hey everybody adam savage at faunco in la hello sir hello um fun and i worked together
have now worked together over the course of about 22 years wow um and we joke about the fact that
we worked on all the bad sequels the matrix two and three star wars one and two mummy returns
uh and it is almost axiomatic in the film industry that you work on a lot of movies and most of them
are movies you wouldn't necessarily watch again that happens but every now and then you get to
work on something that is a genuine masterpiece and i want to talk about galaxy quest yes this is
the best movie i worked on and i was only on this show for like three weeks yes best star trek movie
ever it is the best my favorite quote i don't know who said that but no uh what i've heard is that uh
wrath of khan is the best star star trek film and galaxy quest is the second best star trek film
i totally think that's a very i agree i would agree um so we have a genuine piece of ilm
produced galaxy quest hardware here will you talk about it yeah this is the the hanger for the
protector the thermian built yes doc and the these are all if you if you get in there you can see
there's all the thermians standing there watching the protector pull out in this really grand
ceremony and they had they took a transparency of the actors on set and then had it reprinted
thousands of times because there were many of these yes this dock was a full-size set yes
and these are not even the hero ones you see the there's gels in there that break up the windows
because it's essentially a light box and without those gels it would look like a light box oh on
the hurricane sorry you mean the gels that are doing the difference between the green and the
blue yes that's to create a little bit of create yeah if you look at a high rise you never see
the same color temperature from one window to the next it varies a lot um from floor to floor from
room to room so on the hero pieces there's up to five different colors of gel all very very subtly
different you know i thought that was one of the coolest tricks on this uh miniature but um that
is one of those great things that the director of photography can bring to the to bring to the
knowledge base right like here's what i want you to do yeah and this was this was a really like the
the framing that held all this together with these giant uh water jet cut steel frames you remember
that now i do remember that they were beautiful uh but at the end of the show there was no
way that you got to display the model no one knew what to do with it so these ended up in the
in the break room in the model shop leaned against the wall in a corner next to the door and it said
free oh my god and and uh and they they were there for a very very long time finally i i felt
a little weird about grabbing them so i grabbed one i wanted to make sure that everyone had a fair
chance of grabbing this beautiful piece of history and then later i came back and grabbed some more
because no one cared i was the weirdest thing i want to talk about the economy of scale here
because this idea that first of all there's this lovely idea that you break up the windows because
in real life no two windows have the same color temperature in the second instance in film you do
that so you get this more interesting frame but you don't have to do it for everything you only
do the multiple color temperatures for the stuff close to the lens everything else can drift into
the background and while you might like there's still an amount of effort in someone gluing in
every single one of these transparencies yes but the cost and time savings of just doing
two colors for background yeah and then the the ones in distant background had none oh wow
just all single color just i have to share this because i find it interesting i was showing this
piece to uh uh matt winston who is stan winston's son right yeah and he said i'm in that slide
he played one of the thermians and he's actually one of the thermians in here duplicated
a thousand times yeah it's freaking cool so that's just trivia my job galaxy quest the
only three weeks i had was to do a hero close-up version of this so i built one i built a double
set like this double-sized so it was like eight feet long or six feet long and really high and
i had bigger transparencies and that was three weeks in out wow but it was at least a film i want
to see again yeah yeah no it's it yeah this is definitely one of those movies i i'd say it's my
that and starship troopers are are two of my favorites that we got to do over there because
like if i see them on tv i find myself watching them with commercials even like just because
they're just so entertaining um there's something else i want to point out about this and it's a
lead into to more talking about galaxy quest and painting if you look really closely at these i can
see at least like five or six colors of gray up to and including some little airbrush drop offs
here on the edges again what i can see is a model painter who's doing this and then stepping back
and like uh let me break that up just a little bit let's a little too regular right yeah yeah there's
a lot of that it's it's kind of well it's it's partly because it's got the star trek aesthetic
yeah it's it's a very challenging aesthetic for model makers because in in star wars it's very
busy and everything's dirty there's tons of scale yeah so it's really easy to kind of pull that off
but but to get scale out of something that is very clean finished you have to do it with the the you
know utmost subtlety and it's got to be there but it can't grab your eye and we talked about the
star trek aesthetic uh being like a very regular utopia utopist aesthetic but even still in these
wide flat plains to see the painter just like threw in some masking tape threw it a different
color got a little bit of breakup there yeah and that's the kind of color variants you might not
notice in a star trek model absolutely yeah well then you can see the airbrushing here that's all
like some areas are totally clean and then just a little bit of that gradient is enough to sell
it and then this this these patterns here um this is very common on clean models you just do
like the color difference between these two colors is very subtle
just because it's enough to indicate that there is complexity of panels and stuff happening on
this little tiny piece of plastic um but but not enough to to look too busy yeah there's a fine
