hey everybody adam savage in my cave with an awesome show and tell with tate sabicker hello
kate hello adam um kate built the blade runner blimp that we showed what is now what like seven
or eight 20 25 years ago yeah yeah a couple years ago um kate is a master model maker master painter
and has brought some bits of a movie she worked on to show us and they are very instructive in
terms of i'm always talking about um that a key skill for a model maker is prioritizing what needs
your attention and what doesn't yes because you could build a perfect anything with enough time
but there's never enough time so you have to choose your battles 100 that's a good overview of
this yes yes definitely what have you brought for us so these are actually from the film real steel
fighting robots with hugh jackman exactly uh at one point they go to a bit of a robot graveyard
if you will sort of a junkyard that's full of just random body parts of robots great and sounds like
my head the in-person practical set could only do so much they had a few big crates they had
some machinery around them but they wanted to do a big wide shot sweeping shot full of robot
parts so they came to new deal studios where i was working and said we need you to plus out this bit
so they gave us the original footage we saw the tiny corner that they actually had populated and
it was our job to fill the rest so this is like a a what we would call a set extension yes they had
the shot you're matching the camera's angle to that shot but whereas it's only like 10 of the
screen you're adding the other 90 exactly so uh our largest project for that was to create all of
these different trash bins basically filled with bits of robot parts i see some classic styrene
construction here yes so one of the the aspects of this is i created patterns uh which were i laid
out styrene strip and some bits of styrene sheet and created the different sides i want to say you
know there are maybe two different sides there's a front and a side that was then molded and cast
they then could create tons and tons of these pieces then somebody sat there put
them all together uh then we have the other aspect which is the junk that fills them
and that was a bunch of kit bashing from a lot of gundam kits model kits that's what this you've
got a little bit of styrene just to keep it up yep and then this is a bit of molded detritus
is that right exactly so you guys took a bunch of parts and made a casting yeah we took a bunch of
greeblies we we made a little square that looked like a good example of it and then that was molded
and casted and that way we could create tons of those to fill uh obviously we didn't need to fill
the entire box of the interior there so we took bits of styrofoam or whatever and glued that to
the top of it put that in there so this was a way to create what looked like full bins when really
it's just a little bit on top this is sort of the way they this is very much the way they did the uh
treasure in the hobbit uh the piles of gold coins were large sheets of castings of gold coins with
gold coins sprinkled over them exactly that way you have a few that look real tactile and loose
but really the the bulk of it is something that's cheap and easy to put up there now do you do
like i do when you see a movie shot where you're sure there's no way that that's a real place one
and two that they built all the things i start looking for the efficiencies yep yep yep and a lot
of times like say uh if it is a pile of money or something like that you'll see those defined coins
on top and then towards the edges you might see them get pretty soft in there the shadows drop off
a little bit it's kind of like being on pirates of the caribbean at disneyland where you're like
i see the real ones and i see the fake ones i will tell you that in that great scene in breaking bad
when uh when buell the big guy is sitting on that giant storage space full of money
i looked at that money and i paused breaking bad and i was like well the next half hour
for me is going to be spent estimating how much that is and i literally freeze framed
i figured out a rough distribution of 20s and hundreds and then i made a flowchart
the weight and the size and even considered compression and i was within 10 million dollars
it's 110 million dollars and i'd come up with like a hundred million dollars
that is that is respectable i like i'm so glad that you did that right
it required it required a little bit of math okay so talk about you said here
you didn't have to show all the garbage underneath here on this one you do yeah so you see these ones
were a slightly different construction again the frames were masked produced and then the insides
we laid in some wire mesh now you can see some of the junk that's in there and again the top
is a casting so that you can see the more detailed bits but let's see let's see if it'll pull out
there you go like tin foil yeah so you've got again a styrofoam block wrapped in i believe some
black wrap yeah and then squished up so that it looks like crunched metal and then what the genius
painters did was since each of these parts got a different color they carried that paint scheme
throughout and that's the real brilliance of knowing how to prioritize because
this is the kind of place where film model making is way less detailed than model train modeling 100
because the camera is going to go past this you're never going to take it in especially through the
great it's a it's a brilliant like efficiency i'm noticing okay years ago i was looking at a book of
ship cutaways and a friend of mine from pixar was like oh that's a great book those drawings are so
detailed i said yeah and he goes let's find the joke and i was like what joke and he goes no one
who had to draw anything that intricate is gonna it's gonna it's soul crushing to draw that much
they had to have included some kind of little they're going to slip something out
and sure enough on every page you could find someone pooping
and this kid's book is great way off in the corner of some guy like behind a door
so what i'm noticing here is is is a commonality i notice you said these are made from gundam figures
yes that's the the detritus which is great because like kids toys have wonderful curves and details
but i'm noticing a fist and i'm noticing another fist and i'm noticing i think there's even a third
yeah there's another one this is what model makers do to occupy themselves when they have
to do something over and over again and it's a good way to i think to try and separate this out
you know these aren't uh airplane parts these aren't random automotive parts like those are
body parts yeah oh yeah so that's not even a joke that is like it's robot parts i don't know i like
i i would try and stick as many hands in there as i could too i totally would or uh you include
like logo of a non-company yeah you've done that one yep yep totally well i mean on the blimp yeah
um and so these were these were both laser cut and cast in different in different formulations
