hey there everybody adam savage uh in my cave in san francisco and i'm answering questions
uh about mythbusters about my time on mythbusters from tested patrons and today's question comes
from mega dope animation mega dope animation uh they want to know what was the deal i don't know
why i'm giving them this voice what was the deal with jamie's wall of labeled storage bin what was
the deal with jamie's wall of labels george mint i was around at their inception and it was cool um
for those who don't know who might not have watched mythbusters oh give me a second so
for those who don't know um who might not have watched mythbusters or seen it in a while jamie
jamie's shop m5 where we filmed a good portion of mythbusters for its entire run uh m5 was a tall
narrow long building so it was like 25 foot tall ceilings 20 foot tall ceilings something like that
but the main shop area was only 12 feet wide and 100 feet long and uh on one whole side of it jamie
had these metal racks welded out of one inch thin wall square steel tubing filled with long
legal sized file boxes those are the cardboard boxes with handles and lids
probably like 150 of them across the whole wall and everyone labeled with something different
you know one said doll's eyes the other said model kits another might say scuba gear safety glasses
uh rubber bands weather balloons so what is this i think we might have a picture that we could put
up here okay uh so what was the deal with those well the deal with those is that jamie was a was
for the entire time before mythbusters showed up jamie was a commercial effects shop
um jamie owned a commercial effect shop first he ran the shop at colossal pictures that's
where he first developed that technique of the file boxes on the wall uh and then uh after
colossal pictures shut down jamie moved across the street built a bigger shop utilized the same
the same technique and then eventually bought the building uh in san francisco that became
m5 and did that wall of boxes for real but they started two shops earlier and i'll tell you why
they started because a commercial effects shop is like a swiss army knife for anything you
could think of that is that's kind of what is what a what a commercial effects shop has to be
unlike film so in film effects shops you often get a chunk of money and several weeks
or sometimes even months to build stuff you put together a team and you spend that money and you
you have lots of time and people and it's you work on bigger budgets in film in commercial
you're not only working with smaller budgets but often timelines that are ludicrously tight
i remember at one point while i was working for jamie this would probably be like 94.95 he calls
me up one day and says hey uh we got a photo shoot we need water to to move through a camera frame
we needed to squirt we needed to spray we needed to go in sheets and we needed to go in a shower
and i was like oh okay this is about two o'clock he was calling me i was like yeah okay cool i
could come in tomorrow and he's like no no no the shoot is the shoots tomorrow morning at 9 a.m
i'm wondering if you can come in now and just get this ready for tomorrow morning
that's the kind of timeline we're talking about for commercial special effects
so that's the kind of timeline where going to the hardware store is a hard call because you might
not have time when you get back to finish the thing right so you want as much in the building
as you can possibly have in the building the more stuff you have in the building and the less you
have to go out of the building to make the thing that someone needs in no time flat for no money
the more you can house all of that possibility in your shop the more money you could make
because time is the limiting factor with that doe right um so
jamie uh he had the shop at colossal pictures and because it was colossal he had all these
things from colossal picture shoots uh huge collections of animatable um uh hershey's
labels from hershey's kiss commercials um tons of uh cast resin heads from a nike commercial
we had done uh dollhouse furniture uh breams of dollhouse furniture from pizza hut commercials
tons of mr pizza head pizzas from from pizza hut commercials and then shortly around the
time the colossal pictures went belly up um chris wayles shut down cwi up in marin
um they're the effects shop that did gremlins and naked lunch and a bunch
of other amazing productions um the fly uh cwi shut down and jamie ended up purchasing
a whole bunch of their stuff and then so now he had like not only all these new tools like
the four by four foot vacuum former but he had bigger machine tools was just all of this stuff
and he he wanted to he it was vital that he not lose any of it right it's so easy when you have
a ton of stuff to lose track of where it is and once you've lost track of where it is you've lost
it this is like this is the big innovation if you want to read into something awesome
read into federal express and how they built the first national package delivery infrastructure
at speed and at scale that they did and the way that they did it was their innovation was
recognizing that the information about the package was as or more important than the package itself
and if they manage the information correctly they would manage the packages correctly and
the same mindset goes into jamie making that initial decision to make a metal rack
and having all these file boxes go up so he could at a glance
find the thing that he needed right because someone may call him up and say i need to
do a blah blah jamie's like where am i going to find brown inch and a half length fur right now
f for done so that was why basically it was it was the ability to turn his shop into more
useful swiss army knife of of material of weird material retrieval and then when he
built m5 the final space his his shop still uh and i think jamie moved into that shop in the
the early odds way early odds like 99 98 somewhere around there somewhere around at any rate when he
moved into that shop he saw his opportunity and he took this wall that was like 20 feet high
and 100 feet long and he utilized like half of it for metal racks filled with boxes
and it was that was our store on mythbusters we constantly went shopping and
there's one utility and it's a really important one past just being able to
see everything and retrieve it and that is when it is all in one space
you understand the state of what you have in front of you and so there's this way in which it's like
shopping and also firing neurons in your brain just as you're reading through all the items
some of them are kicking off little ideas that you might have or you might think
about doing it this way but you see this box and oh that's kind of what they want
but actually it's way better than what they said they wanted so i'm going to use that
having all that stuff visually accessible as well as organizationally accessible is really
good for the problem solving that needs to happen in a commercial effects shop
thanks for that awesome question i know it was a simple question with a more complicated answer
than you might have considered um i loved i love that solution that jamie did and i
i you know that that is a sort of a version of the first order retrievability that i love here
in this space keeping everything labeled and current and facing me is absolutely critical
for the way i use my shop so i learned a lot from jamie over the years thank you guys thank you uh
mega dope animation for that awesome question tested patrons keep submitting your questions
and i will keep answering them and as always i will see you guys next
time