hey everybody adam savage here in not my cave i'm in some i'm in fond davis's cave
welcome to my cake thank you sir i have talked a lot about my history as a model maker as
a burgeoning businessman in the late 90s in the early aughts and i went through a lot of that
with you we were doing the same thing at the same time kind of building our little shops together
yeah uh and we're going to talk today about some of the work we did on the matrix sequels we we
have a terrific history in our lives of working on all the bad sequels of truly great movies
that's right whether it's matrix terminator three terminators yeah the prequels yeah he returns
oh boy the list goes on um so we were jurassic park
two and three i was not on either of those there's a book before and after um but we
were on matrix we were model supervisors and we spent uh a huge portion of our time in a small
little room out on alameda island where they built p-51 mustangs behind us during the world war ii
uh running a beam dynamics laser and i feel like we could talk a lot about what we did just by
showing and talking about this piece of wood and plastic describe what this thing is okay so so a
good portion of what we built for the movie were these giant sets and they all had floors and so uh
basically what we did is we did a miniature version of everything they did in live action
so we got the blueprints from the live action division of the movie and so this is we've scaled
everything down and made laser-cut sections and this is specifically the dock where the
ships come in to land in zion yeah right yeah yeah yeah the zion uh hanger i guess it was
we called it the yeah so in the end a lot of weird names like it's called the middle the hamburger
right and then it's the third movie that ends with the ship crashing through the blast doors
yes right yeah so that was the biggest sequence we worked on on matrix was prepping for that so
it was building this gigantic bigotry it was like 40 feet across yeah and it was a miniature yeah
uh and this was the floor and this is this is our effectively like the first camera test or
the first demonstration test the art department of what the pieces we would eventually make look like
yes yeah um and this is yeah so this all matches and some of this is laser etched some of it is
uh something we invented at ilm called out of focus scoring so we'll like pull focus on a score
and then someone's regular scoring and then of course cutting all the way through but understand
that even now laser cutters are while they're more turnkey than they have ever been before
in 2002 when we're working on the matrix a laser cutter is effectively a machine you're
buying but as far as like the software that runs it it is an ongoing process between you and the
company and so we worked with this beautiful beam dynamics laser uh very very powerful
but we're also running so much dirty crap through it and running it so hard we were basically fixing
it every single day yeah i mean i i'm remembering now that i look at this i'm looking at this and
i'm remembering this was part of this long curve and now i see this facet and i'm seeming to
have this memory that like we had an issue resolving large curves in that laser yeah
for some reason it wouldn't it wouldn't break large curves into the multiple sections it
needs to duplicate a circle and so when you did small ones it was not a problem we did big ones
that would you'd have these big facets and we did eventually find a way to fix it but
uh not in time to do this set no this is like so this is a thing where you're dealing with the
artifact of the software's ability to resolve these large mathematical constructs that are
the curves and when this doesn't work we just had to figure out a way to get that curve which
was to break it into smaller chunks and fasted the hell out of it right yeah there's also no
way to do things that's correct we're running all these plastics through it and beam dynamics is
we're looking forward to hearing what values you guys come up with for cutting that stuff yeah so
let's talk about this stuff this was oh this was this was quite the achievement because so when you
when you learn how to use a laser cutter i know adam has experienced this i don't know if anyone
else out there has when you learn how to use a laser cutter there's this challenge that you you
put yourself uh through and that's can i make an entire prop with nothing but the laser cutter and
then occasionally you run into that one shape or that one component you're like oh man i'm gonna
have to make that without the laser cutter this looked like it was gonna be one of those things
and then we figured it out but these are these are the ammo carriers and actually
these are part even though this is in the wrong scale these are the ammo carriers for the ammo for
these these whatever they called these the apu's the apu's right uh so these would get loaded up
the back side of this guy right obviously at a different scale but we built a whole bunch
of these yeah sitting out on the set and being part of the set dress yeah yeah tons of these
and then what so the way we ended up i thought for sure like the backs of the bullets they're
flat you score them boom done uh but the fronts of the bullets they're cone shapes
and so uh just as a test i just pulled a really far out of focus score did numerous circles
in this pattern and um created these cone shapes with the laser cutter in a way that you would
