hey adam savage here in my cave with a show and tell
of some of my model making history and some film history in general
now i have been trained as what's called a hard-edged model maker i make
spaceships i can do submarines and airplanes and that
kind of stuff i can sculpt if i have to but i am not a
sculptor that is a totally different gene pool in the model making
realm however within model making i have
in the past described that we have some industry terms
and one of the terms we have for little tiny details
that help cell scale is greeblys that is a george lucas name
um greebles and gigas is something that we called them since the early 90s and i
was working in special effects it was already an established term
greebly has known the world over i will tell you that in
new zealand and australia i believe nerney
is another version of the same thing but there are also different scales
of greebles and this thing that i'm about to show
is a version of that um so in star wars episode two which i worked
on uh i believe i was actually the very first model maker hired on episode two
in the middle of production there was a long chase scene that we were doing that
takes place over the surface of chorus scan
and very much like the death star sequence
uh production was building modular pieces of coruscant's surface in the
same way that lucasfilm built modular chunks of the death star surface
in order to sort of mix and match pieces and get these long
motion control flyovers of the landscape and as part of that they had a bunch of
rooftops and the rooftops in this one sequence were looking
i think a little too bland and brian grenade my supervisor came and said
we need you to make a big greebly that the mold room can cast
like a whole crap ton of and we can put around on different rooftops and it'll
look different in every orientation that we put it in
yeah is there anything more fun as a directive to get from your supervisor
than such a loose uh uh uh a loose charge
this is what i ended up making now this is a trapezoidal oh it's actually
times 12. this is a trapezoidal base that tells you that the mold room made
12 of these um and i this is already a casting
so maybe they made 12 and then they used this as a master to make 12
more but this was a griebly that i made and it is composed
of tons of little greeblies um and to just like give you an idea of
the taxonomy of greebles at ilm certainly there was um a loft full of
model kits from tamiya and hasegawa and and ertl and npc and that's where we
would go shopping for details for the surfaces of
a spaceship you'd pull out three or four of saturn fives and clipped little bell
housings or something that you needed um for super common greeblies
the mold room would often take a bunch and put them on a piece of card and make
a shallow uh open face mold
and then whenever they had over pour like pouring lions from ai or something
like that and they had a little extra resin
they'd pour it in the overpower molds every mold room in the world does this
and it's often where you can find some really cool stuff to play with
but buckets of all sorts of different uh greeblies
so there's the there's the the real ones we get from the model kids and then
there's the remanufactured ones that the model shop
uses and i used both in the execution of this
but i actually in doing that i grabbed some parts from tamiya
kits there's a grating there there's i can definitely see what is a cylinder
head cover but there's also some pieces in here
that came from ilms griebly mold because i recognized them but in the end what i
made in building this was a kind of a
agreeably in and of itself for a macro set
so this is made oblong so you could make it look like this
or it would look like this or this or this and in each case it sells and shows
different details and that was sort of the entire point
i had one day to make this and again those kinds of restrictions often some
of my favorite restrictions in the world a funny follow-up to this
which is i guess i don't know maybe 10 years ago
i came across somebody selling one of these on ebay
and i reached out to them they were selling it for charity
and i said you know that i built this and they sent it to me and i
signed it for charity it was lovely to see it again and i i have no idea how it
made it out i mean i have this one because i
think one of the guys in the mold room just gave it to me directly
that would happen sometimes um but it is fun to see your work come back
to you from outside through a long trail but
suffice to say that greebly is a very adjustable term it's the aloha of model
making it can mean a single detail that you got
from a model kit it can me means something that you uh
some small square of styrene that you're using just to break up the surface
detail or it could be a macro gribbly like this
meant to add a broad swath of detail with the with a low
effort right because when you're doing a cityscape man you
can lose your whole life in just the extra little details and
every layer of detailing takes exponentially more time than its
predecessor so stuff like this allowed us to do
uh visual shortcuts in the sets uh and man i miss that kind of work i
really do uh the last great set that i have seen
that came close to that is uh some of the
giant big some of the giant miniatures or bigoters
that what a workshop made for the flyover shots for blade runner
2049 you might not realize it but many of
those sets were practical and built by weta to some of the same exact
standards that the original death star and original blade runner sets were
built from like using tool kits and every piece you can
and spray painting and adding detail and just
some of the stuff disappears this stuff you know it communicates
depth and it communicates story and this is just a little bit of
storytelling that i added to episode two thank you guys so much for joining me
for this show and tell and i will see you next time