The First Time Adam Savage Made an Audience Gasp

0:00 Aquila Draconis.

0:02 The questions are as follows.

0:05 I want to decoupage old hotel style furniture with old torn

0:09 comic pages old torn comic pages to create decoupage lamps etc.

0:14 What are my basic first steps as I acquire materials?

0:17 I'm supremely new to this and it will be

0:19 a stress reliever for the difficult last few years for me.

0:22 And then Aquila Draconis says,

0:25 I'm looking to build a concrete life size concrete

0:28 life size statue of a weeping angel from Doctor Who.

0:32 I have never worked with concrete before any suggestions?

0:35 Yes.

0:36 Um Aquila Draconis' question helps me answer

0:39 True Dad True Dad of Two's question.

0:42 Um Aquila Draconis, concrete is marvelous stuff

0:48 and you can do amazing things with it.

0:50 Um to do a life size statue of an angel

0:56 is a really really involved bit of concrete work.

1:01 It is multiple steps.

1:03 It is requires a lot of internal engineering.

1:07 And so my suggestion to you Aquila Draconis

1:10 would be Number one is always go watch

1:13 some YouTube videos of people doing trying

1:15 to do the same thing you're thinking about doing.

1:17 Um number two, try and figure out how you want to do it cuz listen there's

1:22 a million ways you can make a concrete life

1:24 size statue of a weeping angel from Doctor Who.

1:26 You could 3D print your mold in negative if you wanted.

1:29 It would take a while but it's certainly feasible.

1:32 Um but both of these are questions about

1:37 something the the the asker has not tried before.

1:42 And so Aquila Draconis I hope my answer here to True Dad of Two helps you.

1:46 Um there is something I notice when people are interested in tackling a new task

1:52 and they come to me and ask me is this a reasonable project to start with?

1:56 And it is very frequent that the project the person

2:00 wants to start with is I can see hugely ambitious.

2:08 There's nothing per se wrong with an ambitious project.

2:13 Except that if you don't know that it's ambitious,

2:16 the amount of time it takes can basically throw you off your horse.

2:24 Um So, two out of two,

2:26 you want to decoupage some hotel-style furniture and create lamps, etc.

2:31 My recommendation would be um you want to just practice decoupage first.

2:42 You don't want to go buy a nice piece of furniture that you

2:44 have this idea it's going to look great decoupage and then start on that.

2:49 Because if you mess it up,

2:51 you've messed up the thing that you've purchased to get your final product.

2:55 My recommendation is to start cheaply.

2:57 Literally, go just start decoupaging 2-liter soda bottles.

3:02 You totally could.

3:04 Um compound curves are non-trivial.

3:08 Um you can buy uh paper mache uh uh uh uh

3:12 objects online for fairly cheap to be used as like Christmas decorations.

3:16 There used to be this amazing store in San Francisco called Fantastico,

3:20 and they sold all sorts of amazing things for throwing big parties,

3:24 and they threw, and they would sell paper mache stars

3:28 and angels and elephants and animals and all sorts of different stuff.

3:31 You could buy some paper mache forms and decoupage those.

3:34 It's a nice inexpensive thing.

3:36 Um and what I know that you don't is that there are

3:47 a lot of different comics you could How How I say this?

3:50 I kind of like the advice I want to give you

3:53 is advice that will bring you to your own point of view.

3:57 That's it.

3:58 So, there's multiple modalities here.

4:00 One is decoupage is applying paper with some glue,

4:05 probably a PVA glue or or something like that.

4:10 Uh on compound curves.

4:12 That's the hard part, right?

4:13 Doing flat surfaces, that's easy.

4:16 But on compound curves, so you want to one,

4:19 just start practicing that so that when you have comic pages you care about,

4:24 you can start to adjust where they land because you now

4:28 know how things will change as you apply them to a surface.

4:31 So, that's one modality to get good at before

4:33 you start trying an object that you care about.

4:36 The second one is what are the comics you're going to use?

4:38 There's a lot of old comics pages.

