hey everybody norm from tested here and of course at the end of 2020 it's time
for us to share our favorite things of the year i have an array of a few things i've picked up
during the lockdown working from home and as this tradition i'm going to start off with
some coffee table books only three of them this year i think all very worthwhile the first one is
from one of my favorite poster artists an artist called laurent deru i think is how you pronounce
his name but he came out with a collection of his work he's done posters for companies like
mondo movie posters officially licensed amazing art his collection for back to the future for
alfred hitchcock's the birds he did some recently for some hairy housing films with the company ish
i can't afford to buy all those posters and they do sell it very quickly they're very expensive
on ebay and so the next best thing is to get them collected along with some kind of sides the works
in progress uh beautifully printed in this book called mirages next up a photography book this one
i saw being promoted on a few photography blogs and i had to pick it up it's called toki yo from
liam wong and he spent years photographing tokyo nightlife and the city streets in a way that it's
cyberpunk i mean by the time you watch this cyberpunk 2077 isn't out yet probably so uh
relish in the cyberpunk that is in the world today through these magnificent photographs i mean i
like taking photos with my phone and my dslr but it's the kind of thing like looking at even the
cover photo here i'm trying to pick out how do you capture this moment what is that neon right
it captures a place where the lighting in that world it's a time and place technology
in lighting has changed so much in the urban landscapes but tokyo is where you get the
mixture of the density the signage that lighting the rain i mean it's where blade runner and
all our favorite noir sci-fi cyberpunk films and stories uh really pull from and
the collection of photos here you know not only is it inspirational but it's it's kind of like
intimidating really it makes me want to be a better photographer myself now my last book here
actually got as a gift for my wife danica and i mentioned it on the podcast a couple months ago
but it's called the art of the hollywood backdrop it's a heavy tone this is what you think of when
you think of a big coffee table book with a slip cover and of course wizard of oz and on the actual
cover of the book itself oh it's heavy mount rushmore from north by northwest now we're all
big fans of the show in the mandalorian of course lots have been talked about the technology of the
show using the volume to create these backdrops or in camera you know and before that we're
using blue screen and green screen but before that when you didn't have digital compositing
it was actually large hundreds of feet wide full painted backdrops that were used to represent
cityscapes they were used to represent landscapes when they were filming on location or more likely
when they were filming on a soundstage and those backdrops so many of them were lost to history
but they are actually some being preserved by the very same companies that used to produce them
and rent them and this book dives into some of the most notable ones how they were used the artists
you know it's like matte paintings you know the artists who painted those are so rarely credited
but we do get to see their styles and how they influence the look of film even though you might
not have noticed it when you were watching it this is one of my favorite books of the year
now i'm going to switch over gears from books to gear and i've been buying a lot of gear to set
up my home office as we've been filming at home the first is this portable hard drive i've been
working a lot on my laptop in fact if you watch the videos i've shot at home they're all filmed
with my laptop my dslr and while most laptops come with decent amount of storage 500 gigs a terabyte
i want more especially if i'm ingesting a ton of video files and so this samsung drive usb-c it's
nvme uses that pci express lane so fast it's not cheap but i got the max capacity at two terabytes
and you can actually edit at least 1080 video not sure about 4k video but 1080 video off of
this drive it makes moving my workflow from my laptop to my desktop so much easier incredibly
fast drive they come out new versions of this every year this version has some biometric
security but it's not necessary and if you have a computer doesn't have the fastest usbc the latest
generation you actually don't need the newest ones but the form factor here if you have something
like a macbook you don't want to pay that apple up charge for storage getting one of these drives
without growing it to your laptop is a lifesaver in terms of lighting though i went on this whole
journey this summer configuring my tabletop for miniatures photography and product photography
and one of the things i looked to was inspiration from you know adam's workbench he has his lock
line with his flat panel lights and they're pretty strong they're actually really great for lighting
not only the thing he's working on but himself as well but i didn't need something as strong and
there's this whole kind of renaissance in terms of led panels out there last year i talked about
these loom cubes small led very powerful lights i can use with snoots with barn doors and this year
a bunch of companies have kind of put out these small led panels i mean they've been doing it for
a while now but it really feels like it's in this past year that they've exploded in the
marketplace become a little more commoditized i'm not sure if that's because manufacturing over in
in china and they're working with the suppliers but there are different it's not just like these
white labels that they're sticking their own brand into so a company like aperture makes this really
wonderful light it's the mx you know flips on you can change color temperature
between warm and cold uh or brightness um you know it's not gonna work great outdoors but
indoors for photography miniature photography especially with a little bit of a diffuser here
it's actually really powerful i travel with this all the time sandmark also makes one and again
form factor varies right this one has a heat sink so it doesn't get hot this one doesn't have
a heatsink still doesn't get hot actually more lumens here battery life is amazing
uh the thing i'm not as big a fan of is uh the controls they don't have as easy button controls
it's a more of a scroll wheel here for color temperature and brightness but that's the thing
these lights not only can you get them between uh your warm and white and bright to dim there's also
full rgb and rgbw ones you can really light up your scene if you're shorting a shooting a short
film shooting stuff in the dark for photography these lights are wonderful and there are some
notable differences so do your shopping but i'll link to these i use in the description below in
terms of mounting the lights these this is not lock line and this is the system that i ended up
using so the lock line that adam uses stable very maneuverable but if you extend it a little too far
over the the where you have it mounted it can drop if you don't have an armature wire through it so i
needed something a little bit more rock solid and the first thing i found online was this arm system
