philpop asks what is the first official star wars piece you built for
lucasfilm in the capacity as an employee it was newt and runes shuttle that lands
on naboo that is the shuttle that has an almost animalistic set of legs like crab
legs that land and this ramp that comes down and newt and rune walk
out of it um i had let's see
i had been working i had been working in commercial special effects to give you
the timeline and worked in commercial special effects through the mid 90s and
around 9 mid 96 jamie didn't have a lot of work
going on
and i moved on to work for a toy company zub and i was the head of r d for zoo
for about 18 months and then when i left that in
early 98 yeah i think that was early 98 i decided all my friends are working on
episode one it's time for me to see if i can get
into the shop up at ilm and i started calling mark anderson who ran the shop
weekly um what i did not know was that mark thought i was
someone else that kept like tossing my resume in the toilet
that's what i learned is that mark thought i was a different guy that he'd
interviewed and he had never interviewed me
um so eventually i had friends that were like you got to bring in
adam and he called me up and he brought me in and he brought me in on a
bank commercial uh i built some we built some
large buildings uh for this bank commercial and i think my very first job
at ilm was to make a desk that would be
filmable underwater with a live shark seriously
um they wanted this shark to look huge so they had this desk from their
practical set which was a normal sized desk
and they asked me to build it one half scale everything on the desk
every pencil they had a banker's lamp with the green
clear glass and the gold stuff the blotter everything they wanted me to
build it one half scale and mark said i
said how long do you want me to take on this and he said whatever you can finish
in two weeks and i was like well bruno finished this
whole thing in two weeks i didn't say that i finished the whole
thing in two weeks and then
is this what happened my dad died is that true in mid 98
yeah and i had to leave town i did i so i just started
here's the thing with a union shop like that is
you are you're not an employee you're brought in as over hire
so there's justice with a film like that they had over 200 model makers working
so mark was managing this gigantic beast of a model shop and i was
in his mind because i was in his sight line right i was in the shop
but i had to go home for a funeral have a a memorial for my dad
and i was going to be gone for like a week and a half and that felt like i was
losing my momentum and so i said to mark uh so i gotta go
for a week and a half what should i do when i get back he said
well why don't you give me a call and i thought to myself it took me three
months to get you on the phone the first time so what i said was
tell you what two weeks from monday i'll just show up
and if you have something for me i'll get to work and he was like good enough
and so i showed up and he walked me over to larry tan
larry tan is a delightful and amazing human being
uh who became a good friend is just a lovely
man and he was working on newton runs shuttle he had done all the
uh the basic shaping of the ship and now it was time to add some detailing
um so i think we passed on the mechanical leg work to michael steffy
uh and larry and i were doing the paneling and then i just started larry
was really lovely and fully like open kimono about how the shop
worked so i was saying hey who do i need to know around here to
get to build more spaceships and he said get to know the johns john goodson and
john duncan because they did all the prototypes for episode one
and episode two and episode three both of them are good friends of mine now
uh and larry sort of introduced me to the model shop he was a lovely uh
mentor to have there in those early weeks and we spent
i think the better part of a month finishing up newton runes shuttle i got
to eventually wire the lights on it because it turned out that i could do
that i got to paint it which was so much fun
uh and then i got to rig it on set with um marty rosenberg
i think was the dp on those moco shots outside
and we brought it out and i mean you know it's this thing of like
you spend a month on this model which means like with all the stuff going on
like that model is like a hundred thousand dollars of
investment from the film company in this thing
and then it's time to take it to the set and you literally put it on a
on a an av cart and you push it through traffic because the model shop was
actually across the road from the shooting stages at kerner
so you push this like hundred thousand to a million dollar model through
traffic to get it to the shooting stage and you put it out on the shooting stage
and they're just like they got so much to do
they're like get it up there get it up there is it late good good shoot it
we're done get out of there get out of there
i remember me like sitting on my back wiring a light and marty's like adam's
getting the like crash course education and how
how little latitude we give them on the set
but it was great it was really fun i what was the original oh so
yeah newton rune shuttle the very first big star wars thing i built
and that was great i got to see it on screen
mike finn wants to know do you think do you think we lose something moving
from models and computer motion camera systems like dykstraflex to cgi
yeah we do lose some things
the first thing though that we lose that we don't really talk about is we lose
institutional knowledge and what i mean is um
one of the unspoken reasons that a lot of early cgi
didn't look that great is because the people
who had the skills to build stuff in cg weren't model makers per se they
could build a cg model but being able to build a model is only part
of uh the skill that's necessary
um and the best way to explain this is that
we understand in culture that a film is effectively a pyramidal structure
with the director at the top and everyone working below them
but it's not like the director gives a complete vision to everyone in that
pyramid no no no for a really good film to work
correctly everyone under the director in that
pyramid is also taking responsibility for the stories
that they're telling and when you're a model maker in film
and you've been working with physical models
you have built i built over the years that i made models
a deep amount of institutional knowledge about
