Adam Savage from tested here next to friend of tested Brandon Allinger from
props tour of London hello sir thanks for having me good thanks for
coming by we have here some pieces of a new auction you guys have coming up it's
a different kind of auction for you but I'm fascinated by the artist whose work
it is we're talking about Nilo rodas jamero yes yeah that's right I met Neil
Oh a number of years ago when I was doing the Star Wars costumes book
because of course he designed the costumes for Return of the Jedi yeah and
I think a lot of people's a lot of Star Wars fans there early exposure to Nilo
was through these sketchbooks oh yes they did at the time I grew up with
these as well looking at these different iterations and ideations of parts of the
Star Wars universe I mean this is such an important like part of my childhood
yes no absolutely I think everybody has fond memories of these and you know they
were primarily Joe Johnston's work I think it started on the first film they
did one but then Nilo came on board I think in the summer of 78 worked on
Empire as Joe Johnston's assistant essentially the assistant visual effects
art director and then was part of the key group of designers after that that
was working really closely with George himself and for me that's that's one of
the most interesting things about Nilo is he's one of those sort of you know
generation one guys who was in there working hand in hand with Lucas in the
room with just you know it would have been a table like this with him George
Lucas Joe Johnson and Ralph McQuarrie going what's an Ewok and how cool was
that no it's it's insane and the the the to
elaborate on this story I actually know Neil oh and worked with him back in the
in the mid 90s I mean I knew Neil Oh before I worked for him as as a designer
of the slave one of course one of my all-time favorite chips and I loved Star
Wars for first putting the cockpit where I didn't expect it on the Millennium
Falcon like that would felt non-standard and then the slave one was like what the
whole ship like blew my freaking mind right what's it doing but I got to work
with Neil Oh on both flubber and home alone three mm-hmm and I got to watch
what you got here is some iterations of sketches and many different sketches
sometimes of the same object with different points of view and different
ideas around it and I got to participate in exactly that while working for him
when he designed the weibo more for flubber he had his own designs and
he also was like I'm just not sure I've got enough scope so he hired like three
or four other designers for a day to quickly bang out like dozens of sketches
to kind of really wrap his mind around a whole bunch of different forms before
honing in on the one that we ended up building on it's interesting it was
really cool to watch the process happen and to watch him you know there were
points where I had questions like what should these computer carts beat he was
like great question let's figure this out
and we sat down with them and he's like okay on this one I'm gonna put a piece
of tape I'm gonna write one of my daughter's names there and this is the
first time I saw the Easter Egg really boring into a classic tradition obsessed
yeah yeah well he's a talented guy you know when I worked with him on the
costume book he just had great stories and great memories and I think he got to
do those costumes for a Return of the Jedi almost by default you know just in
the early concept meetings he started drawing characters and then it was well
what does it look like well I guess it looks like this and Richard Marquand
specifically the director liked what he was doing and said Neela should do the
costumes but of course he had never done costumes I mean he's an industrial
designer right he went to San Jose State but like all these guys and like so many
people at ILM where you worked it's just that there's talent everywhere and that
it's it's it crosses multiple disciplines right so people can step in
and out of different things and and and and these guys specifically could just
draw and just design and just brainstorm stuff it's really amazing well and in
the same way that like the early McQuarrie paintings they don't just
describe objects in a universe they describe an entire universe and and
Neela's worked us to I know having worked with him what a narrative thinker
he is he's really considering the whole story in the whole universe and actually
I've just forgot this until just now but Nilo is responsible for my first
intersection with Hayao Miyazaki okay that I was working on home alone three
and this would be 1996 and he said go to Japan town go to their video store buy
this video called Laputa you won't be in English it doesn't matter this would end
up being castle in the sky he said the first five minutes of this movie is the
greatest first five minutes of a me movie ever it's you don't need to know
the language of what they're saying it's all totally clear and he's completely
right it's a mind blowing opening and I still have
that VHS tape that he exhorted me to go by very cool now that was at ILM there
was no that wasn't a me Heinemann's shop that was a colossal pictures model shop
our job there was a roboticist and engineer
named Gary platic I believe who was doing the weebo the hero we Bo's with
all of their mechanics Jamie was doing a couple of simpler we Bo's had some and
all the stunts we both so every time I we both got thrown into a couch the
exteriors of all the weibull's were done in Jamie's shop and I was the one to
exact you form young into dressing in the final painting on it all of it cool
it was you know what's what came through the more I realized how much history he
had and how I kept plumbing him for information about working with George
and working on the Star Wars films was how much he still enjoyed the process
there was no jaded miss in me was love of the design and that's actually really
clear and these drawings which are again it's a different option for you these