it's a locking arm and so you can swivel it a couple different ways it doesn't do full
you know multi-axis turning it's basically all along one axis in terms of the extension and then
you can rotate it but once you lock these arms in there they're solid like i can put weight around
the edge and it's tightly mounted to the edge of the desk and it can extend pretty far but what i
want to do was get more quick maneuverability to the actual lighting point than the angle i
can point it at and as opposed to using just one ball head why not multiple ball heads and that's
what these little mini magic arms are a magic arm is a system you can use them for cameras
where you basically loosen at one point and it just all three points droop very easily then
to position where my light is if i for example just want to use a little overhead here
and then tighten it up and just through one point of tightening it stays rock solid and stable and
so for example i can then perfectly if i wanted to illuminate over this figure low high at an angle
super easy and i have a couple of these around my circular table that i work off of so basically i
can light from any direction overhead and combine like a little bit of a flood light
uh what would be the equivalent of a sky panel with something that's a little more more like a
directional arc and combination of those lights makes photographing miniatures super fun uh
speaking of miniatures i've been doing a lot of 3d printing of them and while i don't have a firm
recommendation for my favorite 3d printer of the year because i'm still in the process of testing
those i do want to give a big shout out to the miniatures community that's really embraced 3d
printing there are so many talented 3d modelers out there who are producing files that you can
buy and you can support them on patreon or you can purchase them or download them for free
people are releasing them all over in places like thingiverse and my mini factory and you
can if you buy a 200 to 300 sla 3d printer you can print some pretty amazing things that then you can
paint yourself so one artist i really love is paul braddock he has a bunch of
iconic 3d models that you may have seen all over internet like this skull through a stormtrooper
or a skull through mandalorian but on his website you can actually purchase
some beautifully high resolution 3d files that i've been printing and some of them
turn up to be wonderful figures that i'm gonna end up painting so supporting that model 3d modeler
and miniatures community is one of my favorite things uh this year but if you don't want a 3d
print you just want to photograph things you can buy off the shelf i'm of course all about the
collectibles and the six scale figures that's my jam and so i want to share a couple in that
world uh we're gonna talk about accessories first this is from a company called replicate
and they started a kickstarter uh for a line of six scale miniature arcade cabinets they did
tempus they did street fighter 2 which actually has green fighter 2 and street fighter 2 turbo and
upcoming there's a dragon's lair that's just about the ship but a couple things i love about this one
they're perfect for a desktop form factor they're not going to take up a ton of space uh while i'm a
big fan of the arcade one up stuff that's i don't have all the space for that and this is wonderful
and they're fully playable fully licensed so street fighter 2 here licensed by capcom actually
plays on this wonderful screen the marquee lights up these buttons and the sticks actually work
and i mean they really were well thought out in this there's a player two option has usb ports
in the back the battery is actually inside here chargeable battery so you don't need to have it
plugged in it's a little portable and not only can you plug this in via usb for two players
if you have a full size joystick usb stick you can actually plug that in as well and it will
support it it's a little bit pricey at a hundred and twenty dollars i think so well worth it
well designed uh i love that the compartment for storing the accessories are right in the back of
the cabinet itself why not because electronics don't take up that much space and it's just this
wonderful thing and of course it being sixth scale makes it a perfect accessory for my six
scale figures ah it's a photographing accessory as well so my two favorite hot toys figures this year
one it's gotta be this this iron man this is iron man mark seven as shown in uh avengers
and this is like my quintessential iron man you know iron man one armor great the iron man two
armors i wasn't as huge a fan of but when they got to avengers and this came out toward the end of
that movie i'm like that's it has it's like extra bulky uh tons of armament and this was actually
hot toys 400th figure in their movie masterpiece series and so they went all out it's actually
die cast this is extremely heavy the satin paint finish here is gorgeous it's not too reflective it
doesn't look plasticky at all and it feels cold to the touch because it's die cast yet it retains all
of that crazy articulation in the joints in the swappable body parts the incredible portrait of
tony stark here that battle damage helmet at the end and this is one of those things while i have a
lot of my hot toys uh in shelves and on display this one actually stands on my desk because i
just like picking him up and manipulating him and posing him reposing him and photographing him all
the time it's a it's not a reissue they didn't do a mark 7 a couple years ago but this mark 7
i think is the peak and pinnacle of their iron men but my favorite hot toys figure this year
just came out and it's actually another iron man designed armor but not from the movies
this is iron spider from the comic books and from the playstation video game hot toys has a license
to create figures six scale figures um that were the alternate costumes from these playstation
spider-man game and this one is directly inspired by the iron spider from the comics
uh during the civil war era now if you're an mcu fan you're like there was an iron spider we saw
him in at the end of uh spider-man homecoming solomon far from home we saw him in infinity war
but that i think is an inferior design to the one that was created for the comic books
first of all the extra waldo tentacles and spider legs here uh they're not tentacles their spider
legs are just so massive add this incredible presence to the figure uh incredibly posable
and it's a great comparison with iron man because while this is a metal finish and has that satin
paint uh here it's a like a delusion of you know like a spandex like bodysuit and so it actually
conforms and contorts to the posing uh while there are some plastic joints here and so that mix
of media with the articulation the swappable hands accessories this has been one of my favorite
things to pose and photograph uh this year as well so there you have it those are some of my
favorite things of 2020. thank you for spending the time geeking out with us and spending your
lockdown watching our videos as well and for those of you who are tested
members on our youtube channel an extra shout out and thank you for
allowing us to keep on having fun being silly and hopefully inspiring you to take up making
we'll have more videos from the tested team sharing their favorite things over the next
couple weeks stay tuned for those until next time have a happy holidays and we'll see you next year