uh shawn jorgensen says i'm a grip in the film industry and i love working on set in production
but don't get a lot of opportunities to make anything for people interested in uh model
making and special effects what is ilm looking for well islam no longer has a model shop um
you are still seeing actually in mandalorian at least in season one you were seeing some actual
models built by actual ilm model makers but not made in the ilm shop no no not at all because
that shop doesn't exist uh there is remnants of the ilm shop there is a wonderful company
in san rafael called 3210 productions that has a lot of the same people as the original ilm shop
and they can turn out work of really identical quality but the ilm shop itself is no longer r.i.p
what does a model shop look for that's a great question and in general
you you want your model shop to have a balance between expertise and generalize
between experts and generalists you need both you can't make a film with only experts
each of them good in their one thing you need people who know how to bridge bridge between
a model maker and a painting department because it's not an easy translation necessarily there
are efficiencies the model shop can do to help the painting department and vice versa uh but they you
need people who understand both processes deeply um one of my favorite things about working for
brian gernand who was my main supervisor through most of my time at ilm i also worked for lauren
peterson and steve golly uh and a bunch of others but brian's one of the things about brian that
made him such an excellent supervisor and made all the supervisors lauren steve et cetera so
good was that they could kind of do anything that anybody in the shop could do in fact i remember
that uh when they were first making the droidakas for episode one that beautiful that beautiful
paint treatment on the outside that rainbow of burnt metal that doug chang designed the painting
department had a had a difficult time replicating that paint job and if i remember correctly
brian came in and spent like a day or two he's like he rolled up his sleeves as a
supervisor and worked out that paint job and then broke it down into steps and and taught
it to the team like that is an excellent supervisory execution of a task i love that
you know at the same time the mold shop should have people who like that is all they do
mold making is such a specific skill and so is painting
each of these things you also need people who are exceedingly good at that thing alone um
but as a grip you are a problem solver right you are there on set to do things and to do things
that no one's thought of uh oh hey we need to raise this four thousand pound thing up two inches
how do we do it that's your job and i would submit that you probably are a general generalist like
like any good film crew um and in that regard ah okay i have an answer to your question
what should you show a supervisor of a model shop when you bring them your
portfolio that's the question that i'm going to answer that is hidden within your question
you should certainly show some of your artwork or some of your
some of the stuff you've designed that's absolutely is always good to
see but as a supervisor when i see that it doesn't necessarily tell me how useful you will be to me
what i want to see as a supervisor is i want to see you having replicated something that i know
what it should look like and i got this from an ilm cg supervisor who said you know if you
show me the virtual world you designed well it might be beautiful but i don't know what
you started from so i don't know how well you nailed the problem you were trying to solve but
if you show me a 57 cadillac rendered perfectly then i know i can give you something and say
replicate this and this is the other thing about the film industry while it sounds like
i think a lot of people's fantasy is that we're all designing stuff as we're going and making cool
macguffins for the films the answer is most of it is drudgery most of it is replicate this exactly
don't veer off from anything if you screw it up we're gonna give it to someone else that's most
of the work but if you if you kill at all of that work every now and then you get to do something
fun um okay that was the that was the beginning questions um
let's see
your geek fix says was talking to my friend dan lanigan
dan lanigan is uh a among other things a prop collector with an unparalleled collection
of movie memorabilia he owns the original blade runner gun and a bunch of other pieces that i
constantly covet so your geek fix said that he was talking to dan lanigan and dan said
that he got a lot of his props from former ilm employees that dug them out of the trash bins
um when i was there they said when you were there were props usually at least reclaimed
or reused or did they wind up in the bin where is the closure after the building um
yeah so the question presupposes that there's a policy and it's much looser than that it's
not that there isn't a policy uh it's pretty clear that you shouldn't go home with the props
like that's pretty clear it's also really clear that you should be going
through the trash because um and i'll just show you uh i've talked about uh
i've talked about a material called ren shape before which is a um closed closed cell urethane
uh uh prototyping material and it's very expensive a two inch thick sheet that's two feet by
four feet or six feet is like hundreds of dollars um i have one that i bought like eight years ago
and it'll last me for the rest of my natural life but that's a big expense for a person
so at ilm they would often throw out little scraps of red shape or chunks of aluminum in the aluminum
recycling bin that were way too small for ilm to store and keep track of but perfect for small
shops so a lot of us went through the trash on a very regular basis and i do have stories
about friends of mine finding important things in the trash um i i'll tell you on episode two
uh there's a picture that was in star wars insider of me and tori belachi both working on topoka city
the room we were in in that building i ended up spending about a year of episode two sitting at
the same four by eight table uh and that year you know you spend a long time at the same table it
gets marks from you it gets your detritus around i had stuff stored on the bottom
shelf of the table and at one point there's this trash bag down there
that had been there for the entire time i had been sitting there and eventually one day on a friday
we were playing block we had this game that we played on beer fridays where we had this
ridiculous chunk of uh styrene foam and we would stand around in the parking lot drinking beer
and kicking it around to each other it was a ridiculous game we called it block
uh anyway one of these fridays i was like i played block i'd had a couple drinks feel pretty good and
i was like clearing my stuff away and i was like what is in this trash bag what is in this trash
bag and i pulled it out i pulled out luke's jedi robe yeah no one knew where it was no one was even
looking for it i mean i'm sure there's like dozens of them but it'd been it had been pulled down from
the archives to be used in an insert shot on one of the stages and then it ended up back in a trash
bag in the bottom of the table i was working at so this is this is a long way of saying there
was no specific policy no one got in trouble for that um it went back into the archives but like
things are looser than you imagine that they would be um because the supervisor
the supervisor doesn't care about the preciousness of the props and he cares about getting the shot
he cares about getting the job that he's got to do done after that it's somebody else's
problem and that makes sense that's exactly how it should be i do remember at one point um
a key scene that i worked on on episode two is it episode two or is it episode one where r2
fixes the queen ship from outside is that episode one is whichever one it is when r2 goes out
rides along the queen ship and uh fixes bypasses the thing that was a physical set that michael
lynch had a team build the physical set don b's brought me in to rejigger the two to three leg
conversion r2 unit from europe to work in america and then it was all these press fit
air hoses but in europe they're metric obvi and here were imperial it's ridiculous still i know
um and imperial and metric press fit hosing it all looks like it's the same dimension
but it ain't and you can get it you just get way into the weeds on it eventually what i
had to do on that r2 unit was pull out all of the air manifolding and and distribution and
re rebuild the two to the three leg conversion and it was a it was a death trap r2 he would
literally so you know he sits like this and his leg is up in his torso and it was like funk funk
i mean if you got your hand in the way you were gonna lose your hand it was these big cylinders
um but it worked and we got it to we're getting it to work on set and now the question is what is r2
gonna do with the arm so i'm working on the air system don bees is working on puppeting this arm
that's gonna pull a cable and put it and we go don and i go over to michael lynch and his team
and we're like hey are two's gonna need to stand here at the edge of the thing and activate this
thing and michael goes well you know i thought you'd just get this little doohickey and you
could do that and i said well in the script pages that i'm looking at it says r2 bypass the thing so
maybe he could pull it and at that point michael itch went whoa whoa whoa okay just stop talking
that's the kind of thing that you and don care about that i just don't so do whatever you want
that's the supervisor the supervisor is not concerned with those small details nor should
they be that's why they hire people like donald and me to service the shot
i can't even remember what the original question was