scale and gesture and how to add scale with these little tricks that
we would learn how to kick light specular highlighting outlining paneling
with pencil just to get a little more kick in one of the shots like
all these little tiny things that you learn and you pass on and you trade with
your with your colleagues and in the early days of cg
producers who think that they can get something done cheaper will throw it at
the cheapest person that they can afford and get that person to do stuff and it's
not that person's fault that they don't have that institutional knowledge not at
all but they need that
so for a long period of time ilm was paying
physical model makers like myself to learn
cg because they made amazing cg modelers because they make amazing cg models
because they show up with all that institutional knowledge and several of
them told me that the feeling they had after
building something digitally felt very similar
at the end of the day to building something with their hands because
they're doing the same thing they're telling the same
kind of stories they're solving the same kinds of problems
so yes something is lost when you move from
motion control to cg but i think it the biggest reason
is because there's a lag in the techno in the in the understanding of the
technology the other example i'll give for this is
remember in the early 90s when all of a sudden everyone had access to every
thought in the world on their new computers and graphic design went
through like 10 years of just the worst growing pains in the
world do you remember mondo 2000 i mean i loved that magazine and i'm so
glad that it existed but it was a crime against humanity from
a graphic perspective and only because they were trying
everything and that's to be celebrated but
seriously red text on a black background i just want to shoot myself when i'm
trying to read that and graphic design went through the same
phase i'm describing with cg it was really rough for a while until
graphic designers started to really understand the software and really
understand the things that it could do that they couldn't do before
all that being said every director would rather have a physical model in front of
them i think than than a digital model it's just
it just gives you more to work with and there will be
perhaps a a pipeline in the future using vr or ar in which
again that distance gets shrunk to almost nil but it hasn't happened yet
and i would show as evidence if you haven't watched the gallery which is the
five or six part series on disney plus about the making of the mandalorian you
should watch all of it because it's an incredible
education both in the history of film and in using the history of film to do
some of the coolest stuff going on right now
in filmmaking um and one of the things that they keep on talking about is
having practical models having sets you can see having people in costume
interacting with stuff like the baby is so important for
performance not saying that actors can't act in green screens against people
dressed in blue and green because they have in tons and tons of
movies but they prefer not to they prefer to have physical sets
to get lost in
yeah i have a lot to say on that subject okay uh john
o'halloran asks what do you think about the issue of droids obviously being
sentient and having emotions that are owned by biologicals
often mistreated yeah that's a real thing isn't it i
that's problematic as you stated that is super problematic yeah
if you want to see a great
uh exploration of this issue of what it is to be
sentient
uh you should watch animatrix which is the second best animatrix
it's the second best matrix film after the matrix
the sequels are less good than animatrix animatrix if you haven't seen it
is eight animated stories each by a different
director a different uh visual stylist different different animation styles but
it's all animated some is cg somebody's cell animated uh some by
people you're familiar with some by people you're not
all the stories are incredible and there is a two-parter in there about
how uh how the machines took over and there are some really really intense
intense scenes in there violent scenes of humans beating up
androids in a way that it's not comfortable and not cool
and it exemplifies that exact issue you're bringing up with your question
and yeah it makes you question those things like we make robots that are that
smart we're going to take them to the dump
while they whimper no i'm not that sounds awful that sounds terrible
yeah and a matrix man it's so good it is so good and there's a particular
one in there i'm forgetting which episode it is
where there's a rift in the matrix and some kids discover it
and they discover something out in the corners of the town that they live in
and they discover that there's a place where they can't hit the ground if they
fall it's kind of amazing um
xta f.a
zafa tafa
i'm not sure um wants to know what are your thoughts on the lack of planning
for rey's origins in the recent trilogy as well as how it pertains to
storytelling and planning for a production
i i appreciate that question i am not going to answer it in great
detail um i am just the actual whole specific plot
lines of the three sequels is not readily
available in my head like the like four five and six it's
just it's just not um and so for me to pretend to talk
about rey and the whole issue of her being a
mary sue versus her not being with the plot changing as the movies went
and brian johnson's vision versus j.j abrams vision i just don't
feel like there's any utility for me to get into this debate it is
big and people feel very passionately about it and
i i i wish there wasn't so much enmity about this sort of thing because
there shouldn't be um i think rey is a wonderful character
i think rey is a wonderful character and i love daisy ridley and her
her execution of that character is incredible um she's an amazing actress
and i actually peter mayhew was a
a pal and the the very last time i had dinner with him which was
i think it's silicon in its first year um
he said watching daisy in the first movie watching her
from the beginning of production to the end of production watching watching her
rise to the occasion and really understand the totality of her role and
what her job was was a wonderful thing um yeah that's what i'll say about that
thank you for letting me skate past that one
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