or were these all cast backs these are all cast uh i believe i made the patterns to all of these out
of styrene and then they were molded and cast yeah we did not we definitely did not have an
in-house laser cutter yeah we would send stuff out occasionally to get professionally done but
only if we could spare the cash sure so yeah yeah it gets expensive hurry this is so beautiful i i
love i love how much storytelling you can do with less detail than you'd imagine right yeah i just i
thought it was a great way to showcase how much the eye is willing to believe with the minimal
amount put in right um fon davis and i were on the phone the other day and he was talking about
the old convention we used to say is will it look good on film hold on let me see yeah it looks fine
and that's literally we fond and i built a building for episode two it was the first
ilm set extension to be filmed in digital oh wow and all of us were nervous right we went really i
remember doing lighting tests on the thickness of the venetian blinds we had acid etched and
in the end it worked fine but like it was a much higher level of detail than the standard
frames yeah and to speak earlier um how you said that how this was meant to be a set extension this
was an interesting one to film because i feel like a lot of the model shots i had filmed before it
would be you know the model stands on its own and they they shoot it from whichever angle kind of
looks right but it's mostly about what works best for them this one we got so complicated with math
and angles there were c stands that were measured precise distances apart with a few of them resting
up here and then one set over here and they were spread out at precise points and constantly
being checked back to make sure it would fit the original and of course that was the scene of my
horrible embarrassing mess up where i had to crawl between them to fix something and
on my way back out you did something you bump one with one with your butt and then it like dominoes
and i just thought i was gonna die it was it was so mortifying i had the most wonderful crew chief
who jumped right in it was in front of our owner and everything jumped right in and said you know
what i was on a job once and i did this terrible thing and i thought i was gonna dive away but it
was totally okay and then the owner jumped and go actually i did one too and pretty soon everybody
was commiserating nobody was mad we reset i was like so focused but it actually helped save me i
think if somebody hadn't reassured me like that in the moment i probably wouldn't have been able to
focus the rest of the day but that kindness helped me jump in there and like get back to work right
everyone's there on the film set costing whatever many many dollars per minute and your heart just
how long did you guys have to put this set together i want to say standard for us was about
three months i think this one was a bit shorter i want to say a month and a half we had
both this set which also included a giant sort of railing system i want to say imagine like a
a gondola robot that would go down and pick some of these things up and i was in charge
i i brass soldered that whole thing together a month and a half to do that and this set and
there was a gundam that stood outside of an arena it was like a gigantic gundam that people could
walk through its legs and that was a model that we created an original gundam for so that was part
of it as well um yeah so i mean i you might if you're a beginning model maker you might
think wow a month and a half or three months to do a thing that time disappears so quickly
especially with the parts management your mold shop wants to know precisely how many you want
and you don't know at the beginning well you only know once they've started to turn them out
and then they you know if you want to change the amount that you're getting per day they get
salty about it it is a whole thing yes uh yeah it can spiral out of control very quickly too
i think that the giant gundam we made um was largely made by vacuum forming somebody was
carving them out of ren shape um and then we were we were vacuforming on top of it
and every other day somebody would mess up the vacuform on one piece of it and then that would
set us back and so it was like you were constantly trying to keep up with it um but luckily you know
when you're having to make a ton of these that just starts to go you're on a production line
at that point so i i love the behind the scenes of this kind of production because you then have
somebody pushing like a sandwich cart with like 200 of these on exactly and someone's immediately
throwing them onto the set and someone's using some streaks and tips to tie it together yeah
um tell me about after it was all set up you got to see it you get to see the camera
shot yeah how's that i have to say i was quite impressed it was one of those things where when
i was on set i was having trouble seeing it especially because this was such a funky setup
where there were different level c stands spaced out and i was just sitting there going like i i
don't really know how this is gonna look if it's really gonna be a totally cohesive shot
and then i saw the the wide shot and i was like oh that looks great
oh i totally buy that it's very similar to the way they did the hades landscape in blade runner
oh wow um there are there are you know large uh what do you call it cutaway silhouettes of
buildings for things to be seen in front of and behind multiple levels in forced perspective but
then towards the camera as the camera's moving again things placed just shot by shot to give
visual something interesting visually yeah oh that's so good but that that looking at it at the
first time that's that's the thrill yeah that's where you get to see how how your work shows up
i definitely saw like i think there was a panning shot or some wide dramatic shot and you see like a
small hugh jackman like walking in the corner and their tiny practical bit and honestly if i hadn't
worked on it i probably wouldn't have even thought about the fact that all the rest of that was was
faked that's so awesome um kate thank you so much for bringing these beautiful pieces and showing us
thanks for talking with me about it it's always much more fun with somebody who has the inside
information i never get tired of this stuff and like when one of these sets gets torn down
that's also a nice thing because you know the production company isn't saving every last bit
everyone gets a little bit of something for their home collection exactly and that's as it should be
all right thank you guys uh have a good day and we'll see you next time
hey everybody adam savage here in my cave with the amazing kate sabicker
who careful watchers of this channel might remember uh as having
helped me birth and done all all of the hard work birthing a blimp from blade runner
and this is a terrible segue should we start again that one's that's for instagram