did you let your boys discover star wars on their own or was it
one of those things that was always a part of their life sean vidal
asks that question and that is an interesting question uh we definitely went and saw the
the latter prequels together they were like just infants when episode one came out but by the time
episodes two and three yeah no i didn't have any structured way in which i introduced them to star
wars i kind of let i mean it's funny because one of the great things about having kids is
introducing them to the franchises and movies and books and comic books and things that you loved
as a kid and watching them take it on and seeing them learn the same things you loved about it and
also taking it in totally different directions so my boys are both like total adepts of uh
of tarantino uh they love good action movies good science fiction films they love films that bend
your brain they both called me after seeing tennis oh dude dad you gotta watch tennis it's just it's
lovely to to re-experience your young uh exciting uh uh media franchises that that helped shape you
and introducing that to your kids um but again i didn't think i don't think i did the star wars
stuff in any structured way and frankly like they were just grew up living and breathing star wars i
finished my r2d2 when they were about five years old and our two lived in their room for a good
portion of their childhoods and they would like open his little arms and let our two hug them you
know that was like one of their favorite signature groups um ian kellogg has a terrific question
i know the space constraints of living in san francisco preclude such extravagant uses of space
but have you ever contemplated turning an entire room into a set piece if you were to have that
luxury and to do a star wars room where would you go with the theme rebel base ship's bridge hive of
scum and villainy no it is a single answer and it is there's only one answer and you know what it is
you're all many of you are yelling at the screen it's the cockpit of the millennium falcon 100
in fact the only thing better than the cockpit of the millennium falcon would be the hallway behind
it and like the bench seating where the degenerate test set and the sleeping quarters are adjacent to
like yeah one and there are a couple of one-to-one scale falcon cockpits that are fan built and that
are out there i visited one in um uh uh where was it uh alabama alabama sorry when i uh yeah
um yeah the millennium falcon cockpit man the the the that that that's to me like every cockpit i've
ever built whether it's like for a movie or you know like the the friendship 7 mercury
cockpit that we replicated a few years ago every cockpit i've built is trying to replicate that
exact experience of the falcon of all of the hit in the wall and the all the stuff working
i mean everything about it as a big hunk of junk that han and chewie know so well it's just yeah
that would be the one i would do and luckily because these fan builds of the falcon cockpit
are so uh open and sharing about their techniques and their research and the found parts and how
they replicate um the research is all mostly done i i mean not i i think it's actually probably
mostly done it's not to say that i won't someday make myself a millennium falcon cockpit yeah um
i'm i'm beaming just thinking about how much fun that would be
uh i think it's one of my package deliveries uh let's see here james may wants to know uh
what are your thoughts and opinions of galaxy's edge in disney world land
uh i have i have not yet visited galaxy's edge in any of the disney parks yet i will i'm dying to um
what environment area planet from star wars universe would you like to recreate as a real
space for fans to explore well again millennium falcon and like boss espa the cantina and
what they did with galaxy's edge um was tremendous is tremendous
the level of immersion that fans can attain there is almost without equal i mean and i if i if i'm
understanding this correctly uh the sea change was in and again i might be getting this wrong
since i don't traffic in this world but i think that this is how it's been explained
to me that the harry potter world was a big sea change in terms of in immersive
amusement park type theme park environments where they replicated tens of thousands of pieces of the
harry potter universe and you were literally in the sets that they used for the films converted
into this space so you were really visiting the real the real thing what you saw the film that
was what you were seeing and galaxy's edge is like tens of thousands of replicated pieces and i have
lucky enough to talk to you and know several of the artisans that supervised
and built a lot of that stuff um their excitement and pride over their work is
palpable when you talk to them and well deserved and like i said i'm dying to get there um
because there is something i i i would not be nearly as interested in visiting
an imperial space as a rebel space the the the the chock-a-block nature of the rebel aesthetic in the
star wars universe is totally like look around you look around me this this that is my jam um i
do they still have problems with people going to those things in cosplay like in full costume no
they let people show up in custom-ish yeah see this is the one area where it gets a little bit
fuzzy because like that's the only thing i would want to do is put on various nervous
costumes and keep going back to galaxy's edge um i'm i'm pretty certain that the harry potter
and star wars are just the beginning of a really interesting shift uh in immersive
uh places for fans to really experience the franchises that they love
and that being said i think that there's also going to be more exploration from the the the
amusement parks about letting fans have a deeper interaction with this stuff i don't
know what that exactly means but i know that the fans want it and that's enough for me to know
that eventually someone's gonna meet that need and that's that's awesome that's fantastic um
fandom is it's just so delightful and so inspiring i was just having this image in
my head of all those kids dressed up as harry potter's going to each of the book launches each
time one of the books came out and then i've seen pictures of kids walking into harry potter's world
i've seen oh you know the rey who was walking around galaxy's edge giving
she was giving the the the rebel tapes to to every i mean just like
injecting us as fans finding ways and spaces and communities in which to be able to inject
ourselves into the narratives that meant so much to us it's just a delightful virtuous cycle and
