Hey everybody Adam Savage in my cave no adam savage in Fon Davis's cave the famous spawn
code down in los angeles uh and we're gonna talk terminator terminator today
okay we're gonna talk terminator three great um we both worked on terminator 3. it was the
very uh terminator 3 was the last job i did for ilm before moving on to mythbusters full-time
wow and it was the first job on which i got a desk and became a supervisor and you were like
my right-hand shepherd and being a supervisor and effectively co-supervised the whole building with
me but like you taught me the ropes of being a supervisor at ilm yeah i got all that from brian
franklin it was he was our boss he brian's one of the best supervisors i ever worked for um i never
knew someone who could who could stress about a project and not pass that stress on to their crew
yeah ever he had a term for that what was that he said that we as supervisors are [ __ ] umbrellas
we had to take it all and keep it off our crew yeah and that's something i learned from him
it's very extremely valuable actually especially with artists artists do not work well under duress
right yeah meanwhile brian would be going and getting yelled at by the producer every day
oh yeah everything he has stories oh my god okay so on uh terminator episode three on terminator 3
um the the big set that we built was a miniature particle accelerator yes
and what did we take about seven or eight weeks to put this together to put the final model together
i wish i could remember i don't remember i remember it was fast yeah for the amount of
detail that that it contained and it had miniature lighting inside the particle accelerator which was
done by grant and maharaja yeah so we actually designed this is a particle accelerator so it's
a big tube but it's fastened it because there's all this detail parts to it both inside and
outside so we're working with these pie slices that are tapered yes and then we built into the
castings that we sent to the mold room um lighting ports so that grant amahara could route his
interior lighting through places yeah like that's the kind of that's the sort of really interesting
engineering challenge isn't it of like who's gonna have to have a headache with this later
yes well yeah and the the paint department and the electrical department was always the ones that
got the short end of the stick if you didn't plan for it totally and yeah actually on the
painting department we made that model incredibly modular yes so that you could build pull out all
of the interior detailing yeah and like the paint one guys one one of these sections that
would cover the seams and it could all break apart yeah um okay so let's let's talk about
about these beautiful things because they actually have a couple of lessons in them that i want to
talk about but what are these these are these are uh just fuel containers or liquid flammable liquid
containers i just read that on there anyway but these were um foreground pieces for the miniature
this is actually a larger scale than what was in the miniature i think the miniature was
12th scale no these are a human in the miniature was going to be two inches tall
okay so that would be 48th give or take yeah sure anyway but so we made these oversized containers
so they could put them really close to camera we wouldn't have to worry about them looking
uh terrible um but on the set they were the same exact pieces but smaller like the set
scale right so in this interior we had all of this piping and these were part of the piping and then
you made these to be closer to camera in a sort of forced perspective so we're looking at more of it
yeah when cg first started showing up in movies a lot people were complaining that it didn't look
as realistic and they kept on thinking that was a an artifact of the process of using cg
but i submit that a lot of the early cg looks bad because of the lack of institutional knowledge
from the model makers making stuff in 3d back then and when i look at this i can see that
this is one two three four five laser cut six laser-cut parts two pieces of plaster
two more pieces of plaster one plastic tube right that's correct this is all of 30 minutes to put
together yes but one thing i love that you did is these little slots that's like the kind of thing
that absolutely would be on the real thing that a model maker might not realize needs to go on
that kind of little bit of storytelling right yeah absolutely no i've always designed and i'm sure
i've learned this from a lot of my mentors through the years but what we do is visual storytelling
and and something i learned uh just working in films is every single you never take any item for
granted every item tells a story and that story might be subtle and not something that steals the
the scene the focus in fact often it isn't uh but it's it does need to cement whatever
storyline they're telling you know and this was an industrial facility yeah and it had to have all
the nuance of an industrial facility my favorite is actually the graphics yeah because we got that
alps decal printer right it was a dye sublimation printer that could print in color and the best
thing about it is it could print in white oh yeah and that's how we were able to do these decals
because you could print the white first and then all your color on top and it would pop and those
are water decals water slide decals just like the ones you get with a model kit which before that
printer there was no way to make them we used dry transfers oh my god i miss i actually miss
dry transfers nobody makes them anymore but like i remember contracting like four color pantone
tight dry transfers for museum quality work yeah yeah we used them a lot um yeah the protector in
galaxy quest those that's all dry transfer right right how was the last project i could remember
where we used dry transfers before we got the alps printer um for me it was the shuttle on
space cowboys oh we dry transferred a serial number on every tile on that sure remember
that now okay so within this um you used a term that people might not be super familiar with
i think we said forced perspective when something like this happens when you take a larger object
than is in the set and put it close to camera so it feels like you're looking at a wide expanse
talk about this right now yeah these i did not work on this scene but i was fortunate enough
to save these from being tossed uh when kerner was sold off i think okay um but these are for the sea
of skulls in terminator 3. it was an underwater scene so there are actually two in-camera effects
used in that scene oh wow one is dry for wet yeah and one is forced perspective dry for wet
unbelievable they did hunt for red october yep uh all the underwater stuff and phantom menace
they did with that there's this as an aside i just want to talk about sure because i love this drive
for wet is really specifically you smoke up the room so that the smoke has the same inhibition
on light's ability to move as water does and if you get it close holy hell it looks amazing but
it opens the question is how do you know and i remember getting on to the first
location that on the first sound stage set at ilm with marty and he was smoking it up and i was like
how do you make sure the smoke is right from frame to frame because you're doing stop mo