are new drawings they are yeah so so I kept saying to Neil oh hey why don't you
do some new sketches you know comic artists frequently get asked to do
Commission's I said do some sketches we'd love to see you do some Star Wars
sketches you know you have such a great style that distinctive ILM style and and
would love to see your take on and he finally said alright I'm gonna do some
but I'm gonna do him a little different and I didn't know what that meant at
first but it bench it basically meant he wanted to revisit the ideas like you're
saying it's all about the concept and what is it in the story and not just you
know for him it wasn't just I want to remember the speeder bike and draw it or
the chicken Walker it was well what should a speeder bike be and let's play
with that you know and and many iterations and so that's what some of
these things are is it's just new takes on classic designs you know here's a
speeder bike with it with the sky trooper on it but instead of sitting
he's standing and Mila said the concept for this was just what if he was riding
a really big cannon and that's his only objective is to shoot and destroy you
know I know you I look at that drawing and it makes me maybe this will end up
being a one day build because I know that and it makes me itch to make a
prototype it's just a cool design oh yeah and and and one of the things that
he talked about also was how in that era that him and Joe and Ralph working on
things the concept was always about making it look like it was from
yesterday but behave like it was from tomorrow
so it's it's very World War one Hardware armor
plates things like that it's not slick or stylized or or you know 3d printed
it's more kit bashed and hammered out of real worlds well yeah I years ago I had
opportunity to ask Lauren Peterson my friend and one of the original ILM
modelers for Star Wars about the difference between those early
prototypes of the Star Wars ships and the ones they eventually came out with
and he talked about the FD a-- the aesthetic being what he what they were
calling boilerplate yes but it felt like you were in the engine room of his ship
so you didn't know what all those dials meant but they clearly were part of a
narrative and when Neil Oh does these things it's like up close you can see
this is ballpoint pen or marker and it's very very rough but move it like four
feet away and I could build an entire model from this I don't need any more
information than this drawing to build a complete shooting model I like to say
one day built and be cool this is totally something we're gonna do and I
love the energy in these you know look at this one look look how loose all the
line work is but one of the key things here is this is all done with ballpoint
pen on paper and so nothing digital nothing computer nothing even pencil he
said you know he works without erasers and that's part of the fun of it it's
just you put it down and it becomes what it is and so all this this line work is
really searching for what this thing could be and in a sense very loose but
it also has a great energy to it and for him he said that line work that
searching is part of the design process it's where you're finding things well
there's one in here that I particularly love for that is this the stormtrooper
the trooper holding a gun that isn't drawn right he started with some of the
well there's gonna be a scope on it and there's some sort of group thing there
but he hasn't gotten to the gun and yet still in the same way that a Mobius
sketch is so evocative right just a few simple lines the same thing writer the
gesture is all yeah because you don't need it it tells the story as is exactly
and and and so you know all these things are different versions here's a snow
speeder with a single cockpit rather than a dual cockpit yeah a bit like the
a wing cockpit right I love the oblong guns up front and the the cockpits much
more streamlined yeah they're rigged the real one is square yeah and then all the
coloring on these was done in colored pencil and he said he actually went and
looked for markers but the markers they used at the time were
time-based and he said you can't really get those anymore he said the modern
markers which are water-based don't blend the same way and so he said it
doesn't behave like it used to when they were doing these things so he sort of
recreated the same effect through through colored pencil I thought that
was fascinating this is a probe droid robe yet from the start of empire and I
like that minion the probe droid minion version and this so he did a series of
chicken Walker's or Scout walkers and what he said about the Scott Walker was
he always felt like it looked like it was built out of plywood yes I guess -
yeah - too rigid and so he did a more organic a curved surface here and then
he did he did four or five of these that are all in the auction and just the
other day on Instagram Doug Chang who of course is amazing
production designer of the prequels yes many other things yes and still in there
designing today and Lucasfilm creative director I believe he did a version of
this and he posted on his Instagram where he said you know here's something
inspired by a piece I saw by Neil rodas recently which was one of these sketches
in our auction so how cool is that that's so cool um I will have a story to
tell you I'm gonna bring an object over to show it hold on just a sec speaking
of the difference between the curved and the straight I was one of the first
modelers on Episode two and one of the things that I was asked to come up with
was what might the predecessor to the sky hopper that you see in Star Wars guy
look like so I came up with something that was quite similar in some ways but
added some paneling and definitely changed the whole engine design how cool
apparently when George saw this I wasn't in the meeting myself but when George
saw this he said yeah the only reason the sky hopper looks the way it did is
because all we had was plywood like something more rounded it's like fair