my full kudos to lucasfilm lucasarts disney in general for being so supportive of the fandom
we live in this weird age where corporations are continually working on total control over
their brand and any discussion of their brand and they brook no critique and
people get crazy and send cease and desist letters one of my favorite websites techcrunch
covers this extensively and american corporate culture is idiotic about copyright and fair
use they are in general by and large idiots about fair use i'm just saying that outright
you know who i'm talking about sorry about that um
but lucasfilm really seems over the years to deeply understand
their fans love and where that love can be directed and fomented and uh
welcomed into the fray and i really like my hat is off to lucasfilm for that um let's see here
david martin asks a great question he says if you hadn't done mythbusters do you think you
would have stayed at ilm or moved on um it is an interesting question and of course because
that wasn't a timeline i lived through i don't know but i have an idea um i will tell you that
i i got to work i started working at ilm in 1998 i worked on episode one and two space cowboys a.i uh
terminator 3 galaxy quest a few other small films we actually my friend john duncan built while i
was working on topoka city he built the underside of the bleachers from the quidditch match a set
extension for the first harry potter film um and after about four years there around about 2002
um i'll tell you i started to feel like i started to feel like i had achieved my bucket list in the
model shop i'd like worked on a bunch of different kinds of models that i'd always wanted to work on
and i really really liked working directly with effects directors like john knoll uh and dennis
muran and i really liked working with the art department people like peter grube and alex
laurent all those guys were amazing um and as a as a model maker and a model supervisor
my i think one of the things that made me valuable is i really liked to know what the big picture was
and i like knowing how what i was building fit into the big picture because frequently that
would allow me to make key decisions that i might not have the art director or effects director
at my disposal to ask but because i knew the big picture i would know the choices to make
so i kind of naturally accreted to a supervisory type of consciousness because i liked knowing
how this all went together and i had started to imagine that if there was a track at ilm to become
an effects director that that was definitely really interesting to me because being an effects
director and like like dennis mirren or or john knoll uh or eventually my friend dave fogler um
felt like exactly the mix of deep weird unique case-by-case problem solving that we're a super
marriage between art and engineering literally between art and engineering right you've got to
engineer something so you can't tell how the art happened um so it's the pinnacle of engineering
robotic cameras costing hundreds of thousands of dollars executing ridiculously complex moves past
ships that themselves took weeks and dozens of people and maybe a million dollars to build
some of the most beautiful paint jobs you've ever seen all of this to get you excited about a space
battle uh a year from now um this is a long way of saying yeah i i probably would have
i probably would have moved myself into the track at ilm towards uh the effects director pipeline
uh and eventually my good friend dave fogler one of the best model makers i've ever met
uh is an effects director he was the effects director on uh the last transformers film uh
and did tons of the modeling on all of the transitions of the transformers which i
those transformations of the transformers and all the films are the those films to me absolutely
mechanically gorgeous fogler did that so shortly after i left ilm started its uh move from sarah
fell to the letterman complex in in the presidio in san francisco and they also started offering
model makers a chance to learn the ropes of being a cg artist and many of my colleagues at ilm went
on to do that john john goodson and steve walton and many others took advantage of that training
and became super accomplished digital artists i probably would have done that too um yeah without
a doubt uh and then mythbusters showed up and jumped into a different timeline but it's like
obviously what i love about special effects is the fact that it's problem solving right it's always
problem solving and problem solving weird things that no one needs to ever know again how to do
so you end up with this weird set of one-off occasions of ways in which you've achieved
something um and effects direction is like that on steroids i i want you to think about this
uh remember close encounters of the third kind remember those beautiful shots of the storm clouds
rolling in over the the midwestern landscape that the movie takes place on so those storm clouds
were filmed by taking a fish tank full of water um putting a ton of salt in it so you had a layer of
heavy salt water and then carefully pouring fresh water onto the highly saturated salt water so you
had a bifurcated layer of heavy water and lighter water and then they injected paints into the water
and the paints would go through the fresh water but stop at the salt water and that would give you
what looked like appropriate cloud cover that yeah man that's like the kind of stuff they were doing
in the 70s and the early 80s is so hand-hewn and used no digital anything whatsoever that is like
i get so excited thinking about that and then you know john favreau when he's started doing
zethra and then iron man he loves the practical effects right because we all grew up on those john
and i are i think born within a couple months of each other um and yeah like the handmade
nature of that problem solving just thrilled me and to be honest if i'd become an effects director
you know i i'd probably be pushing for practical effects wherever i could thank you david for that
awesome question thank you guys so much for watching that video if you'd like to further
support us here at tested one of the best ways you can do it is through a tested membership
there's a link below as to the various levels of tested membership but it's so much more than just
exclusive videos there are exclusive videos but there are also live stream q and a's and the thing
that i love most about the tested members is the interactivity the wonderful communication between
not just me and test members but our whole tested team every single day it feels more and more like
a community just devoted to the joys of making things so join yourself up and become one of us