hey there everybody adam savage here in my cave with uh some q a a mythbusters question today
um i've been answering these from time to time submitted by tested patrons
um and answered in this format here in my cave um and today's question is actually
two questions there we go that's that's a better one all right today's question is two questions um
and these two questions come from tested patrons kyle bennett with an extra e so maybe it's benetti
and justin bacconi justin becconi um kyle's question goes like this how did the camera
and safety crew size change over the years in the early episodes it seemed like it was a small crew
with limited resources uh they point out that when buster's leg fell off in the hammer myth
we dove into the water to search for it in the later episodes we had dive crews
and justin's question is very similar he says i know you've mentioned before that
anytime you're in a team right on location you always cleaned up after yourselves
who actually cleaned the location sites after each myth was it the five or six of you in the
beginning and then maybe a special team in the later seasons did you did you all just pitch in um
i've always wondered especially after some of the big ones like
cleaning cement from a truck or the lego ball or anything that blows up um so i
yes uh the basic answer to both your questions is absolutely what you surmised in the beginning
years that we had a smaller crew than we had in later years is totally true
um and that's pretty normal for a show you're gonna
you know as you have a show that is a successful show like ours was it becomes a revenue stream
for discovery for the parent channel and the parent channel wants to do things to
augment and help that franchise make money for them so you know they the budgets got bigger
which is seems totally normal but these days what i'm hearing about television is
that when a show does well in its first season the networks are tending in some
of the stories i've heard to make the second year budgets smaller which is kind of enraging
just personally personally the idea of having a show that does well enough to get awarded a
second season and then be told you got to do it with less resources makes me a little crazy i
mean i understand capitalism but for crying out loud so let's go back to mythbusters early days
and the very first pilots of mythbusters which were shot in the late spring and summer of 2002
almost 20 years ago now uh we had a crew of we had a producer we had a production manager caroline
oddsson we had camera paul henry and sound jude paul's amazing wife and i think that was it
i think it was four people plus me and jamie and jamie's shop assistant chris rocha
yeah except for some added help we we reached out to here and there for some fabrication stuff that
was the crew for the pilots it was tiny and unlike regular episodes of mythbusters when we were
later in production in those episodes we would often do a story at a time one story at a time uh
when we were shooting the pilots we shot i think 10 separate myths but we spent a full we spent
six weeks shooting them but a full front month of that was just lining up the executions and
then two full weeks of executing every story doing the set of experiments so it was a lot of building
basically we were shooting out of order for the pilots because we didn't know what the show was
that's what happens when you're making a pilot kind of shoot everything and you get into the
edit room and if you're ever working on a show that you care about and you don't know what this
you can conceive of a show and you can film that conception but the one thing i will guarantee
you without knowing anything about you or your idea is that the final product you end up with
is only passingly going to resemble your original concept i mean there's going to be
obviously a parity but as you develop your concept you're going to discover things you
didn't know about the thing that you're making and it's going to change and it's going to shift
that happens with every piece of art that happens with every execution of creativity um
and that kind of um freedom was really engendered by having a small crew which we still had when
mythbusters kicked into production in the spring of 2003. so we shot those pilots uh
beyond productions in sydney australia spent seven months cutting them and it's always long it's all
first of all it's always long to cut that first cut because you just don't know what you're
you you're putting all the stuff out there and you're kind of finding out what structure is
underneath um also the first time you witness that first cut it's gonna be horrible it's gonna
be awful and you just have to embrace the suck and swim through it it is really i have to remind
myself when mythbusters junior i saw the first rough pass of the first episode of mythbusters
junior i was like we've made a piece of garbage and if we hadn't i just had to remind myself that
the first one looks same thing with savage builds first cut of savage builds i was like
oh wow we are what are we doing wrong and again it's not that we were doing anything wrong so
we're finding the show within the show so we started with jamie and i plus carrie plus we
had uh main camera and second camera i was young tim elwood i believe if i remember correctly
plus sound main camera second camera sound so it was uh plus i think two production managers or a
producer and a production manager so it's probably more like six or seven people in the first season
ultimately by the fourth season i think we had hit our stride in terms of the amount of
crew by the fourth season um kerry torrey and grant were now over at m7 they had their own
production crew which was two producers camera sound second camera and we had the same thing
plus a couple of extra people um the whole mythbusters family for most of our run was about
