hi everybody uh how i i hope this uh live stream broadcast finds you well finds your family healthy
uh i hope it finds most of your christmas gifts under the tree or holiday gifts under whatever
tree or festivus pole you have set up in the living room um i hope that delays from
the post office or ups or dhl or whoever aren't going to ruin anybody's christmas
i hope all those things um and i hope this next week is a week of relaxation and reflection uh
even if you are not with your family soon enough we'll be able to hug our families yes um and hi uh
i'm gonna do a live stream i'm gonna answer some questions today posed by tested uh
patrons and today's theme you guys chose an awesome theme is industrial light and magic um
everybody knows that in 1975 george lucas embarked on making star wars the first star wars movie uh
and in doing so reinvented um pieces of the film industry from soup to nuts uh everything from the
way films are shot to the ways that people act in them to the way that those films are marketed and
the way the public receives them luke has changed everything um what is less clear is that he came
up with i think not less clear but less celebrated is that he came up with i considered the greatest
company name in the history of company names in choosing the name industrial light and magic
it is an astounding company name and i will spend the rest of my life every time i have to consider
the name for an enterprise that is going to be my godhead that is that is the pinnacle the the
zenith of company naming uh one of my oldest friends actually his name is david in high
school everyone called him davey his high school bedroom was called dlm davies light and magic
aspiring filmmaker imbued lucas into his high school bedroom um
and so i'm answering questions about what it was like to spend a few years walking the halls and
making models for industrial light magic but first but first a little bit of uh painting
uh weathering uh modifying augmenting improving um i have this uh i have some baskar steel
yes the only thing impervious to or one of the few things impervious to a lightsaber who knows
what else might be impervious to a lightsaber i have these three beautiful pieces of cnc'd
baskar steel these are a gift to us from cal at the sabre armory not the first gift
we have received from cal uh cal and saber armory made this beautiful thermal detonator
okay um by the way it was so awesome to see a whole bunch of thermal detonators on the
mandalorian recently yeah um so uh i was going to do a little bit of a paint treatment to these
pieces of bescar steel to one of these pieces of bescar steel uh i love by the way having
it be metal it's special it's if you if you've been debating whether or not to get a piece of
metallic best car steel i'm here to say yes you should because it the way these click together
as a prop replicator i'm always looking for both uh fidelity to the original but also an experience
that feels like it has a fidelity to the original and this definitely satisfies that um so
we're gonna do a little paint treatment on this we're gonna get our hands dirty
um and see here i've got a i've got a tray i have a brush and i have some oil paint and i have some
turpentine and i have some other stuff so um what i'm gonna do with this because in the cnc if i can
bring this up to the camera and you can see yeah so that pattern is um is actually dimensional
that pattern is and by dimensional i mean it's not just printed it actually has a topography to it
so what i'm going to try and do is hit this with some dark oil wash paint uh in hopes that the
oil settles into the valleys of that topography and then i'm going to hopefully remove a bunch
from the mountains right so that you'll end up seeing and i'm not going to start with the
black oil paint i'm going to start with this uh payne's gray who's paint i don't know um
is that something i should know no what okay um let's see here i've got uh i just want to get
a piece of it by the way um shop paper you always need pieces of paper at a shop and after
years of having just a bunch of copy paper over in the corner i went and i bought some heavier weight
paper this is more for like cover stock and it's so much better it's so much better to have
something that's not just as not that um so yeah i keep i know this is not a standard eight and a
half by eleven it's actually because i made some christmas tags this weekend and i chopped this
did some hole punching and uh gave missus don't try this a whole bunch of very specifically sized
little tags for some of the granola she's been making and sending to our friends oh yeah if you
haven't had mrs don't try this is granola it's the chisel uh okay so let's um let's set this up i'm
just gonna dollop a little paint down there i'm gonna get a little bit of turpentine on my brush
um always good to get your brush wet before you touch it to paint the reason for that
is that the liquid that you're getting it wet with gets down into the base of the bristles
and keeps paint from getting down to the base of the bristles that will shorten the life of
uh shorten the life of your brush so i'm just going to get some of this paints
gray and it looks pretty black here on screen and i'm just going to unceremoniously sort of
just douse this piece in the panes gray
and i'm gonna go all over it i'm gonna it may be that i need even more
okay yeah i think it might be that i need more
god i love the smell of this the smell of it
yes i was quoting i was quoting that's not
our someone is at the front door no they're not hold on
i've unplugged her
okay so i might be using two well yeah anyway i'm just i'm jamming the paint down into the valleys
and you might feel a little more timid about this part if you haven't done it before
but the thing that i've learned from experience is that
some of the best paint jobs have come from over doing one paint job and then having to
remove it and then in the removing of it which is always imperfect i find the right paint job
um this is definitely the some of the dirtiest my hands get as handling the oil paints
i don't mind my hands have been dirty since i was four years old i don't think they've i don't think
my fingernails have ever been complete no my fingernails have been clean i have had several
manicures in my life i have apologized to the poor people doing those manicures
i especially apologize for people doing the pedicures yes i've had the odd pedicure
