oh oh no it's not show and tell it's a q a
hello everybody adam savage in my cave and uh this morning it's morning where i am
uh i am answering some of your questions that uh tested patrons have submitted um
i didn't look over these in the beginning
uh okay jared hinderer it's a fascinating last name jared hinderer hinderer i'm curious what
your people did for a living because it sounds like they got in the way of stuff
there's a great book called mother tongue english and how it got that way by bill bryson and
it points out that uh the only reason people got last names was because
we started doing larger censuses to figure out taxes and we needed to delineate between glenn
over there and glenn over here and so they'd say well this is glenn the blacksmith and this is
glenn uh the the fair the the farrier uh and they would get last names based on their occupations
however the farther away you were from where the the center of activity was the harder it
was to get to you and you know then as now the last mile is the real bug bear of governance
and you were if you were far from the center of activity you were also often likely to get a
last name based on what other people thought of you now if you live close to the action
you could run that off at the past but if you lived way out at the farm and you were like a
uh uh you had robbed somebody that's why there are last names like thief and robert
those are like maz jim the robber yeah i mean you know sorry jared hinderer so maybe your people got
in the way of stuff and the census takers were like hinderers that's what we're calling them
maybe it's just a germanic word for something total occupation i don't know about at any rate
jared wants to know for a job at a company like ilm how much of the hiring process is
based on prior work i.e a portfolio and how much is based on the applicant's willingness to learn
is a portfolio the end-all be-all of a model-making job uh no and in fact i don't
think my portfolio is the reason i got hired at ilm i think it was word of mouth uh in combination
and i think that's the split i think in anything you're gonna do for a living there are two aspects
to it there is your skill at the thing that you're doing and your ability to learn new aspects of it
and solve problems in it and then there's the relationships that you build along the way
and those two things are equally as important
so when i first interviewed at ilm which was probably like uh
early 1997 i think that's probably it could have been early 98 right i got hired in late 98 like
august september so i think i showed mark anderson my portfolio like in january or february of 98
uh and we had a lovely time i went over to their they at the time industrial light
magic had all these buildings on kerner boulevard in san rafael and there was one
where you went to the front entrance but it was just an address there was like
nothing on the front that said anything it's a kerner optical and you look through the window
and i could see a darth vader through the the the tinted window and i was like this must be it uh
and mark anderson met me took me on a tour through the shop sat down and looked at my portfolio and
as a supervisor now i know that that portfolio showed him all that he needed to know uh um
in terms of that i was hireable and at that point i don't think that they were
uh they weren't hiring more people so he just put me on a list and i think the difficulty if mark
told me correctly was that he ended up thinking that that was somebody else he ended up thinking
that i was a different person who he looked at their portfolio and he didn't think i i don't
know who he thought i was but he didn't call me when they were staffing up and it took my friend
christine ells and my mentor mitch romanowski both sort of hammered away at different people
at ilm and you should hire this guy if you're bringing in people hire this guy hire this guy
so the word of mouth and the relationships i think are what got me that work at ilm um
all that being said a willingness to learn is super important in any employee but it's not
again you a portfolio is not going to show you that
uh i've told the story before i'm going to tell it again i i at one point i was talking to an
art director that i was working with on uh on a film and because it was i was teaching at the time
at the academy of art college and advanced i was teaching advanced model making in the automotive
department at the academy of art and my students wanted to know what should i put in my portfolio
and i asked the cg supervisor of this film i was working on hey what should i what should i tell
my students and he said you know if you bring me a portfolio of stuff that you designed and built
he said yes it shows me that you're a designer and it shows me that you are a builder but it does not
show me what it took to get you from one to the other right like i look at something you designed
i don't know how close or far you were from where you started so i don't have any metric to know
like you might have built the most beautiful miniature wild west town that i've ever seen
but if it took you a year to do it i i'm not going to necessarily hire you to do a job that'll take
a couple of weeks that might be a bad example but you kind of understand my my point there
what the cg supervisor told me was bring me a picture of something that i know
just a second so what the cc supervisor told me was bring me a picture of something that
i know what it should look like like a 57 chevy he said if i see you bottled a perfect 57 chevy
then i know i can give you a picture of nearly anything and you could make it or draw it um
it's also about that interpersonal relationship if i'm talking to someone and i can feel the
confidence in their work i can feel that telling me honest stories about how it went i'm often
getting a feel for the kind of person i'm dealing with you know and i'm gonna look for humility i'm
going to look for ingenuity i'm going to look for excitement at some of the problems they solved
i remember one guy interviewed with me for something and he brought me all these pictures of
wind tunnel prototypes heat built at a skunk works in california for like classified planes
and i remember looking at these pictures and being like did you break any national security
laws to take these cause this is gorgeous but i don't feel like i should be looking at these um
look a willingness to learn is i mean it's a key to life right
a willingness to learn means a willingness to have your mind changed it means a willingness to
assess things as they are not as you'd wish them or hope them or dream them to be um i
have often stated that the the potential that mr jamie heinemann saw in me in 1993
and the degree to which he allowed me total access to his shop to expand my skill base i
didn't realize i was making myself more valuable i thought i was just getting this free awesome stuff
knowledge from it but jamie was very savvy by letting me learn on in his shop and you know
seeing the way in which i took responsibility for that learning he fomented in me uh that that skill
he helped really develop it and so i feel like working for jamie for those four years was like
going get my bachelor's degree uh i i would then go on and say that ilm was my master's
degree and mythbusters was my phd in what i have the slightest notion but something um
look if you're gonna
i so i was gonna say this i was gonna say if you're gonna go on a job interview you
should bring as much of yourself to that job interview as possible but i i have to temper
that that phrase with there are so many different jobs and so many different job applicants and
so many different people interviewing people for those jobs i can't discount
i can't discount the privilege of my position the way i grew up how i was raised all of that
stuff um but on the aggregate i feel like when you are interviewing for a job we i think in general
humans find the most satisfaction in doing things that they feel like they are making a difference
uh and you know you want to work at a place that values your contribution then
the ultimate goal is to bring yourself to that interview
and see if you are a match for that company and if they don't hire you maybe that's like maybe
that's a real bonus maybe if they did hire you they would have made your life a living hell
i feel like i'm wandering really far afield here jared has just asked a simple question how much
is based on the applicant's willingness to learn jared that's a really hard thing to assess in an
interview however in a good conversation with a good supervisor you should be able to see
somebody's passion their intellect their ingenuity uh and you should endeavor as an interviewee to
to to show those things if they are part of your roster of skills jared thank you so much for
that great question i hope my rallying answer somehow helped thank you guys keep submitting
your questions tested patrons and i will as always continue to answer them thanks see you next time