i am now going to answer some of your i'm now going to answer some of your questions and
the questions were fantastic um but they almost came in reverse um so there's one let's see here
someone wants me to know uh let's see someone was asking about the first day um what okay
lee marsh hi lee uh lee marsh asks what did it feel like on your first day at ilm uh did you
feel a mixture of excitement and trepidation yes uh as a model maker ilm and weta must be
a pinnacle of one's career best to all attest it so when i started at ilm in late 98 um mid
yeah fall of 98. um weta was in pre-production uh they hadn't they had just started in fact
there was a handwritten sign on the wall at ilm that said if you're interested in moving to new
zealand to work on this lord of the rings thing with the guy who made brain dead uh you should
call this number and i i want to tell you i seriously considered calling that number wow
my life would have been very different um still awesome i'm sure but uh wasn't it funny i like saw
the heed i saw i saw that call and did not heed the call to go to uh weta um but yeah when i was
when i was a kid ilm was the was the zenith it was the it was valhalla it was heaven for a model
maker and the idea that i could go potentially work for a place that had made so many things that
that had affected me so many films so many effects so many sequences so many props
uh it was heady and i've been like every kid i'd wanted to work at ilm since i knew that it existed
um but i got to san francisco in 1990 and i started looking around for work in model
making in film and i wasn't finding it i ended up finding work in theater i got a reputation
in theater and i've told this story many times before my reputation in theater got the attention
of jamie hyneman who ran his commercial model shop for colossal pictures and i worked with jamie for
about four or five years uh and then because that was all freelance that was all just come
in and work for 10 days and maybe we'll have work after that uh at the end of four years with jamie
i took a job for zub uh which is a building toy based on ball and socket joints i think
they still make the zub back then it was a startup it was its first year at toy fair
and i spent a year working for zub as their director of research and development which
was intense and i learned a lot of lessons doing that that's a separate set of stories for another
time but when i finally left zub i was looking around and thinking okay so clearly i now know
myself and i know i have to make things i have to get my hands dirty um the shop i need to go to
is ilab and at that point ilm was in production on episode one they had 200 plus model makers working
i was thinking this is my time this is the time and my friend christine ells was up there and so
was my mentor mitch romanowski and christine was like you got to come up here they're just hiring
people right and left and i sent my resume to mark anderson and somehow mark anderson
what i later found out was that he thought that i was another guy and he kept on getting my resume
and [ __ ] canning it because he thought i was someone else that he had met and didn't like um
but he had interviewed me a while back and it took basically i think i called every week for about
three months i felt i felt confident i had this confidence that like i'm gonna work there i gotta
work there they just have to know about me and i'm gonna work there and i called every week for
three months and then i kept on like kept in touch with christine and with mitch about what the work
was like up there and then one morning on like a tuesday morning at like 8 a.m my phone rings and
i pick it up and it's mark anderson who still good friend of mine ran the model shop at ilm
and he was like what are you doing sleeping come to work i'll see you tomorrow morning at 9 a.m
and i was like right like bugs bunny like slot machine bar bar bar i'm like super excited um
the tldr is that i was given the wrong directions to get to the ilm model shop
i took the wrong exit send and selmo exit instead of the first san rafael exit
i went the wrong way up kerner boulevard i got lost i had a flat tire i changed my flat tire
and i was still 15 minutes early for my first day of work
that's the kind of contingency planner i am i gave myself a full extra hour of driving time
to find the shop uh and that was my first day it was phenomenal i walk in it's a mystifying
deal to walk into a working model shop with 200 model makers working it's
barely controlled chaos but i found mark anderson he walked me around the shop and the first thing i
worked was a a bank commercial specifically they were about to shoot an underwater scene with a
shark with a real shark that was like four feet long and they wanted the shark to look like it was
much bigger than that so they had a desk set and they wanted mark said i need you
to replicate everything on this desk in one half scale one half scale actually probably like one
quarter scale yeah because the lamp i made was like this big um quarter scale i said how long
how long do i have and he goes and whatever you can finish in a couple of weeks would be great
which is like coming from commercial special effects all i heard was mountains of time
and i delivered i delivered a banker's lamp with the green clear shade and the gold base i made one
quarter scale the blotter the pens the inkwells the paperweights everything on it uh and then um
and then my dad died and i had to leave and given that it had taken me
three months to get mark on the phone i was like i gotta go
i gotta go to the east coast because i gotta go to this funeral i gotta go to this wake uh
what should i do and mark said well give us a call when you get back and i was thinking
it took me three months to get you on the phone the first time and i just said how about i'll
just show up on monday two weeks from now and he was like good enough and i lasted five years yeah
i mean i yeah i lasted until mythbusters showed up um can you be specific wyven vk even even ivan
it's probably ivan ivan vk wants to know could you be specific as to what you worked on at ilm um
like which movie did you do an object or a prop for okay i'm gonna do this
rapid fire i worked on episode one uh i worked on the bank commercials so i did this giant crane
i did uh this desk in half scale i did this giant machine that tore up a building that
actually worked and we made buildings that tore up it was really beautiful then i moved on to
episode one i worked on newt and roone's shuttle with larry tan and john foreman uh and i was able
to help larry tan finish the model making and then because i could paint and i could also
do the electronics i did all the painting on newton rune's shuttle uh and then i also did
uh the electronics i did the lighting uh and that was my first experience of working with doug chang
was that the only model i worked on on episode one i feel like i worked on a couple of others
oh right right right no though there was a swamp set that dave fogler was running uh dave fogler
and mark siegel were doing uh and they did a bunch of i can't even remember rocks or something
dave and mark had figured out that the opinel french knife like what every frenchman has in
their pocket and they eat apples with is like the perfect knife for cutting the specific
i think probably six or eight pound urethane foam that all the rocks and beggars canyon were made
out of uh and so they were i was making rocks with them for this uh swamp set then after that let's
see i worked on space cowboys a.i terminator 3 uh galaxy quest galaxy quest i spent two weeks
on it it's by far the best movie i worked on my whole time working in film um i built
the part of the thermian dock that the the ship crashes into on its way out on its maiden voyage
um that piece is still available at the prop store of london's website by the way yeah so you can buy
a piece of my model making if you want to fork over the dough um there's a thing that happens
in film which is most of the projects you work on aren't awesome i mean they have awesome components
to them but they are awesome you know terminator 3 is fine it's fine it's not insultingly terrible
it's a fine movie it's really hard to make a movie this is the thing is that like
i want to say i don't love all the movies i worked on i don't love most of the movies i worked on
but it doesn't mean that they're bad movies it doesn't mean that they were made by dummies it's
hard to make a thing i'm really cognizant of that so i don't want to be in the position
of like trashing something that you know we all worked so hard on however there's a term in film
which is when you're busting your ass to make something beautiful for a film that's not great
it's called turd polishing and that's where we got the idea to make that mythbusters episode you