hey everybody Adam Savage here in my cave with a show-and-tell a bit of work
for hire I did almost 20 years ago now Wow that's her that's weird
20 years okay um so in 2000 I was working for Industrial Light magic I had
been there for about a year and a half and there was a really cool feature to
working at Industrial Light and Magic that I did not realize until I worked
there and that is the moment Industrial Light magic went on my resume and was
something that I talked about people who were hiring me to build stuff for them
stopped needing to see a portfolio that was really freaking cool like you know
up until then I've working out of my little shop on Bartlett Street in the
Mission District I would get a call to submit a RFP for work for hire and
frequently the the person who was building the job would say all right can
we see a portfolio can we see kind of stuff you do do you have any
recommendations or you know what it was always a little bit of a dance who had
to do which is like that's employment you always have to sell yourself and
talk about your history but there was a way as a model maker that having
Industrial Light and Magic smaadahl shop on your resume just made you like
bulletproof it was a really neat superpower because all of a sudden
people call you up and go can you build this usually well I've been working to
Industrial Light magic and they were like great well just tell us where to
send the dough and we need it by Thursday
like the transactions became so much easier small story to tell you
when I first got to ILM in mid year 1998 they were in full bore production on
Episode one two hundred-plus model makers working and I a lot of friends
working there Kristine ELLs and my mentor Mitch Romanowski among many
others and Mitch Romanowski who I talked about in a recent thing who ran the shop
at James and the Giant Peach and Nightmare Before Christmas one of the
best model makers I've ever worked with sadly he's no longer with us but Mitch I
got up there I think just after Mitch got hired
there and after about two months Mitch and I are working at the table next to
each other we glued some parts together for something and he goes dude now that
we work at ILM do you know what that bag says I was like what he's like now were
wizards because every time any show or preview would talk about Industrial
Light magic they would call him the special effects wizards at Industrial
Light and Magic he was like now we're the Wizards okay
that is the longest preamble for a show and tell
imaginable but in 2000 I was working at ILM which was not full-time work because
there are very few actual staff jobs there you got work to work on a job
often actually for the first two or three years I worked there I never knew
if I was gonna be working two weeks hence it was like constant re-upping of
my employment which meant that I still was doing a lot of freelance work what
we call G jobs government jobs gravy jobs
side work side hustles and as a model maker you looked everywhere for side
hustles Jamie's the first one to teach me that toy prototyping was very
lucrative I did store window displays I did theater props I did film props and I
often built large models of things for trade shows so at one point I built a
giant pair of headphones Sennheiser headphones like standard Sennheiser like
tech cans like your basic Sennheiser's I made them big enough to fit I think a
14-foot tall gold Buddha that we rented for this trade show and I mean they had
like just I can't believe I never took a picture of him because they were
beautiful and then come to some vacuforming some laser cutting some
woodwork some vinyl cutting and this project I'm about to show you is a
similar kind of project I was reached out to by my friend Dan Corr still a
good friend we've been friends since the early 90s and Dan was I think this job
came through Dan it was a company called sonic box and they made internet radios
to be honest I'm not sure about the project itself I'm not sure about the
product itself but what they wanted was they had this little internet radio it
was about this big and they wanted a big model of it to put at their trade show
booze and I built that model and here it is this is the model that I built and
this is just a terrific terrific example of exactly the kind of work for higher
stuff that I was doing as a young model maker so yes you can see I mean it's
been beat up because it's been traveling around me
traveling around with me shop to shop for 20 years but it's a fairly refined
bit of construction and I'm still really proud of it and I'll walk you through
the construction process the main body is vacuum formed the buck that I
vacuform these oh sorry the main body is vacuform did its back you formed in two
pieces there's a back and there's a front and in order to do this I had to
pull the vacuum form plastic vacuum form is a process in which plastic gets
heated up until it's soft and then it gets pulled over a form called a buck
and with a vacuum underneath it and the vacuum sucks the plastic the soft
plastic onto the buck and it holds whatever shape your buck was now we all
intersect with vacuum forming every single day in toy packaging the clear
stuff that your action figure sits in that's a vacuform piece and it's a
fairly refined technology at this point in manufacturing and industrial light
magic had a vacuform ER in there in their stock as do i that should be a
show and tell me I should or have already done that okay so I used
Industrial Light and Magic just to buy 2/3 vacuform er to make this and the
very first thing to do was to get their original product measure it and make a
CAD design of it and the CAD program I used back then was auto cad in there 2d
because that fed directly into our 24 by 3 24 by 48 inch laser cutter we used
if I'm the buck here the actual form that I pulled the vacuum form over was
laser-cut and that's why I was working in AutoCAD because I knew I needed the
form to be really precise and the laser cutter just afforded me to make this as
a set of layers and if you look here up close you can actually see the remnants
of some of those layers as I cut out like a base piece of acrylic and then I
attached a piece of plywood to that again multiple layers for each step
that's a separate layer which was rounded and sanded to fit and then it
embeds in this large circle here which has a kind of a radius radius sort of
long-faced and that required me to take those pieces onto the wood lathe and
actually face them and the same thing happened with the volume dial so with
each of these bucks I made the buck long enough to pull the
plastic what happens when you pull the plastic over like on the edge here if
your buck is here your plastic comes over and it then webs to the base so you
always want to design your buck so that it so that your form can actually get to
