks and feels in every way identical to the metric hose
but they might be off by a fraction of a millimeter in terms of their diameter
and that fraction will keep them from working with each other's hardware
i'm telling you this because as i tried to make r2 work what ended up happening was there was one two
one hose missing and in replacing that excuse me just a sec as i was saying
in trying to make this european metric pneumatic system inside r2 work to make the cylinders and
the timing work so he could kick out a leg kick himself back and drive on three legs
i had to effectively rebuild the entire pneumatic system because i couldn't scab
english and metric together that just was not going to scan i had to pull out all the parts
re-diagram out the air path and the electrical diagram and effectively rewire him and when i did
um here i'm gonna continue this one near my r2d2 because he's here
there he is look at him what a beautiful boy poor girl i don't know what is what is bartus gender
r2 is uh when i was first building this my friend davey was like you're building a happiness machine
for if r2d2 is in your house how could one ever have a sad thought and i kind of agree at any rate
so that's the center leg i'm talking about the pneumatic system inside this uh this r2 it's just
two cylinders one that activated to change this angle and the second that shoved that foot out
and reader i would like to report to you that when that mechanism activated this thing was terrifying
r2 this not this one the one i was working on was terrifying it was folk funk i mean you wanted all
your hands and feet away from him when he did that um because i wasn't hired to build a two to three
leg conversion i was hired to get one working i i might have chosen a different methodology had
i been able to design the system from scratch but i had to work with something that had been built
before i got there and make it work and we did we totally did that two to three leg conversion
you can see while i think it's digitally sped up it was genuine and we did do it on set and
i was there that day it was really really cool um thank you so much for that awesome question
i am very excited that you are making a fully functional that you are making a
fully functional uh aesthetically accurate bb-8 that is definitely something i would like to try
someday i'm sorry and this was asked by matthew winchell young matthew mitt winchell good luck
to you sir uh and tested patrons thanks for the great questions i will see you guys next time you