4:41 Are you grabbing them from real newspapers on eBay

4:45 or are you buying a couple and reprinting them?

4:47 Both of those are valid ways to do this.

4:51 But there is an ideal in for you

4:57 out there is an ideal comic color material combination.

5:03 And I want you to spend some time

5:05 trying to try different things before you get there.

5:08 It may be that old comics in a Chinese newspaper is the look you're going for.

5:12 It may be that, you know, you want to buy an old Sears Montgomery Ward

5:16 catalog and tear that up and use that for decoupage.

5:18 Um but to me when you want to achieve an object

5:27 you care about and you want the process to be rewarding,

5:31 the most important thing is that when you're

5:33 turning out an object that you care about, when it's time to like, okay,

5:37 now I know enough of this and I know enough of that and now

5:40 I want to execute on this thing and you go get that object,

5:44 modifying an object is is fraught.

5:47 And modifying something as variegated as a chair is

5:49 all sorts of I say this sitting in my holy

5:52 chair has also there's all sorts of different places

5:54 and approaches and there's a huge amount of area to cover.

5:59 So, give yourself the time and space to practice

6:03 both the aesthetic form and the physical application,

6:08 and then decide upon the object you care about.

6:11 That's my advice.

6:12 That's my advice for both of you guys.

6:15 Troot out of two also asked, "When you started in visual effects,

6:17 did you ever think you would become a mentor

6:19 at such a high level in the industry?" Well,

6:22 I'm not positive that I am, but you know,

6:25 I I like to think of myself as an enthusiasm gateway.

6:29 The film industry is a difficult industry.

6:31 It's not for everybody,

6:34 but I love being a communicator of the magic that happens on set.

6:38 I love visiting sets and talking to the artisans out there.

6:42 Um, I've said many times that every time tested

6:46 walks onto a new movie or television or web set,

6:50 we just feel like we're widening our expanded family.

6:54 Um, and that feels really really lovely.

6:56 There was a moment early on when I kind

6:59 of realized that my skills were might be unique, might be really useful to me.

7:04 And it was it was about 2000 at ILM and I learned

7:08 that ILM occasionally sent people to film

7:10 festivals to talk about stuff ILM related.

7:13 And I went to the the the person there and I was like, "Hey,

7:17 I I'm pretty good at speaking maybe sometimes." And they sent

7:22 me down to San Jose to a con to give a talk.

7:25 And then they sent me to the Breckenridge Film Festival.

7:28 And they even like I was even able to work

7:31 with the photo department to build a slide carousel of a you know,

7:35 few dozen slides of ILM's process.

7:39 And then I was giving this talk about special effects and how we

7:43 did this effect and I was showing the various elements that people, you know,

7:48 that we shot at ILM to put this effect together and then I showed

7:53 the effect and when the slide went up

7:55 that showed everything going together the audience gasped.

8:01 Um they GASPED WITH THIS AH THAT THAT SOUND.

8:07 THE no no better sound from an audience ever.

8:14 And the other thing was that like I'm in Breckenridge.

8:18 I'm in this police station in Breckenridge.

8:20 So it's like this tall sided sort of old

8:23 Victorian kind of theater uh uh and there's about

8:27 400 people in there and they were trying to do

8:29 an intro of me but the guy who was doing the intro was only told like a minute

8:33 before to do the intro and he was all

8:35 like he was you know he was put up and so he was like you know, come on out.

8:40 I didn't get a full intro cuz it had never been discussed and so I

8:44 just started talking about George and when he

8:46 founded ILM and I realized that like yeah,

8:51 that I had so grown up immersed and infused with all

8:56 of this information and this history of special effects that uh

9:00 I I was surprised to find it so easy to talk

9:03 about in front of people on that stage in Breckenridge.

9:06 So it was a little bit of a a harbinger

9:09 of of things to come uh and and a desire too, right?

9:12 Look, I want nothing more than TO HEAR THAT [groaning] THAT SOUND.

9:17 NO BETTER SOUND.

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