do i still have the ostrich dorodango and uh that i handmade for the excrement polishing episode
yes i do all right i'll be right back
there we go here is the uh here is the first dorodango i made and this is simply dirt and
elbow grease and then this is the one that i made out of ostrich poop yeah of course i kept these
uh these are two of my favorite objects i made on mythbusters um the ostrich poop still has a slight
a tiny tinge of grass and i also still have many of the poops that we collected from the san
francisco zoo um of the poops i will tell you that warthog poop is the most stressed out poop in the
animal kingdom warthogs man they're just like it's all stress with a warthog seriously though i when
when mythbusters when we filmed in south africa for um the last shark week episode that we did
uh we were filming with those great whites that breach out of the water on false bay in simon's
town on the southern tip of africa um we at the end of that uh my wife and i and alice dallow
our producer director um we took a few days to go do a safari at an amazing uh wildlife park
about two hours flight east of simon's town called shamwari shamwari yeah the samurai reserve
and um life-changing life-changing to do that so far it was really really beautiful um we
saw some amazing things it's until you see how well elephants can hide 20 feet away from you
like you don't understand anything it's totally amazing and seeing giraffes in person
is like looking at the aliens from arrival like giraffes just don't look like they should work
um but i was telling that story for a reason warthogs yes it was warthogs so we stay in in
it's chamori has these accommodations that are jaw dropping beautiful rooms
four poster beds and the food was incredible and our room had these big beautiful windows out to
this little yard which was our yard and the grass was being mowed by a family of warthogs
so like we get into the hotel room and we look and there's warheads and we go i'm like honey
look it's warthogs they're mowing our grass and she looks over and just the turning of her head
and they all they scattered like a bug's bunny cartoon warthogs are stressed out animals man
and then like we'd stay quiet and then come on back but if we move too much they'd scatter
so yeah i still i i have kept a lot of my favorite props
from the show but yeah i'm glad you asked about these because these are two
of my all-time favorites if you don't know about dorado d-o-r-o-d-o-n-g-o
it is a japanese pastime of making shiny mud balls using a process which involves
mud and powder and your refrigerator and plastic bag and that's it and after a couple of days of
labor you can end up with something like this and it is super satisfying and before you say it
yes i already know about the polished aluminum foil balls and i have not yet made one but that
is definitely something that's on my list to do as a one-day build because
i want to try it out this is apparently a new kind of doradongo style method in which you take
a whole bunch of tinfoil and with a hammer and a bunch of elbow grease and some polish and some
more elbow grease and some time you make a perfectly shiny chrome ball made out of tin foil
oh i totally will make one of those um okay let's see here uh
lee marsh hi lee good to see you again says uh can you discuss your journey
into being a creative problem solver under the pressures of tv deadlines
how much has the experience helped your professional life since
um that's a really good question there's a lot of meat in there to discuss because
someone asked me in an interview recently
what is it that draws people to film work and i'm gonna conflate now film commercial and television
uh the production of them is all pretty similar from the standpoint of just being a worker bee and
they said what kind of person does film attract and it attracts people who like solving problems
under constantly shifting parameters that's what filmwork is about it's about problem solving
but the parameters are changing constantly and you are always having to adjust the parameters
of what you're going to deliver based on the parameters of what's standing in your way um
you might have to do this prop which on any other day would only take you 10 minutes but
it's 104 degrees and the air conditioning's out and now this thing is too greasy because
it's too warm or your paint won't dry because it's too humid because it's raining outside
these are the kind of problems we run into constantly when working in film
and you either love the fact that those parameters are changing all the time or you hate it there's
there's not a lot of in between so i submit that a lot of people work in film for a day or the rest
of their lives but there's not a lot of like i spent two months doing that i didn't like it
um i have seen people step on to a set and be like dude is this what this is i can't do this this is
way too stressful but i'm here to tell you that one of the early times i was
on set and i told the story in the book in the book i wrote last year jamie had built
this rig spent two days building this rig for this toys r us commercial and the rig failed
and it failed we had to do like six commercials in two days or i can't even remember the number
breakdown but we had to do a lot in a little bit of time which is that's commercial production work
uh and the rig wasn't going to work for the commercial and instead of getting upset about it
he didn't get upset about it i watched jamie be like hmm my rig doesn't work
all right then he met with the director i think it was my friend carl and he said uh the rig doesn't
work uh here are the options i can come up with a a plan b that'll take two hours i can come up
with a plan b that we could shoot tomorrow uh the pros and cons of each are this and that
take your pay and there was something about the simplicity of that unemotional approach to what
was a disaster like jamie's company had been hired to build this thing for a
commercial and now the thing he built and got approved and was ready to shoot failed
so on one level you could just start sweating bullets and getting all upset
and getting emotionally activated but i watched the opposite happen i watched him say well okay
we still have to get a commercial in the can so here's how i can contribute to that
and i just remember watching that and being like i love this industry that that is a great mindset
and consequently i have always loved being on a set i've always loved i mean and i've been under
some of the most egregious conditions you know working 25 hour days multiple days in a week
uh you know you know working on a motion control stage for a star wars movie man
those 10 and 12 hour days after several months those those can feel like they're ruining your
life because they kind of are uh and yet there's a camaraderie of the problem solving
that i really love so that's the that's the preamble to your question about how what it
was like to work on mythbusters one of the things that both jamie and i took pride in as makers and
as professionals in our industry is that we were fast we each of us were were quick at the problems
we liked to we were quick at solving the problems we liked to solve and then we were asked to solve
them even quicker on mythbusters and even quicker than that because we had to stop constantly to do
things for camera in addition to doing them to get the job done and then we had to stop
doing the thing for camera that we would normally just be getting done for the job
done in order to also talk about it on camera so it was like this extra slowdown the biggest
difficulty on mythbusters was building momentum in a build because you kept on having to stop
so how do we do it um i mean the main way
we got through it was just by being real really realistic with each other
and if builds took longer than they should have well that became part of the narrative uh
but i don't think that making mythbusters radically altered the way i like solving
problems under pressure i think it just was able to take advantage of the fact that i had been
doing that professionally already for like 10 or 15 years and still really enjoyed doing that
what mythbusters changed for me um because a couple of your questions have led towards
this what it really changed for me well it changed me as a maker fundamentally and
understand like again both jamie and i had worked for multiple different effects companies
and like i come from ilm man and one of the coolest things about working at ilm was that
shortly after starting to work there i never again had to show my resume to people because
they'd be like oh you work at ilm sure where do we send the check that was awesome so i showed
up on the mythbusters set thinking you know i'm i'm hot stuff i like i know how to do my thing
and jb and i in the last season at one point were sitting in a car waiting for a shot and we were
talking about like man we were such babies when this show began like we thought we had some skills
but now with that vantage point of looking back 14 years we didn't know anything we knew how to
make small objects in front of us we knew how to do stuff at this workbench but we didn't
know how to pick up cars and drop them in things we didn't know how to sink boats and raise them
again we didn't know how to get permits to blow crap up all of that stuff was learned on the
job