everybody Adam Savage here in my cave with a movie prop show-and-tell that
I've had way longer than I've been doing tested and yet I've never talked about
so I think it's time what is this in front of me no we are not about to do a
frog dissection video even though this has great resonance to me of high school
biology class and this is a frog but it is not a real frog it is a frog shaped
object this is in fact a movie prop built for an awesome movie I'm trying to
figure out how to do the reveal for you but I guess there's no other way to tell
you then this is one of the thousands of frogs made for the one of the last
scenes in the movie Magnolia in which frogs rain down from the sky on Los
Angeles it's an allegory or something I love the movie Magnolia is a terrific
movie it is yeah sticks would be after all these years I've watched it three or
four times and it towards the end of the movie spoilers frogs rain from the sky
like a biblical prophecy of some kind and this is one of those frogs right so
like you're making a movie how do you make frogs drop from the sky and
moreover how do you make that realistic and so the production contracted a
special effects company I'm not actually sure who made these frogs but they made
lots of them and this is one of them and they are kind of awesome objects because
it's more than just a frog shaped object it's meant to look correct when it falls
and that involves some cool technology
no someone's just working on the roof alright so we have our frog here what's
it made out of it's made out of rubber to be sure that's what I would make them
out of too but it's it's a specific kind of rubber that I have not worked with as
a casting medium this is made out of that kind of rubber
that like look at that do you remember those little toys little octopuses you
could throw on the window and they'd slowly like walk their way down the
window they still make some things like this
it's a super super low durometer rubber which means it's incredibly soft and
it's also sticky this feels genuinely gross and it leaves
a sort of an oily residue on your head so it's kind of gross in every way but
the best part about it is how realistically
it looks like a piece of biological animal it's not stiff like a hard rubber
frog would be it actually has a huge amount of lumen and I'm pretty sure they
probably chose that yeah that's the other thing is is it yeah if it plops
and it plops in a way that I find really super compelling and this is a great
piece of kit I'm not sure what this type of rubber is called again I didn't do my
research but it is just a fabulous thing I have no idea how they dropped
thousands of them whether there was just like dudes on scissor lifts throwing
them off for every camera shot or if they made giant dump baskets but if they
did they would have come down in clumps so even just like this sort of goes to
how much problem-solving is in making a prop for a film right like okay we need
frogs to drop from the sky it's not as simple as calling someone in saying we
need a bunch of frogs because you have needs for how those frogs move in frame
the story that they tell it if they just bounce off the ground you're not gonna
buy it you're not gonna you're gonna lose that suspension of disbelief so
when the special effects company gets called they not only have to figure out
how to make them what to make them out of and then how to pose them so that in
a neutral position they still look like a frog understand that sort of neutral
position that something gets cast and often has a huge amount of bearing on
what happens to it later in a film like how it moves and how it what its
attitude is to a certain extent so the special effects company has to make all
those calls and then the special effects team has to figure out how to dump all
those and I'm not exactly sure how they did the dump you
I just love that there's this big fat gross bulldog a bullfrog of a prop and
that it comes from such a like I don't know there's something about this prop
that's really sort of disgusting in a way that feels very immediate almost
like a horror film kind of disgust and the fact that this was built in service
of a movie that is so like not a horror movie Magnolia is so much more of a tone
poem about human sadness in Los Angeles and the things that connect and
disconnect us and the stories we tell ourselves about our families and all of
that and even in a movie a drama a beautiful Petey Everson directed drama
like that you still have to answer these really basic questions in the film crew
about like whoa okay frogs Oh also there's the question of how do you make
these frogs and make them cheap right so this frog is totally unpainted it's
been molded in a rubber and I believe that they made some hero frogs that were
lightly airbrushed for close-ups for the frogs have landed in the foreground and
then they simply chose a color they mix this disgusting kind of snot green color
for all the background frogs and that's also a fairly frequent movie thinking
you you paint the stuff that gets close to camera and you mold and color all the
stuff that's back there behind because there's no way you could afford to mold
and carefully trim and pain 5,000 frogs I have no idea how many many they made
for the film I will tell you when I bought when I bought these frogs I
bought them by the pound I literally bought 20 pounds of frogs and over the
years when people tell me that Magnolia is one of their favorite movies ever
know and then I'll bag up one of these frogs and send it to them because well
I've got it I've got probably 30 of 30 or 40 yeah they're not like there you go
that is a little bit of there's a little bit of film history they're a delightful
prop from a movie you wouldn't have thought of as a special-effects
extravaganza and yet still needing the same kind of service from a special
effects company this is Magnolia frog I'm Adam Savage we are still on lockdown
stay safe stay away from each other and I'll see you guys next time
thank you very much have a good day let's do this drop we go there is a one
last thing I'm noticing as I was shooting the slow-mo shots of this
falling and to be honest I was thinking that would be the end of the video and
yet I'm also noticing that as it falls if it falls and it's twisted it tends to
untwist and kind of slowly move and that is this whole other level of kind of
cool realism together to this I'm not sure if that was by design of the front
or if that was a happy accident but it's really neat if you're dropping a bunch
of these behind somebody some of those frogs if they're still moving it adds
this whole extra layer of realism that's really neat so there you go swimming
towards the camera