line you can't cross it well this is definitely one of the more challenging paint jobs within
galaxy quest there's a really interesting model dichotomy that i don't think exists in any other
late 20th century film which is there's a protector from the tv series in galaxy
quest and then there's a real protector and ilm built both of those ships yeah and they built
the tv show protector with the purposely shitty paint job yes that was the idea right right
the idea was we had the three footer which was the tv show version and then we had one that
was nine feet long that was that was the one that was supposed to be imagine this nine feet long oh
it's beautiful oh and the in the the engineering oh i want to talk about that i went into the wings
well i also want to talk about grant's engine the cells yes yeah there's a lot that went into that
who did the painting on the on the protector was that carol there was a whole team of people yeah
yeah in fact i got to paint on the protector and i was so thrilled because that's when i learned
how to use the um the the opalescent specular highlighter yeah specular highlighting and that's
something that was invented uh for star trek and it was that same dilemma they had this giant white
spaceship uh an enormous scale but it had to look clean so how do you then indicate all these panels
without it getting really busy so explain what the pearlescent painting how that would be they were
they were uh it was a pearlescent powder that they would mix with clear paint and we would
airbrush them on and we had they were interference colors so basically it's a reflective paint that
you can only view if the light hits it at a certain angle and so the paint job was very
busy and we used gold blue purple and red and then white and we would we would airbrush all
those little panels on there and just when you say airbrush panels it would be like they would give
you might even get stickers from the laser cut room of like a splay of small details and you'd
lay on friskets and take them off lay on another frisbee take it off and each would give you a
different like spread of panels yeah we would laser cut file folders because they're a nice thin
piece of cardboard but stiff and you could reuse them a couple times and they wouldn't get soggy
um but yeah so we there were thousands of these that's why i ended up getting to help on this
because we had all our you know brilliant painters that did that for a living and then you know i get
to pinch hit here and there yeah i love you when i got to join them oh man yeah i learned so much um
so yeah we just covered a whole thing with that and if those were regular
paints that it would look like a mess of little rectangles and l shapes and tetris kind of shapes
right and it ends up being that thing you only see as the ship is moving right just when the light
hits it just right because it's a curved shape you only see it as the ship is passing a light and you
just see the little glimmers of each panel right and it's all this detail your eye just fills in
it's a beautiful technique i don't know who came up with it but it's it's uh it's mind-blowing i
remember so i remember our our common mentor mitch romanowski coming to me and going dude
have you heard about the specular highlighting that they do here and then he walked me over to
one of the trek ships that was on display and uh actually i visited uh blue origin a couple years
ago and they've got one of ilms enterprises and i was like i pulled out my flashlight and i was
like dudes come over here let me tell you about specular highlighting and i like pointed out
all that paint job yeah yeah it's amazing now if you watch galaxy quest now you'll see the engine
the cells back here have this beautiful lighting effect and you'll say to yourself that's a nice
cg effect and the answer is no it's actually a completely on-set in-camera practical effect
brought about by the engineering prowess of grant yes yeah he made these custom circuit boards with
the little dial and yeah he's i remember we spent a decent amount of time on that well because he
built this custom circuit board for both taking an led bulb and brightening it and dimming it using
i think he's using pulse width modulation but then a program that can do it across multiples and then
a program that can do it for a motion control camera so it's not just enough that it goes the
fact is it didn't do that on set it just did that as each increment so grant is effectively building
a custom circuit board to animate lights for a motion control camera correct yeah that's like go
motion or yeah stop motion that blew my mind when he showed me because i remember coming over to his
desk and be like come here i want to show you this it's the first time i ever designed a board you
know and he's so psyched yeah that was beautiful and then we used reflective material for the uh
for the three footer there were stickers oh really yeah it was like that it was very popular in the
center oh 3m uh scotchlite yeah yeah well not scotchlite no it was like the reflective like
they call it hologram back in the 70s holographic stickers yeah but they were just really metallic
stickers with these uh kind of patterns in them so that's what was all that was in those oh for the
three footer um i thought you were referring to uh like on space cowboys when we wanted to shoot the
wing of the shuttle heating up we coated it in 3m scotchlite yeah and then shined a red light at it
and that made it look like it was glowing yeah i remember that yeah so this is this was much
cheaper because it was supposed to look cheap i miss problem solving sometimes
i do too fortunately we still get a decent amount of that here um but yeah i miss i miss the really
big budget miniatures we just don't get those anymore that's not a that's not a common thing
i remember the energy at ilm when pearl harbor came in and we were building like the two big
giant 40 foot long 30 32 foot ships i think
i mean and same thing on pam right those big oh the galleons yeah the grimace galleons i wasn't
on black pearl or any of those yeah but yeah i wasn't on on pirates either but i did get
to work on the ship for peter pan yeah that was really fun i left fogler with that one half done
uh this has been a walk down memory lane i i hope it's been roughly as enjoyable for you as it has
been for us because this is just so this is just naturally what happens between fawn and i when we
get together thank you so much that's great to see you all right we'll see you guys next time