where you want it to before it starts to web that's non-trivial takes some a be
testing and a little bit of experience to figure out what what height off the
but it works for you but I did this as two separate vacuuming holes then once I
had those poles and these buttons are all integrated into the pole because I'm
using fairly thin plastic I think this feels like oh three out of 400 for OHS
like my bread and butter that's forty thousands of an inch thick for reference
yeah it's about the thickness of a paper match about the thickness of ten sheets
ten some odd sheets of regular paper and I've done an effect forming over the
years to know that that would get me the level of detail I wanted on these
beautiful buttons now one thing that happens in vacuforming is you can also
end up with webbing on interior details and that's no good if I had webbing here
and I did on the first pole I would have to throw it away and so the way you deal
with webbing on stuff like that is you actually drill tiny holes in the buck
they allow the vacuum to move up through the buck and suck the plastic into the
corners where you want it to go and if you look closely at my bug you can see
there we go you can see those see these four little see that little d-10 that
one that one these are all little holes that I
drilled to make sure I wouldn't end up with any webbing between these buttons
and the side of this front dial yes okay so that's the hole so you can also see
them in another spot I recognized would be critical in between each of these
four corner radius buttons yeah so factory forming isn't is it's an
iterative process tonight I did a pull on this and it didn't work and so I kept
on like modifying the buck until it did there is the question of this dial here
which as you can see is a lot shinier than the paint job of the other thing I
actually did one of my favorite vacuform tricks on this which is this is actually
clear pet G that is painted on the back and that gives me this beautiful gloss
coat I absolutely did the same thing oh yeah
the remote control cars from that movie I will have to do that as a
show-and-tell - so this is a OH also all the lettering all the the
character lettering here from the sonic box to the that part and all the buttons
these were all vinyl cut on our vinyl cutter at Industrial Light and Magic one
of the great things about that shop they knew that everyone was doing side
hustles so they actually had costs built in for the laser cutter if it was for a
personal job and you just submitted however many minutes or hours you were
using the laser cutter for how how long the cut was and then the shop would
charge you for it you build that charge into your fee and I mean it was a
wonderful place to work I mean not just because it was this resume it was like
this solid gold on your resume but also because the shop itself under the
tutelage of Mark Anderson and later keith london really engendered keeping
its folks employee so if you weren't working on a job they
were often really cool with you coming in on your off time and making stuff for
hire and they're pretty special so like I said these are all vinyl these are all
cutout vinyl letters that I applied to to the piece and I had to find bits of
vinyl that matched the colors that I wanted this this style here is a piece
of vinyl that I cut in Reverse so I could stick it to the back of the clear
vacuform and then spray paint around it black yeah I'm really pleased with the
effect and the end result is a super lightweight I mean this thing this whole
thing weighs a few ounces and yet very robust and good-looking product
the reason I still have this is actually a fun story I reached out to them about
five months later because I realized I did not feel the pictures of the piece
that I built for them and the guy who hired me was like yeah I can get to some
pictures but frankly we only use it for one trade show I'll just send you back
the prop that was like damn brother that sounds lovely that's delightful and so I
am able to still have this example of my early work for hire in my collection oh
the last bit was getting this color right so obviously maybe you don't know
this but every company that has every company with the logo has very specific
color slated for what that logos color should be so these guys supplied me with
the Pantone swatch of this specific color of highly blue purple or slightly
purple blue however you want to talk about it and I had the most difficult
time and really the most difficult time matching this color and I'm this kind of
color mixer I end up with two gallons of the wrong color
that's just slightly off that I have to throw away III do this additive process
and I always end up mixing way more than I need so they're in the paint room at
ILM trying to find a local that will match and I'm doing these airbrush
Testament not working and my friend the amazing painter a model or Melanie whale
is Melanie fantastic modeler at stick painter excellent human being she
would often come to work wearing a fur coat made of the pelts of stuffed
animals one of my favorite Cruella de Vil cosplays I've ever seen anyway Mel
was watching me one afternoon after hours trying all these different color
tests and she was like very gently like would you like some help and I was like
oh yes please that she gave me some great guidance I actually can't remember
at this point but it was about maintaining it was about it's about how
to get a vibrant color out of a mix because oftentimes when you're mixing
paint you're you're killing the the brightness of the primaries and you can
get very gray versions of a color that's close but because it's like feel
slightly gray or muddy or it's not it's not working so Mel gave me this a bit of
advice at that point about what to mix to get this color that turned out to be
the perfect advice and I'm lame now that I went down the road to tell you that
story I couldn't remember what the actual advice was but if I have to
hazard a guess as to the advice I think she was even advising me to kill the
intensity of the blue by using its opposite on the color wheel she broke
out a color wheel showed me ways in which to think through this
problem-solving that expanded at that point my ability to mix color it's been
a long time now so I think I just clearly lost that knowledge base this is
why I often made notes about the things that people told me yeah yeah but that
was definitely a thing that would happen and I have in some of my old sketchbooks
some really cool breakdown some processes I saw other people using
that's a little trip down memory lane about what it was like to work at ILM
back in the day and about the kind of work prior I would do thanks for joining
me this has been a lovely show-and-tell I will see you guys next time