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I kind of do all the ridiculous things that i bragged about gonna do when i was eight years old.
A friend of mine pointed that out a while back he says you're the only person I know who's doing all
that stuff he said he'd do when he was eight and I told him I said you're absolutely right
and i'm kind of upset by that because if I'd picked five-year-old me to make that choice
then I'd have been an astronaut and a president a firefighter by now.
I need a bigger shop yep.
So my name is sean thorson this is my little workshop we call Thorsson
associates workshop T&A for short.
I make set pieces for promotional use for advertising companies for video game companies,
I make costumes props and then of course there's always any
number of odd things that come in through the door any given day. I did a life-size replica
of ed209 the bad guy robot from the original Robocop movie. It's just been something i've
wanted ever since i was a little kid you know as soon as you see the thing walking around in the
movie it's like oh my god wow I must have this, nobody makes it...well i can make it there's no
reason why not. It's impressive it looks like it probably weighs 20 tons. I like showing off.
Well here i'm actually showing off a bunch of halloween costumes and similar projects
that i've put together over the past few years and for the most part of course the star of the
show is all of my spartan costumes that you'll see walking around here at the fair end in the booth
my shop is located just outside of petaluma california it's formerly a chicken barn
so starting off once you walk into the shop the first thing i've got is a bunch of finished or
almost finished things that just need to be put out of the way we do everything sculpting we do
sewing we do leather work we do 3d printing we do cnc carving molding casting painting all of it
right now we're gearing up for comic-con so we've got a bunch of pieces that are vacuum formed that
are being assembled and rigged this whole thing started as a hobby and kind of got out of control
after i left active duty with the navy i started sailing with the merchant marine
which was great because you've got the whole bilbo baggins feeling i'm going on an adventure
and then after that week runs out it's basically monday every day and then i'd have nothing but
free time for months and months on end so i'd get home from being out at sea and get bored and each
year i'd spend more time and a little bit more money and make slightly more elaborate things
it was easier for me to start doing all the stuff everybody was asking me to do for a living instead
this armor is all essentially a vacuum form for the most part they're reasonably durable it's
the same way they did the storm troopers for the original star wars it's you know
it's really cheap quick inexpensive stuff i start off with pieces of just
fiberboard but once those parts are reassembled you end up with something like this guy here
that gets sealed up and then smoothed out you'll have a thing that's ready to mold
every once in a while someone will ask me how much does it cost to make a costume
if someone's looking for me to make a cape with tights and underwear on the outside i
can probably put something together for a few hundred dollars you know as soon as you start
talking about some 10-foot tall mech suit with digi-grade feet and wings and flames and whatever
i can rapidly get into six figures a lot of your like garage and hobby type prop and costume makers
end up doing vac forming and it's usually some really sketchy homemade equipment like this
this is the oven under this piece of wood is the what's called forming platinum
turns out this will actually build up quite a lot of pressure when the vacuum is on and one day in
particular we ended up imploding it sounded like a gunshot it was the coolest thing ever
first thing that i did that was you know kind of on the level of projects that i'm doing now for
halloween i wanted to be a stormtrooper from the star wars trilogy went out to you know catch up
with all of my buddies and it was this really weird transformative thing like when you walk
out into a crowd wearing this you know thing that looks like you just stepped out of a movie screen
you get this sort of instant celebrity status and i was hooked like everybody
wanted to post for pictures people were shouting stupid movie quotes at me all night
as time went by pictures start getting around online people start saying hey i saw this thing
that you made is it possible you could make one for me too before too long people start
asking me to make things that i haven't made yet and that is the making of armor
my grandfather for the longest time he'd start asking me when are you going back out to sea
finally i have to explain to him like when it turns out i'd enjoy my life more doing that
publishing a book and getting featured in a bunch of different websites and all these
different things it's finally at the point where he thinks i'm being taken seriously
my prop and costume shop is the coolest thing i've ever made