and he said this is lovely they use a digital spot meter from the longest angle in the sound stage
and as long as you're getting the same value from the white card at the other end of the visual spot
meter you have the same amount of smoke density yeah and i could not believe that that meant that
when you're shooting stop mo even one day to the next you don't get pops but you don't
so sorry that's my drive for like well it's also because it's a haze right like you you
smoke up the stage and then you wait for it to settle to where it's just an even haze
and they would add or subtract to get that spot meter to read the right number okay so that was
dry for wet and then also forced perspective so there were some of these on a table in the
foreground right up close to the camera and then there's some space and then another table with
this size skull and then a little bit of space and then a table filled with these and they were
as you know hundreds and probably thousands of these things they gave me one of these at
the end of production as a crew gift you got one of those i think everyone got one that in
fact i think that's how i got that one but so yeah so the effect is is that when you do this
all of a sudden this one looks way farther away from the camera than this one and this is one
of the old literally this is from the silent era well this is from uh even further back to on stage
they would they would use force perspectives on stage quite a bit amazing so yeah it's a it's a
it's a uh a special effect that predates cameras and one of the things i also love about this is
it's like you only talk about it as part of film history after the fact in the moment
your supervisor comes and goes dude we need 600 skulls of this size 400 to this size and 1100 of
this size and then you're just going and then you dress the camera right like that's the other part
about doing this kind of perspective work with this is when you end up like sticking this on
the end of a c-stand and just flying it until it fits the frame right right and it's it's a
remarkable amount of it is uh eyeballed you always imagine before you go into this line of work that
there's formulas for everything and i remember i used to talk to pat sweeney and i've had a lot of
these conversations he was one of the dps at ilm and i worked with him at skellington on nightmare
peach um but he i i said one day i was like so when you do high-speed photography how do you
calculate how many frames per second you shoot for an explosion is it based on the scale versus any
and he he stopped me and he goes you know he goes well fawn there's a lot of formulas that people
have posted on the internet you'll see him around and stuff and he goes and all of them are wrong
he says what they ultimately do is they shoot tests right they pick whatever looks right
and sometimes if you use the formulas it won't it won't necessarily look right so it had a lot to do
with just intuition marty and bob were a cameraman dp combo we all worked with frequently um and
there was this thing that would happen because the dp the director of photography is sculpting
sculpting the shot frame by frame and you know you're putting your pieces in in forced
perspective but every now and then uh marty would turn to us and say i need in the top left of frame
i need a little thing that looks like some shit's hanging off of it and charlie bailey would be like
uh you've got 90 minutes go and build something and you'd go and run and slap some stuff together
throw some paint on and come on back and hang it from a c stand and then your thing
is like right in the frame sorry you got really excited no it's no i was there i was just there
those are some of the most fun moments running into the paint booth and like lauren and
everyone's like what are you doing you're like i got 40 minutes i got to make this that's so funny
i hadn't thought about that in a long time but there's like the different stages of like when
you're in in uh our department when you're doing maquettes and all that kind of stuff things are
kind of slower and and changes are not bad no you want to explore all the options change everything
it's like you don't get married to anything because someone can come in and change it and
that's part of the process yeah and then once you start shooting no changes right no god you can't
change anything what are you kidding you know so there would and there would be that lead up
to shooting and the shooting would always be the peak level of tension and anxiety and uh pressure
because once you're on stage you're paying for the stage and the entire crew yeah on on some
shoots you could burn ten thousand dollars an hour yeah more less you know but it's it's a lot
and so your time is more valuable on stage than it is uh in the shop and then certainly
in the art department there's this aspect of that high pressure decision making process
that i find like film like every other career film attracts a certain gene pool and that gene
pool tends to really like high pressure decision making where you have to alter your priorities
constantly on the fly and some of it's based on production some of it's based on the fact that
this is the director and that's the dp and some of it might be based on the fact that it's tuesday
but you better have all that straight in your head when you're making those calls
because there's no time yeah and i love that yeah that's exhilarating yeah it's it's yeah
definitely there's an excitement level that grows with all that anxiety i like to say
that uh time time pressure tends to hack branches off your decision tree yes right yeah i think i
i think i might use that quote or something similar of yours uh in my lectures for students
it's it's such a valuable life lesson i feel like absolutely but i used to i always use the
analogy of a toothpick on set might be worth ten thousand dollars because if you don't forget that
toothpick you could spend ten thousand dollars waiting for someone to go get that toothpick
right yeah so the thing is in a stage don't have the same value as they do in the real world
this is totally true the last thing i want to point out about making models at ilm is that for
much of the time we were at ilm the sound stages were actually across the road from the model shop
and so the last stage of indignity for any model that we were making and these models might take 11
people five six months to make this like a million a two million dollar model and we'd be pushing it
out into traffic in marin california to get it over to the sounds with a sheet draped over that
you knew was just ripping pieces off as it kind of blew in the wind and like people are driving
by and like holding cameras out the windows like every stop wasn't like screaming at you
yeah it was like the gauntlet well then every single driveway and crack in the road and
manhole cover and just oh just torture you you could just hear the sounds of cracking plastic
and you have just spent like weeks like and you know whatever happens between that shop and that
stage you have to fix that day right right right before anyone even looks at it i think it's a
great place to stop fun thank you so much for this walk down memory lane we could keep doing this
for hours but i think we're good thank you guys thanks for joining us thank you fawn thank you