somewhere right around 20 people um which for television is still very small i mean don't
get me wrong i'm sure some of the stuff that rob cordrey shoots with his friends are even smaller
um and i think that's like there's something engendered by a small crew uh there's a lot more
there's often a lot more creative freedom i'm not saying there's not more creative freedom because
you could have a big crew and do the best things in the world if you know them really well it's why
people like fincher and cameron and favreau work with the same people over and over because they
build this beautiful shorthand and they really understand what their roles are
um working i got to spend some time with jason reitman on
in his process of working on the new ghostbusters film and i met a lot of the crew
to find that you know most of them have been working with jason since the beginning of his
film career there's a shorthand with the with the with the crew that's just one of the most
invaluable things you could ever have um when we went and made dangerous toys we had a crew of like
35 people um there was a video village there's just all this stuff that jamie and i weren't
used to and i look i'm not begrudging that model that's one way you make reality television but
for me i prefer the more hand-hewn close-knit approach
that's the environment that i thrive in so savage builds was what was that crew maybe 15 people
yeah maybe 13 i mean it was a nice light crew um the thing that i find most astounding
is that when the crew showed up for shooting those pilots jamie and i had no idea what it
was about to shoot a television show i mean we'd shot television shows from the side of
production but this kind of indie like let's see what kind of show we can make out of this um
we had no idea what to expect but the fact that it was such a small crew meant that the
experience of shooting those pilots in the early seasons was really intimate in a way
that i think is intrinsic to how the show grew up
and i think it would have been very different uh if we started right off the bat with a kind of a
modern 35 person crew that i would have felt a lot less freedom to kind of cut loose and
try weird weird stuff um but i am so grateful for that there are a couple of things about
mythbusters germination that i'm really grateful for one is the er is all of our camera people
just are so delightful to work with and you can ask all of the all of us hosts everybody
there's something about having a relationship with your camera person that's
that's uh that just makes the work that you do on camera so much better so much better
um that and the small crew so uh oh but you were also asking who did that cleaning up yes
in the early years for the at least the first four or five seasons us hosts were always absolutely
doing all the cleanup uh alongside our alongside our crew as the demands upon all of us grew
we delegated more and more of that and by demands i mean
you know many we had to travel for doing appearances for discovery often in the
middle of production which meant that you'd have to like leave on a friday
fly somewhere in the country saturday sunday do an appearance come home monday then there's also
college appearances which is a lucrative revenue stream that television hosts can afford themselves
of and should and do and so um all of us all of us hosts were traveling a lot during those early
and mid years doing appearances building bringing in extra income uh and also you know working and
filming all day long every single day as the crews got bigger and the budgets got bigger it
made less sense for the hosts to be sitting there until 8 o'clock at night sweeping up so we had to
be pretty the next morning i feel like i'm giving an excuse for the fact that we didn't clean up but
there are good and bad executions of one's time at this stage in my life i will be happy
to delegate busy work that is not the best use of my filming building construction time
the best use is this me talking to you directly on the camera um that being said during covet
i haven't had any of that help so it's all been me we've been back to basics but so has
the whole world i think somewhere in there is the answer either of you might have been looking for
i hope so um thank you for letting me walk down memory lane about the early cruise in the early
days of mythbusters i really appreciate it um yes we left every location as good or better
than we found it and nothing very few things made the show how do i say this that is one of
the reasons we had so much flexibility with all of the places we filmed here in the bay area because
we built developed and maintained excellent relationships with all of those venues and those
relationships were maintained by an incredible crack team of producers eric haven uh john hunt
claire mandel jax marker i'm going to forget some dennis kwan alice dallow linda wolkovic
did i say linda already linda deserves two mentions she just she made sure the vendors
were always happy she was so good about making sure wherever we were filming that the people who
whose property we were on were delighted with how the whole shoot went um yeah that's money in the
bank keeping your word and being reliable seriously which is all that we were doing
uh years later when we would be like oh this experiment didn't go the way we thought it did
uh we need a totally different location on eight hours notice how we're gonna get the permitting
going well when you've built great relationships with every place you've ever filmed that becomes a
much easier problem to solve thanks for that great question uh both of you justin and kyle uh tested
patrons keep submitting your questions i will keep answering them here on the channel thank you so
much guys stay safe keep wearing your masks just a little longer i'll see you on the other side