from ian teling who says what is the one thing that makes you proud when you watch the
films and say i did that the topoka city battle between obi-wan uh and django the topoka city so
there's a there's a shot online with me and tori belache working on the on topoka city buildings
that was actually a wonderful murderers row of some of my favorite people at ilm that built
uh built those buildings uh brian gernan was the lead supervisor on the model shop on episode two
um in that main big room for topoka city was me tori belachi john goodson john duncan
dave fogler i mean just like some of my favorite humans let alone some of my favorite crafts people
to work with um and in topoka city uh there there were many there were several low-lying buildings
and then there was this big hero building with this big sort of cunning that's sort of yeah
almost like a submarine conning tower on top and i got brought in late to do that hero building and
brian brought me in it's like you have you have two and a half weeks that's all that you have
um but you got to turn it out we just need to get this done and that is something i miss that there
is something that i really miss about that kind of high tension especially i will admit that group
of modelers we were all quite competitive with each other and that was a delight because you'd
be working like you're trying to do the best job you can you also want to do a little better than
that guy you want to do a little faster and you want to show off and you want to exult in the
in the delight of what you get to do and all of that was extend on that to poke a city build um
what i didn't know when i built the building and brian said you know this is a hero building
the detail needs to be it needs to hold up no matter how close we put the camera so
you get told that you you really pay attention and there's this point after you do the main detailing
the vacuum forms and then i use a secondary vacuform to penalize the outside of it and then i
the tertiary vacuum form to add more paneling and then i did the conning tower and then i started
adding styrene strip and then i made this pallet of little tiny greeblies and i sat there with a
it was really neat a pallet with edges on it and here is a little uh uh the underside of a soda can
filled with weld on three and i've got this like bin full of little tiny parts from like one 600
scale battleships and all these tiny things and i'm taking them with tweezers dipping them in the
glue and attaching them to the side and tipping them in the glue and it's this is the best part of
any modeling when you're doing that final pass and you know coming up with these patterns and they
use the universal gribly and everything and then when the movie comes out and django and obi-wan
have their whole battle on the on the landing platform of topoka city the entire background
behind them is my bottle it is like about 16 inches wide of maybe even less of my model
and it's filling the screen and like i have two of those in my film career the other one is the
payload bay of space cowboys when clint eastwood leaves the airlock in space cowboys which is a
sweetly delightful film by the way you should watch it when clint eastwood steps out of the
airlock that is a cg clint with his face like plastered into the spacesuit but he steps out
into my model and when that airlock opens what fills the screen is a 12 inch wide model that
i made i mean i spent six months on it it was great thank you for letting me tell that story
um matt holbrook sorry matt holbrook bull holbrook bowl that's a mouthful of a name
uh hi from the uk hello uk i hope to visit you again someday maybe by boat who knows
what or who is your most favorite star wars universe character and why
from any episode including the new disney ones ps thank you for helping keeping us sane
during these crazy dates you are welcome um i am doing it as much for myself as for anyone else
but frankly these live streams are a a huge part of what makes this bearable for me too
um i did a uh i did a couple of meet and greets for silicon last week virtual meet and greets
where people paid for a couple of minutes of personal time with me on a video chat and i'm
here to tell you it was really really great it felt like going to a con uh i came home
the same amount of elated that i do after any kind of fan receiving line because i find that
i find doing those meet and greets super invigorating they wire me up and i like can't
sleep for hours afterwards it's really lovely um so you're welcome my favorite character i mean
it's hand in chewbacca it's hand and chewbacca it's han and chewbacca they are they are a
singular entity to me it's not just hand han han i know there's a distinction and i don't make it
in my head so i'm sorry if it's driving you nuts how i pronounce it mr solo um it's not just han
solo because i'm never gonna be as cool as han solo so i can't quite fully identify with that
character because he is the epitome of cool and i'm not i've accepted that only recently
but but han i think that's right but han and chewbacca together
they make a team and they make a team with a
with the ethos that infuses my entire existence it is an ethos of working with what you've got in
situ resource utilization it is a team based on uh a a really great moral code hunt pretends that he
doesn't have a moral code but keeps showing up at the right moment to help the good guys because
you can't let a bad thing lie and that's that speaks highly of that character
and chewie is not just loyal he's not just he's not a pet he's a partner in every sense of the
word and the two of them could build anything and fly anything i mean that is just that is a great
pairing i like i consider them one entity and so my answer to that is honda chewing
yeah and i have i have i have cosplayed as both of them i've cosplayed as both of them i have an
excellent han solo outfit although i was recently thinking of redoing the belt simply because i have
a really good sewing machine now and i could do the belt from scratch and that's that's a
