hey everybody adam savage in fond davis's cave we're at faunco
in la how are you my friend i'm good um fawn and i worked on a lot of movies together back
in the day and a couple of them were the star wars prequels episodes i worked on episodes one
and two you worked on one two and three one two and three and then the the special editions right
that was before that right yeah oh wow i think that's how george tested the waters to see if
the world was ready for more star wars did you get to work on that star destroyer restoration
yes this this conning tower of the star destroyer went to the smithsonian right it was known as the
whole thing it was the eight foot star destroyer from uh empire strikes back and it was mounted
on a steel pylon that attached to the internal armature of the craft which is how you mount them
when you shoot them and they loaded it into the semi truck uh they got it there and then on the
way back just the vibration of the semi truck and the starstruck was just on this one pylon
this is before they started shipping things like this with the respect that they deserved
and the uh yeah the vibration everything drove the pylon through the ship and the ship
ended up on so when they when it got to island the star destroyer was on the ground
and the pylon and the armature was just up on its stick with pieces littered throughout the
the truck i thought pictures of you guys were all working on it it was a lot of rest like and we
were very faithful to the original uh orientation of all the parts so it was like building a
three-dimensional puzzle any of the gribbles or the pieces that fell off we will we oh right you
had to hold them on and see if the glue where it cracked would match the same shape as the part
we did that for we had just bags and bags little ziploc bags of parts we had to glue back on
that's after we repaired the whole top after the structure was done and we had to re redo
all the fiber optics there's i think it's over a half a mile of fiber optics in there in that
model for every little blinky light you see is everything a window is a fiber optic yeah okay so
we were planning to shoot this video and we still will talk about these maquette models and this
and model making in general but i'm actually really curious because i hadn't it hadn't occurred
to me but as you were putting that together that star destroyer was built in the 80s right yes
so what about its construction surprised you were there any things that weren't being done anymore
by our generation that you learned from looking at the inheritance you know it's interesting there
was a lot more acrylic structure than i was i was thinking there would be because that's something
that we had definitely phased out yeah for later built we would use plywood even plywood for the
interior and then styrene for the exterior paint in the butt well it's it's brittle yeah
you know so uh also i mean we built to be fair everything that we built for the prequels we
knew was going to end up in an exhibit somewhere because they had already been doing exhibits for
star wars props right so everything we built we built as if it were going to a museum exhibit
right we're finishing every last bit of it and back then steve and lauren and those guys
they're just getting their destiny just got to get it into the stage right yeah so it's
a completely different standard so yeah so a lot of the older models aren't aren't built
full of finish and they're not built to last yeah we used to joke at colossal pictures
if your model fell apart on the way out of the stage after the shoot you built the perfect model
that was jamie's axiom about mythbusters we built it to work for the day we're experimenting and if
it falls to pieces we've done exactly the right he worked at colossal so he probably got that there
um that's right i have seen behind the scenes pictures with big sheets of acrylic
in the star destroyer and in the millennium falcon yeah before they
that's fascinating yeah okay so let's talk about about maquettes because uh this is a
lot of the kind of work that we would do that was some of the most fun work like i like to
point out to people who think that working in special effects is a dream job like every other
job that is still 90 drudgery and tedium and it's exhausting and a lot of terror yeah right
of being on set while everyone's staring at your model that doesn't work yes
um but every now and then if you do the tedious stuff with enough assiduous dedication you get
a chance to do something really fun yeah and this is an example of one thing i did where
uh early on in the production process for episode two brian grenan our supervisor said
uh they'd like to see a maquette of the predecessor to the t16 skyhopper
so i chose to make this the t11 skyhopper and i followed many of the form factors i added these
more curvy engineer cells that's vacuformed i added this curved engine cowling in the back
and apparently it was one of the first meetings of maquettes for episode two and george soton goes
well the only reason we made the t16 look like it did is because we only had plywood and no time
and so brian brought this back to me and he's like george didn't like anything about this i guess
just keep it and i'm hoping that no one's gonna get pissed off that i still have it if you do
i guess call me um but this is like this is this is this is classic ilm model making styrene basic
construction greebly's on the underside can can you talk about what it was like to go up into the
loft for getting griebly's oh it's like a kid in a candy store definitely well first of all you i
mean you you when you went up in the loft you knew that some of that stuff had been around since at
least empire strikes back right right and so this is this is a lot of model kits for detailing yeah
detailing yeah just office passed off models from previous shows which is always really amazing too
but they had yeah we had our go-to's we definitely had our go-to kits that were there and uh every
last truck part every catalog every plastic part all the evergreen in the catalog yeah it was it
was it was amazing there were star wars ships lots of star wars model toys because they were based
off castings that had been designed in-house so we just used that stuff as well yeah so yeah i just
i remember going up with a with a tray and just going through the models and then you'd like have
a pair of nippers and you'd like and you'd end up with this little palette of sort of detailing