enough I totally get that but interestingly out of that limitation
came a certain aesthetic that it kind of worked right I mean same thing with the
set deck it's like the reason it looks like aircraft parts just because it is
because you could go to the aircraft junkyard and go I'll take that and then
one here one here one there and that looks good if you visit the Flying
Fortress bomber and you look at the polycarbonate Gunners ball from
underneath you're like oh half of Star Wars aesthetic is in this ball it is
completely clear that this was where they grabbed so much of
and it also doesn't hurt that a lot of the Star Wars stuff was built by
out-of-work aerospace engineers in 70 so that was their background yeah yeah but
but so there's a whole range of different sketches here you know a bunch
of scout troopers which was one of the things in Hilo design for Jedi a bunch
of different speeder bikes here's one where the color is more orange and again
he's riding it more like a jockey on a horse yeah in this sort of upward
position which I thought was very cool I like this try I mean I like the way in
which it feels so Star Wars but it feels like a new approach but still doesn't
change that sort of hand modded feeling of Star Wars it's not too slick right
somewhere it fits right in yeah which is which is part of the phone okay yeah
yeah these are my favorites and again the line work you know just the energy
that's that's borne out of all that is so cool
oh yes some more color he said he loved the tontons just thought they were great
great design and creature I loved one of the things I loved about those books
when they came out when I started to look through them is exactly the way in
which the film was showing its homework mmm the way in which you got to see this
incredible art department exploring all sorts of different avenues to come to
the one they ended up with mm-hmm and that was really inspiring as a young
maker realizing that it's just as much an
iterative process for someone at the absolute peak of their field as it is
for anybody else yeah I mean that's interesting to hear because probably
with Star Wars there was as much in the way of documentaries and making of type
books these art of books as any other movie that had come before it right so I
think there's probably a lot of people out there working in the film industry
you could speak to it who were inspired by not just Star Wars the movies but
Star Wars the process of making a movie who went on to get involved in that
industry well it's the first time you know I'm silent running was before that
really important in 2001 but the the cultural intersection when those two
films was so much different than Star Wars because in Star Wars the modelers
and the the shop itself Industrial Light and Magic was one of the stars and what
I felt right and became one of the sort of the cultural juggernauts that we
understand people I mean for me looking at like film Famous Monsters of Filmland
in the 70s was where I discovered people did
verlan yeah and you know as looking at oh my gosh this is a sandcrawler
that that's an imperial tank so before they had walkers for HOF they were
thinking tanks right so this is sort of going back to a Hoth thang amazing and
all these are being sold in the auction which is running right now you know
because they're modern sketches they're relatively affordable they're starting
between 150 and 500 dollars and you know to get an original sketch by one of the
key guys who was there at that time pretty wonderful and not more a lot
would be a lot more if it was from the film it'd be to be far more expensive I
appreciate you constructing an option in which the the price threshold is lower
it allows more people to enjoy this I have some original sketches from films
that I admired that I purchased over the years and I love having them up on the
wall yeah that actually I find it really inspiring to see them framed and given a
place of pride well I think these designs you know designs in general in
the film production process they're so important right because it essentially
all starts on a page I mean all the things around us that the you've build
replicas of at some point 90 percent of those started in somebody sketchbook
right I mean that's that's the birth of it early and one of the things I loved
about being a model maker specifically for Doug Chiang which was when I was
much more advanced as a model maker is that Doug would come through and you'd
get detailed sketches from him at the front end hmm and then as Doug learned
to trust my as Doug learned to trust that I understood what he wanted he can
give you less instruction okay unless it's trucks and then he'd go hey under
here that's all you figured that out right and you get to do this really
really cool stuff yeah oh look at the deeply running tauntaun how cool was
that that's fantastic I like that he's got some sort of falcon hood on or
something like yeah just slightly different you know just sort of working
from more of the concept of serving a story as opposed to what did it look
like exactly in that final movie and he's using a little bit of white out
here on top of some of the sketching I mean again the work is all clearly
extending each of these drawings it's a beautiful collection yeah I mean when I
talked to Neil oh he he describes himself as a designer not an artist but
there's a lot of artistry in these works and it sort of it takes on its own life
and even though in his mind it's all about
serving the director explaining a concept to a director I think someone
like myself or anyone who's really a fan of pop culture you you look at and you
go that's a piece of art totally I don't make the distinction yeah Brandon I
really appreciate you taking the time to come up here and show us these it's
really inspiring and the auction is going on right now it's running right
now yeah it runs through this Friday and yet take a look prop store comm prop
store calm thank you guys for joining us see you in the Star Wars universe