one day build that's in my plan han solo belt um but chewie when you cosplay as those two
chewie is the one man chewie like walking around a con dressed as chewy is like walking around
the world dressed as george clooney or i guess now if you like ryan reynolds yeah
george clooney is no longer a huge movie star like he's a movie star from the past right
isn't that weird now we have new movie stars we have oscar isaac we have timothy shalom can you
tell i watched the dune trailer like 40 times this weekend yeah i did and yes in response to your
question i'm already thinking about that still suit as a potential cosplay um peter ferguson
that name sounds familiar i think i might know peter ferguson peter ferguson says
hey i would like to know if any of your prop making for star wars was there a
favorite kit or other source you use for your greebles yeah i've covered this before
i don't think i have one up there now um look the the tamiya and hasagawa military kids and not the
super uh big scale small scale ones like the battleships but like the mid scale like 172
and one you know when you're building a tank and it's this big whatever scale that is
those kits from hasagawa and tamiya the the tooling is so beautiful on those parts and the
little pieces the little gribblies that come out of those the anzio annie is a really important kit
for star wars models the uh the flock veerling um the railway gun i think that's the one that houses
the uh uh uh the universal griebly um and then there's also like there's some airfix kits like
the air the space 1999 airfix was a great one and that was used extensively by british model makers
uh on alien and other other films being made at pinewood uh around that time but for me it's
tamiya and hasagawa those two are just my favorite my favorite parts and bits to work with at ilm we
used some of those parts with such incredible frequency that we actually would make up
cards with a little with little details glued to it then we'd make a silicone mold of that
so whenever the mold makers had overpoured they would just pour extra green leaves we
would use those and i have buckets of them around here actually i was doing some um
yeah i pulled out an old costume last week and i was doing some work on it and i was doing some uh
some detailing some grievely detailing and so i pulled down
i have an entire shelf up there behind me that's devoted only to aesthetic details like that like
greebly's and it's super unorganized and i was looking at it and it's time to get it organized
because i'm using it more and more um i'm doing more of that um all right kerry shanahan says
can you discuss scale and how you decide to figure out what scale you should make something
um it's always puzzled me like the nightclub in episode two that scale was often had to be
corrected by cgi how do you decide what scale to build and how do you keep it consistent
um on episode two that decision was made for me uh and it was actually based i
think it came out of the camera department you know the camera department looks at the
look everything is balancing all of these elements against each against
each other camera department would prefer to have everything full size if they could
they would always like things to be in as big a scale as possible because that that's the best
kind of shots but that's also expensive and so there's all this push pull between producers
and camera and the modeling departments and and all of that stuff um that being said um
it also depends on the talent of your model makers and it depends on what the
object is going to do if you're making something that's going to blow up
scale the scale you build it in becomes really important
specifically because as it blows up if you choose too small a scale the chunks that it blows into
will be too large there's a great example of this scale in the first superman movie
uh the christopher reeves donner film
it's wonderful it's a lovely film but some of the special effects have not stood the test
of time and the damn breaking and the water rushing out if you watch it now you will see
it's it looks like it was like it was built here in my shop it's not huge there are like
water droplets the size of volkswagen traveling through the frame as that dam breaks and that
is a terrific example of like just not choosing the right scale but it's also probably informed
by a whole bunch of factors including the fact that it's hard to get money on a film
to add money to your special effects so the producer might just tell you have to do everything
with x and then the special effects department it just only has that amount of money to work with
um so it's not any one person's fault like i said it's always a balance between things on this
uh on lord of the rings famously uh they had the ability to make their scale models really huge
and coined the term bigature because their tiny scale molecular models like of minas tirith are
actually like 15 feet high but what that gave them at that scale was a tremendous amount of
like the camera couldn't get too close that's the kind of work they do there that's kind of work we
did at ilm uh when we got to build that large on the matrix actually i got to work on a bigoter for
well over a year on the matrix sequels um when you finally meet zion and you see the dock where
the mjolnir and the other ships come in that dock was a bigotry the entire center elevator assembly
was probably about yeah about this by this by about this um and then long walkways those were
all practically built uh tons and tons of laser cutting fon davis and i were running this four
by eight beam dynamics laser cutter man we so abused that thing we could by the end of that
production we could take it apart and put it back together because like when you operate a
laser cutter at that level you're constantly having to fix it and beam dynamics was great
they would send people out and fix but also fawn and i ended up doing a lot of fixing ourselves um
but yeah again um those decisions are almost were almost always made well above my pay grade
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