never imagine using the laser cutter and then this entire prop was made up of laser-cut parts that
was the one part that we thought we wouldn't get away with well and we would add we would end up
with like this this hero board of little pieces like this that were set up that said uh undo
this to right score five up to 60 power but then there's also like how far you would unset the
focus to get to get that effect yeah so this is the actual board we used for our crew that was
laser cutting parts for this it had all the notes as to what the settings were for the laser cutter
to get these parts exactly the way they were because the the styrene i remember we had to
really push the envelope on that as well which is to get off yeah to get that thin styrene without
warping it right because it would just melt and turn into a like a squiggly mess you'd be spending
like half a day just cutting various iterations adjusting the settings by one increment at a time
to get the right thing there's this other aspect i want to talk about that most people wouldn't
realize is so obviously where you know the main base of the floor was wood that allowed us to
screw screw it and glue it to the rest of the set but when you're adding in these plastic details
um the inconsistencies in its manufacturing becomes something you really have to address
this black acrylic which is extruded not cast means that it can have a variance this is 0.62
this is 16. but i can see right now it's like probably 45 000. that's right like its spec is
way out of tolerance and you could end up cutting a long piece of this that abuts to another one and
if there's a step i'll tell you you're going to find out about it from the cameraman and that's
the last person you want coming to you to tell you that your set is showing at scale because they've
done a long ranking shot yeah right so we had to like go choose pieces of plastic for some of these
yeah yeah it's always better to work with cast acrylic because it's a consistent thickness but
we didn't always have access to that so that we used the extruded and it was very tricky sometimes
you would get out calipers and measure the ends of the sheet that you're going to butt the parts
into for the next cut so that you knew all your pieces were going to be at the same elevation
this is i this all brings i mean even when you broke this out this smells and i smell that
smell of burnt acrylic and burnt wood um we spent a year in that room in this little room on alameda
working for manix with owen patterson the production designer behind us nancy noble
art director yeah um it was such a that was such a fun shoot it felt like a small shoot it did i mean
it was all of our ilm but it was so i remember it being very very fast-paced like we moved into an
empty uh antique naval hangar and a naval air station hangar and we set up in a month right
and started making the sets and these were giant giant giant sets because what they wanted to
do is they wanted to film all the pyro and the explosions and crushing and crashing of things
with large-scale models so it would look more realistic but large-scale models means that the
the ship that crashed through the the blast doors in that third movie that ship was like 12 or 15
feet long like 36 feet long or 32. it was like 40 miles per hour on the tracks yeah and it had
like a roller coaster rig hidden underneath of our miniature and we had to build special sections of
miniature not like this that would break away as the ship would plow through it and some of those
were made out of uh frangible uh resins but some of it was lead that was actually soldered together
so it would twist like metal okay the gate was 16 feet tall and 30 feet wide that i remember too
massive okay there's this other thing that was going on on the matrix streets that i want to talk
about all right which was the flying club oh right yes so we had we're working in these rooms we're
working in this building where the room behind us is 80 000 square feet and it's abutted on
each side by another 80 000 square foot room and those other two we weren't even using so at lunch
you and pierre maurer and a few others yeah pierre started it he brought in a radio control plane and
he flew it in the empty hangar and we all watched him so he just he walked over to this empty 80 000
square foot hangar with like 70 foot ceilings and it's like the best place in the world to fly your
model airplane and then and then we all decided we had to have planes and we were all flying them
every day at lunch and our breaks were completely addicted to it and then one day
two planes accidentally collided in a spectacular fashion one of them just the landing gear hit the
other one's wing it went spiraling to the ground and exploded into pieces of foam and we knew from
then on that's what we were going to try to do that became the only goal just smash two blades
into each other and it's oddly harder than you would imagine we would go in circles for like
we'd go on friday nights we would stay late after work and we'd be there for two three hours maybe
one or two planes would hit each other it should be a sport that was so much fun oh dude thank you
so much for taking this little walk down memory lane with me sure uh yeah this like this i i look
at this and i can just tell exactly that it is the beginning of a project here's what we're
going to do everybody yeah all right thank you guys for joining us we will see you next time