hey everybody adam savage in my cave with a show-and-tell about how to get ahead
i know look we got the bad pun out of the way early the fact is i have had my head molded and
cast and scanned multiple times throughout my life and i thought it was worth taking you guys
on a walk through how this went the very first time i had my head cast and molded was in 1994
i was 27 years old uh and for the last time in my life i was bearded beardless and bald i was
bald because oh i knocked over the guy um sorry i was bald because uh i just shaved my head in
1993 i decided to shave my head i don't know why exactly life was just easier that way and
i have a pretty good shaped head so it was fine i was bald for a couple of years
but uh a friend of mine who's a photographer asked me to participate in a photo shoot
and asked me to shave for that photo shoot so i was thinking i was working for jamie heinemann at
the time at colossal pictures and i was thinking as long as i'm bald and beardless we should cast
my head it would just be useful to have and i knew how it worked i knew you took dental
alginate which was a seaweed-based fast-setting non-toxic casting material that dentists use
to cast your teeth you slather that on yourself like wet oatmeal and then you cover over it with
plaster bandages that give a support to the soft rubber that captures the detail of your head
and after about 45 minutes you pull it off and you're released from your silent prison of being
wrapped up and you end up with a negative mold of your head now if that sounds scary to you it
is scary to a lot of people uh the fact is if you have any proclivity to be claustrophobic it can be
a very tough thing to sit there still while people tightly wrap stuff around your head
i do not get claustrophobic but when we posted a picture of this recently a lot of people were
curious how we got a casting with the mouth open because obviously when you do a casting you need
to accommodate a space for the castee to breathe and usually that's through the nose it used to be
back in the days of like the thriller videos but people like rick baker and those guys would put
straws in your nose and they'd mold around you'd be breathing through these straws but that's awful
to breathe through straws stuck in your nose so quickly i think the industry standard went to just
not covering your nose that was all they just made sure they went around the nostrils and then later
on in the sculpt they'd fix that nose because it's an easy place to resculpt for me in this
case i simply kept my mouth open uh and the guys just put the alginate around my lips but
left the middle open and i was able to do that by using my tongue to make a little breathing space
um noteworthy that this casting was performed on me by jamie heinemann and uh then model maker
ralph miller i worked with ralph in the early 90s on a bunch of commercials he's a master sculptor
wonderful modeler and a very funny human being who's the first person from which i heard the
phrase i reject your reality and substitute my own yes it comes from a famous movie in the 80s and
ralph is the one that introduced me to that he also introduced me to some other very strange
movies what is the one where herve villas plays the king of hell it's an early uh danny elfman
project anyway never mind i'm getting ahead of myself we made this casting in 1994. i had
the mold for a while and this is the last casting i possess from that mold the ears
need a little re-sculpting but it is in my plans at some point to fix this up and re-mold it
it is it's interesting having a rad uh uh what do you call it uh uh it is interesting having a
representation of my young self and this wasn't the last time here for instance in around 2010
uh my friends at ilm did a casting of me and this was supervised by my friend danny wagner
uh master sculptor master uh prosthetic artist painter modeler danny can do it all
um and danny supervised this casting of me up at industrial light magic and it was a way faster
affair than this obviously a bunch of time had passed in the interim and the industry got better
at doing these castings quicker because as you can imagine while lots of actors have to get this done
nobody really loves the process so the goal with people who do this is to get it out
as quickly as possible and danny did this sculpt for me sorry did this casting for me in order to
make this sculpt so this is not truly a casting of me at 117 because
well we don't have time machines but danny sculpted this prosthetic of me to look like
i was 117. yes i wore this over my own skin as a prosthetic i got to spend a whole day
as a 117 year old me and then later i asked danny i furthered the commission and asked him to
uh drape this over a casting of my head so i had a record of it it is really fascinating
to look at an excellent prosthetic makeup while you're wearing it to look at that in the mirror
and to also give danny an idea of how i was going to age i was able to supply him with pictures of
older members of my family including my dad just a couple of weeks before he passed away in 98.
but so this is like yeah i feel like i can really see old me in here now you're probably wondering
about this guy uh and this comes courtesy of my friends at fbfx and this required no sitting
no time no casting no molding so fbfx is a company out of london that does
all sorts of incredible movie costume work they did the suits from the martian uh and gravity and
a bunch of other space movies they've also done tons of the marvel universe armor and i think even
some dc universe armor yep um and as you can imagine for like a big marvel project someone
like chris hemsworth getting them somewhere in the world so you could spend a couple of hours
casting their head these people are expensive to move around the planet and fbfx knowing that
it came up or utilized a totally different technique for getting high quality reproductions
of their actors and it is a scanning process for this i stepped into a room at fbfx's facility and
uh something like 150 dslr cameras photographed me all at once and then software stitched all those
together into a photogrammetry model of me which they then carved out of white bead foam and sent
to me i didn't know that they were going to do that um i said that oh i haven't said that yet
one of the things that's great about having a casting of your head is if you do cosplay like
i do it's fabulous to have a correctly sized buck that you're going to model off of for wigs for
hats for anything that has to go on here glasses all of that the marks on these that you can see
are all actually pieces of costumes that i've built using these as my foundation and this is
without a doubt the most useful mannequin i have in the shop i've draped many costumes on this
um and i wanted to explain how weird it is to see yourself up close not not just like this not
not that that that's weird in and of itself but seeing my whole physicality here albeit about 10
pounds heavier than i am now but seeing my whole physicality here it's far out it is it's peculiar
and there's one aspect of this which i really dig which is here you can actually see the my cell
phone in my pocket that's how accurate these scans actually are yeah i built a special dolly for this
just so that it sits as close as possible to my height as possible um yes as an active cosplayer
these are incredibly useful to me and i realized that i had never walked you guys
through the whole history of these castings even though many of them have shown up in the
background unexplained i thought it was time to explain thank you guys for joining me for
this show-and-tell and if you are interested in a more in-depth view of these literally in depth
we shot this for tested vr there's a link in the comments below that you can follow and go see
this in virtual space right in front of you thank you guys and as always i will see you next time