and then you'd sit there with your model and you'd be like oh i think this one might go doop there
and now i'm looking at this i was just asking fawn is like is that an eagle lander is that one of the
earl kits from 1999 or wait they didn't make the 1999 kids crazies you think you would never forget
yeah that stuff when you're doing it and then one day you forget it's totally totally it's not what
you'd expect i still like pick up a hasagawa model and i can tell that it's hasagawa just by the
quality of the cast yes the quality of the molding the same thing with tamiya yeah that's true mad
respect for them yes and it's and i i've always really admired the art of griebling i think it's
it's undervalued in the world of model making because it's not just grabbing random parts and
putting them on explain why because it's got to serve it's got to look like it serves a purpose
and then there's also a lot and we learned all this at ilm on the fly yeah and and every show had
its aesthetics and it wasn't like no one really wrote any of this stuff down there that's right we
would we would talk about it at lunch there was a game i'm gonna sidetrack a little there was a game
where we would write on a piece of paper just uh three shapes and we would hold it up and everyone
in the lunchroom would have a guess whether it was star wars or star trek so and everyone in
that room was really good at nailing that just that but everything had an aesthetic and it
included the gribbles you know so and you didn't want to overdo grebels you'll notice that like
there's always a a smart use of open space and then a cluster of grebels and then maybe another
cluster of grebel's connected with a pipe or two but this is the very star wars aesthetic because
that what you just described doesn't happen in star trek in star trek you might have five
things that are all the same all lined up next to each other it's it's a utopia five unbroken
things but in star wars there'd always be the fourth one is missing and there's a rust streak
yep that's the star wars is we haven't gotten around to fixing that part yet star trek is we
worked it all out a long time ago it would always be that one pipe that went off to just a box
um i think you and i both had a similar moment which was uh we've shared a mentor in mitch
romanowski yes um who was an amazing unbelievable model problem solver just incredible and mitch ran
the shop at nightmare before christmas you worked on that show but when mitch first got up to ilm
one of the first things he said to me is we're working at a desk together and mitch goes dude
we're at ilm do you know what that means and i said what he goes it means we're
wizards because every news story about islam or the wizards up in san rafael california but then
after we'd been working a bit on star wars and then a little galaxy quest then back on star
wars mitch came to both you and i at some point and was like dudes can you walk me through the
star wars star trek thing again and we're like oh sit down boss we'll fill you in on the whole thing
those are proud moments for sure mitch also had this uncanny ability to get so much
done without ever looking like he was working i never remember rushing at all crazy
because yeah he was never in a hurry he never walked quickly he always had a coffee mug with
him yeah and somehow he would always hit all his targets which a lot of model makers couldn't no it
was very very uh difficult work and i still don't to this day i have no idea how he got it done
there was a thing at ilm where if you weren't gonna hit your mark though
it wasn't like someone was gonna tell you it's like most often you're super
you just noticed someone else would be sitting next to you and they'd be like hey i'm here to
help you for the day and you'll be like okay and then you think i guess i'm not hitting my
marks that's how i work yep you didn't get yelled at you just got a little more help
yeah i got yelled at after the fact right like it took a little longer than it should have when
i when at the end of the t2 set because i went over oh right t3 yeah at the end of that set yeah
brian told me you took a little bit long to take care of us in that one they started they started
tracking things closer so we can get those numbers real time later yeah that made it
a lot easier but yeah before that we were just guessing i think we spent this much
um will you talk about these two beautiful so these these okay so this is kind of funny this
this actually dips into my childhood because steve golly was one of the original ilm model
makers on star wars and i think he's the only one that has his own uh trading card of just him on it
building a star destroyer and this is the original orange series from the 70s so i've got that card i
worked with him at james the giant peach before i got to isle i didn't realize he was on that
yeah and uh so i i of course totally nerded out on him and had a lot of fun talking about this stuff
and he loved sharing it because i don't know if he was around steve was super good about checking
in and remembered everything yeah like he would tell you oh yeah i found that to agree with you
so uh one of the the biggest debates among model makers uh when i was making uh the the tie fighter
model kits was what color is it because in the original movie they overexposed the film and they
looked white or a very light gray yeah and then an empire strikes back they were kind of a blue gray
and everyone thought that they actually changed the color of the tie fighter from one movie to the
next but it was just the way they shot them they were still exactly the same color wow and then so
the next question was what color is that you know and then steve actually told me which paint and i
immediately had to build a tie fighter so i could paint it with the color that he told me about
now speaking of steve and paint i think we should cover one thing that steve was unbelievable at
which was walking into a room you were painting a model in and touching the wet part
yes god this guy steve is the nicest guy in the world but you walk in go hey hey that model looks
really oh buddy i'm really sorry i just put a huge thumbprint right there and you'd be like what
i don't know how he always somehow had this he had to touch your model where the pain was
he'll be happy to know i've been following in his footsteps in recent years yes
uh dude thanks for uh thanks for covering a little memory lane with me yeah absolutely it was
a pleasure thanks you guys we are uh this is adam and fawn from fond's cave funko see you next time