hello adam savage in my cave uh answering some questions from tested patrons about my tenure at
ilm and shadowfax 1007 uh has a great question shadowflex 1007 wants to know wait a minute
what would you say is the best skill you took away from your time at ilm
it's going to be mold making not that i didn't know how mold making worked before i worked at ilm
but my exposure to mold making pre-ilm was only the work of one guy mitch romanowski uh
who taught me a tremendous amount about mold making how to think through it
how to imagine it what the philosophy was and mold making is a really really difficult discipline
because it's all about thinking upside down and backwards and also inside out kind of the way
sewing does too they have some similarities um but it wasn't until i got to industrial light magic
and met the folks in the mold room mike jobe and tony prestiado and the others uh mark ferenza that
sorry a machine i've got running over and the other side of the shop sounded like it stopped
running um it wasn't until i saw the craftspeople in the mold room at ilm that i really grocked what
a magnificent intricate complicated concerning amazing art form mold making can truly be
and to demonstrate this i want to show you a mold that i built that i think is the best mold
i have ever personally built um i was doing a job so this is uh
yeah this is like 2000 2001. uh galoob toys uh hired me to make some uh prototype models
for a mid-range set of star wars ships um here is a rough casting of the star destroyer that
i produced for them i didn't actually built this dave fogler uh who was the uh effects supervisor
on the last transformers film good friend of mine he did all the model making on this
uh this isn't a great casting it's got some separation here and there but like it took
us a few to get this right but to make this piece as a it was almost monolithic this was an add-on
um and also yeah let's show you some real close-ups of this thing you can see yeah
i'll shoot some better close-ups as b-roll uh this star destroyer was one of the ships that i that we
produced for galub and uh they wanted i think two or three of each ship um one they had to send to
lfl marketing another they sent to their factory etc um and i had to figure out how to mold this
and so i specifically remember having a conversation with mike jobe and tony preciato and
getting advice from them about how to do it and recently in storage in my storage space i found
the original mode oh no no no no no no no i'm totally wrong i didn't find this in storage john
duncan brought this by because i'd lent this to him like 12 or 15 years ago i found another
one of my models i found my tie bomber mold in storage recently um this is the mold that i made
for this ship and it's worth showing you because what i needed
was a mold that allowed me to remove this delicate shape from its confines right so the normal easy
cheap fast or not necessarily cheap but the fast and dirty way to do a mold is to put a pouring
gate somewhere and then pour a brick of rubber around this and then when you pull it out you
pour rubber in the pouring hole and it fills up the brick and that's got dimensional stability and
everything but for a model like this that causes a lot of issues you're going to have to cut that
block of silicone and you're not going to want irregularities along this leading edge
from that cut yes you could do a jeweler's cut that would eliminate much of it but
you don't want the hassle so i wanted a two-piece mold that held this in orientation but then i
didn't want the rubber to be too thick because i wanted to be able to peel the rubber off the resin
casting i wasn't going to cast these solid i i actually cast them somewhat hollow
and again like i said these are delicate so i need that rubber to be thin so this is
the mold that solved all those problems the outer jacket the mother mold is um
a ceramic hard plaster
whose name is escaping me at this very second but it's a it's an ultra cow
it's a super hard plaster uh it it actually if you had a thin chunk of it almost sounds
like glass when it breaks it's so hard and it's got some if you look here closely you can see
a little bit of fibrous material that's jute uh and jute uh which is like a hemp-based
sort of fibrous material is what the mold room used for supporting ultracal mother
molds so again all of this came from the the wonderful tutelage of the mold makers at ilm
okay so in order before i show you this i just want to like walk you through the
mechanics of thinking through this so if what i want is what's called a blanket mold
that is in two pieces that surrounds my ship that's fairly easy to understand a blanket mold
is a thin layer of silicone about an eighth of an inch thick maybe a quarter of an inch
that is the overall shape of the ship nice and thin so i can pull it off the resin but
it also needs to actually have keys that hold that blanket mold in the mother mold
so how do you do that well you end up actually doing a lot of work with clay and plaster and then
you remove the clay and you pour silicone into the interstices where there was plaster and yeah i
can't get more detail than that because i'm going to need drawings and supporting materials but this
is the mold that i made and 20 years later it's still beautiful it probably will survive one more
casting which is why i actually have it sitting on my mold table right now because i do plan to do
one last casting with it before retiring it old silicone gets brittle
you have to be very careful with how you handle it but if you look really close you can see that
what i did was i actually sculpted a clay blanket around the ship that the ship registered inside
of and then i keyed the outside of that blanket to the plaster mold and then in addition i have
these keys here that register it into the outside of the mother mold and in order to achieve real
good adhesion there i would precede every casting by putting a little vaseline on the inside of the
mold to pro to provide a little liquid suction to keep this very thin mold perfectly registered
to the inside of the plaster a motherboard this is not a mold i would have been able to even conceive
of had i not been able to watch the incredible craftsmanship on display in ilms mold shop and
yeah i learned so much from those guys and they were open books about my questioning
uh it was a real delight thank you guys for uh joining me on this trip down memory lane
yeah i will do a casting of this i will show you the the the final thing because i want to
i i don't have any of the castings of the ships that i built for glue i have all the molds now
and it's time to put them all back together all right thank you guys for those great questions
tested patrons please keep submitting your wonderful questions and i will continue
to answer them thank you guys so much i will see you next time