adam savage here in my cave with a show and tell from my past
model making history and today i'm going to show you
some decrepit office furniture
yeah man uh i was working on ai artificial intelligence famously a
stanley kubrick script uh that he did a lot of pre-production on through
the 90s but never got around to finishing and
then after kubrick died shortly after eyes wide
shut came out um steven spielberg who was a lifetime
friend of kubrick they were they were great admirers of each other's
works and great friends uh the kubrick family asked spielberg to
take up the reigns of a.i and direct it and to be clear
i had actually as a kubrick fanatic and spielberg
fanatic i had actually heard about a.i in the early 90s because i had heard
from someone who worked with dennis muran
that kubrick had asked him about some stuff he wanted to do that miron said
was not possible at that point in time uh and then when
jurassic park came out kubrick apparently called him again
and there were discussions about the art of the possible because
of what they achieved on jurassic park i've actually spoken to murren
a little bit personally about this but suffice to say
in uh in 99 i think or 2000 a.i got produced with steven
spielberg directing and industrial light magic did the models for it and
i was one of the main model makers on that shoot for
the better part of a year and let me just say ai first of all holds up
way better than i thought it did i was a little disappointed when it first came
out i watched it recently it's actually quite a powerful and moving
film and i am proud of the model work that uh
i was able to participate in on that film um
there are some really beautiful moments and to be honest
there's a key moment in the film when the teddy bear
when the boy says to his teddy bear his robotic teddy bear
what should we do and his teddy bear says now
we run and i submit that when your toy tells you that it's
time to run that is about the darkest thing
that will ever happen to you um so ai
we did so many different kinds of models for ai
we made detritus for underwater amusement park shots i made an
entire carousel that is still on display at lucasfilm but never made
it into the movie specifically if i remember it didn't
make it into the movie because it was so expensive to generate the cg
kelp and seaweed that they had to scrap an entire motion control shoot for the
the carousel which is sad because this is one of the very rare
occasions in which i was told build a carousel
about four feet in diameter that is the only axiom we're going to give you
no one has time to art direct this just make it from scratch and i
did and i l i loved that set but it didn't get used anyway
there are some scenes in submerged new york
which takes place like 70 years in the future in new york is like 40 feet deep
in water and obviously it's mostly abandoned and
the buildings are falling apart and one of my main jobs on ai was
to do all the broken burnt destroyed buildings in new york city
uh aaron haye if i remember correctly my friend aaron hay was supervising a group
of model makers making buildings so doing these long you know normal
office building brutalist facades like new york has tons of
uh and then giving me the buildings and me and my crew would take those
buildings and rip them apart and make them look all beat to crap and
this seven months of doing this of taking pictures of
of broken things we ended up having for reference material notebooks full of
pictures of buildings that were destroyed including
from the kobe earthquake we had hundreds of pictures of the horror that
is the aftermath of the kobe earthquake and we utilized all of that information
in the destruction of these buildings i remember one of the technologies i
came up with was uh there's a building that's like
cracked in half with water pouring out of it so you see all
these concrete beams that are split apart
and i uh made a laser cut holder that held
six pieces of plant wire and then you poured in
uh a soft plaster of paris and then when you took the whole thing
out of the mold and you cracked the plaster of paris the plant wire was in
that you'd see it like rebar sticking up that was real
we made dozens and dozens of those and glued them all in to
look like crumbling concrete it was really really neat
now most of those buildings sorry about the jiggling most of those buildings we
built were um in a very very uh big scale right so
a 60-tory a 60-story office tower might be seven feet high
but for sorry but for uh one specific sequence we
built a very large destroyed building um there is a
sequence in which you see the the copter that uh that the kid is
flying in with with jude law um and you see it
flying to new york and then you you you basically follow it but you
seeing it through a building so you're passing by like
a long floor of empty offices that are abandoned and
weather beaten and destroyed and you follow the copter on the other side of
that and this was done as a motion control shot
where the the the copter was comped in later but the set in the foreground
was real and it was 12th scale or dollhouse scale
and this is a remnant of that and it includes some dollhouse things
for instance we've got a computer keyboard that we found at
dollhouse supplier a little phone little coffee mug all those
totally easy to find the computer also trivial not a problem
the desk is modular uh i made this to be cut out of eighth inch
give or take eighth inch black acrylic so you could tab and slot it together
and assemble a whole bunch of desks really
quickly i think we made like 40 in a few hours
um the toilet we we actually made slush casts of the
toilets and then beat them up and broke them that was
really cool but the two pieces of kit that i
personally contributed one was this these these fluorescent
light fixtures here's one where you could see some of
the glass and here is the casting right so i made this
as a single piece out of styrene that only took me about 45 minutes
sent it to the mold room the mold room made castings of this and then we
added conduit and paint and weathering and in some cases even broken glass
nobody makes fake fluorescent fixtures at least they didn't when we were making
this movie uh and perhaps the most important
contribution nobody makes a desktop again that's
right i don't want to be absolute about this
when we were researching we could find no one that made a desktop
cage fan and so if you remember my show and tell
of the radar dish from space cowboys where i laser cut it
flat and then slumped it into a form under a vacuform
vacuum former heater i did the same thing for these fans
and i think i made about 10 of these because they provided a tremendous
amount of like high value detail as your eye went past
we were looking for things that you like oh i know what that is it's not just
visual noise it's actually got to be stuff you've got to
feel like you're in the space um and so we had this entire assembly
line of buckets of each of these things cast
chairs computer screens uh the cage fans and the desks and
everything and then when it was time to dress the
actual set which was only one layer wide i think it was about 10 or 12 feet long
a whole bunch of us just spent a day just assembling different versions
of workspaces and things like that and as one often does at the end of a
challenging but exciting job i kept a few of the key
pieces for myself that i may have some record of ingenuity
i had as lad thank you for joining me for this trip
down memory lane this has been a show and tell i'm adam savage i'll see
you next time