okay so now i've got i'm gonna get another piece of paper here
oh i am making everything dirty by touching it okay put our best car there that's good sound um
and i am going to uh i am going to dry this a little bit before
i start to wipe it i want a little bit of
this won't fully dry this will not fully dry
the oil paint but it'll help it'll help it settle where i want it to settle
and in doing this i'm kind of thinning it out
getting it to really sit down i didn't do one of these i did not do one of these before we
started this broadcast so this may work or may not um let's see what i want to do is so
when you have hills and valleys like this that are very very narrow
um i mean it's probably not much more than five thou which is
to be honest probably about the thickness of this paper is probably about five thousandths let's see
let me pull out my calipers
oh this paper is ten thou um so yeah the depth of these valleys are probably half the thickness of
this piece of paper so when you use a cloth to go over something like that you can overdo it so i'm
going to start by actually kind of wrapping it in paper oh look it's like i'm doing a sort of a
woodcut stamp yeah there we go i've got my best gar steel stamp there is exposure there we go
um this is precisely how printing works okay let's get a little more
drying
yeah the blow dryer needs to always be at the workbench for me for me it's just always got
to be here so now instead of wiping this i'm actually going to sand it and i'm going to use
um this thing oh actually it's worth showing you this thing this here is an ancient
it's probably 30 years old for me now um soapstone plate this is a machinist's layout plate it is
incredibly flat it's probably slightly more abused than your average one i
use this all the time but when i want to sand things and make them superiorly flat
i tape uh i tape sandpaper to this block and that gives me this really really
is everything cool or am i offline okay um it gives me just a super flat surface this is um
i learned this from chris at clickspring by the way how great is it that he's making some more
videos yeah that latest one all right check out clickspring this video is pretty mind-blowing
and pretty incredible um but i learned this from watching him he's got this piece of plate glass he
puts uh he puts his pieces he puts the sandpaper on and then sits there and does this kind of
very careful sanding and i've adopted that and it was it reaped so many benefits when i was making
the samaritan parts uh it's just like you can actually move stock
uh you can remove you think that sanding steel or aluminum at 400 grit and take you a while to move
material around it it's actually way faster than i thought okay so i'm going to take this piece of
bescar steel that i've now washed in an oil-based paint uh dried a little bit and now i'm just gonna
take it on here and kind of sand off the top
are you ready are you ready you can't handle the truth look at that i'm gonna do a close-up
yeah that is really pretty and especially like once i bring up the yeah so the 400 grit lends
this kind of glimmering shine to it that's really beautiful so i'm just gonna do all six sides now
following the figure eight pattern i see chris used so many times
all right now this is where it gets a little tough it's harder to maintain perfect
on an edge thing like this i tend to pull the piece
towards me because if i try and do this i'm sort of moving it all over the place and
i want to make sure all my sides are as orthogonal as they can be
yeah and i have found that like taping a piece of 400 grit onto my uh layout plate here i am uh
able to use it for days before i have to replace it sometimes all right let's do the bottom here oh
yeah this what i'm doing right now is maybe the hardest lesson i had to learn
in sanding and i don't think i learned it until i got to ilm um and there's a reason
uh before i got to industrial light magic i had spent five years or so working for jamie
heinemann in commercial special effects which is very different than film special effects
specifically in terms of scheduling in a commercial you usually have like well in a film
you have like weeks or sometimes months and teams of people to help you finish stuff i know not
every place is like this but ilm back in the day was a fat shop lots of work lots of people working
and you had lots of help and lots of time to get stuff done in commercial special effects
you've got like 18 hours six hours two hours 40 minutes the timelines are ridiculously compressed
um and so i never had the opportunity in commercial effects with jamie to do super high-end
the best possible quality finishing work but once i got to ilm and i was looking at the work
of my colleagues and replicating it and doing my own work i discovered that we think of sanding
as like this but to be honest every sanding job ends with this just pull it towards you
a couple times and inspect pull it towards you a couple times and inspect and i was blown away by
what a difference just a couple of passes can make here and there ah this is great and now
even that just to get the corner just to roll it over i'm not i'm not overdoing it i'm just
as i'm moving it keeping pressure down yeah and i don't i mean i'm not following
a specific plan i'm making this up as i go along but well you're used to that um
and wiping the sandpaper really does help move some material uh let me get some air
the law of unintended consequences uh oh here here's your close-up
i airbrushed the logo and it sprayed some paint out of the logo but that's great
we've thinned out that paint i'm gonna get a blow dryer on it there we go
and then i'm gonna hit it on the sandpaper and hopefully yeah another pass with the gun
better
uh what do you call that kind of beat it's like the beat of almost all the songs in graceland
traveling beat we are almost there
that is absolutely lovely i'm going to move this off
put this back on my rolling table and ladies and gentlemen let's see a before and an after pick
that's before and that's after and you can see that my paint job hasn't created
a massive difference and yet the difference is massive uh just by adding the darker color
and i think i really succeeded by not using a jet black but the payne's gray
i think it balances better oh that is absolutely gorgeous lovely well now i am now i am ready
in case i need a dark saber i can use some of this baskar seal make myself some proper armor