YouTube:
Adam welcomes pop-up book designer Kelli Anderson to the workshop to learn about her latest book: Alphabet in Motion. Six years in the making, this book is an interactive exploration of the history of typography, and the engineering of its pop-up mechanisms is as elegant and beautiful as the letterforms they illustrate!
A M A Z I N G !!
Adam Savage's Dino Build: Wearing the Raptor Costume! (Ep 5)
On the final day of Gary's time in Adam's shop, the team puts the finishing touches on the raptor's paint and each get into the costume to experience walking around as a 15-foot long dinosaur!
Adam Savage Assembles His Raptor (Ep 0)
Adam Savage's Dino Build: Building the Infrastructure (Ep 1)
Adam Savage's Dino Build: Testing the Paint (Ep 2)
Note: There are tree previous videos in this series, all worth watching if you like this kind of thing. Which I do. Fasinating!
From the YouTube page:
This may be the smallest remote controlled robot we've covered on Tested. Adam visits the workshop of Endiatx, the makers of the Pillbot robotic endoscope that can swim around in your stomach to map and examine your insides. Adam swallows not just one, but two Pillbots during his visit and pilots the robots around his own stomach!
The first 18 minutes give you the background on the robot. The actual swallow starts about about 18:02.
On a Shooting Set of Aardman Animations' Early Man!
Adam Savage’s Tested
Adam Savage steps onto one of the film stages at Aardman Animations, where a complex and detailed miniatures set is ready for stop-motion filming. Chatting with one of the Animation Directors of the film, Adam learns how the puppets are mounted on these sets to make them come alive, one frame at a time.
Trailer for Early Man:
Some years ago I watched a bunch of TED talks. And then lost interest. These days I rarely watch any TED talks. But I watched this one because it's by Adam Savage and it's about cosplay.
I've known about cosplay for well over a decade, but have never participated. Adam Savage is a new interest. He devotes an enormous amount of time create costumes for cosplay. It's obviously important to him and rewarding for him? Why?
That's what he explains in this video, which starts with his childhood and ends with him wearing a No-Face costume (from Miyazaki's Spirited Away) to a Comic-Con. He tells that story starting at about 10:16. Pay attention to what he says about playing the character of No-Face and of people's response to it. The thing is, it takes months, if not years, to build the costume, but the cosplay only lasts for minutes, perhaps hours, a couple of times a year. So I'm still wondering: Why? As part of that, what is the relationship between the part one plays while in costume and how one is in real life?
And the Why? isn't just about Adam Savage. It's about the culture of cosplay, and Comic-Cons. What role does that play in our culture? Do we need more of it? If so, why?
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Addendum (9/24/21): For more on Adam Savage on cosplay, see the first part of the following video:
I've been watching a lot of videos by Adam Savage, who was a model-maker in the film industry before becoming co-host of MythBusters. A lot of his videos involve model building of various kinds, whether from scratch or from kits, including Lego kits. A lot of the issues he talks about in constructing those models come up in this video where my cousin, Erik Ronnberg, Jr., talks about building a museum-quality model of a fishing schoner.
The over-riding issue is that of narrative, the model implies a narrative. For Savage this comes most strongly into play in the last stage of model building, "weathering." How do you finish the model's surfaces so that it looks used? What particular history gave it that look.
Erik doesn't illustrate building his model, which took 1800 hours or so. This is a presentation made and the model's unveiling. But he does point out the features of the model, starting at about 20:45. Erik points out that he chose to depict the model when it was under full sail and coming close to the fishing grounds. He arranged figures of the crew to show them preparing to commence fishing.
VL31 - The Launch of the Elsie - A Ship Model by Erik Ronnberg, Jr. - 04-09-2011 from Cape Ann Museum on Vimeo.
About the video:
This event commemorates the unveiling of a model of the fishing schooner Elsie that was constructed by Cape Ann Museum maritime curator Erik Ronnberg, Jr., who learned the intricate art of ship model building from his father, Erik Ronnberg, Sr. The model was commissioned by Wilbur James who is a Rockport native, a member of the museum’s Board of Directors, and the great-grandson of a former owner of the real Elsie, Charles River Pearce. Assembled in the crowd are relatives of the Elsie’s past captains, additional owners, builders, designer, and crew. Along with a slide show that highlights the model’s incredible detail, Ronnberg speaks about the process of building such an exact replica, down to the four-strand left-hand turned anchor cable and lucky horseshoe attached to the windlass. In the course of the discussion that follows the lecture, many harrowing experiences of the crew who earned their living fishing on these great ships are recounted.
Adam Savage is an experienced special effects designer and fabricator who has a YouTube channel where he shows how to build stuff. In this video he is building a Totoro, one of the creatures from Hayao Miyazaki’s film, My Friend Totoro. The video is fascinating. Note several things: 1. He is very experienced in doing this kind of thing. 2. He has a well-equipped shop, lots of tools and materials. 3. He works without a plan, so he has to figure out how to do it. 4. He improvises a lot.
Why am I posting this video? In the first place, how people make things interests me. Beyond that, I’m thinking about a more playful future.
If we’re going to be living in a world where we only have to work 15 hours a week, we need to fill a lot of time. We are going to be spending a lot of time playing, in one way or another, and preparing for play. Why not build costumes?
Of course, Americans have one annual costume festival, Halloween. But for the most part we regard costumes as being for kids, though adults have costume parties as well. This or that community may celebrate a Victorian Christmas, where people get decked out in Victorian ware. And so forth. But only the well-off can afford to have really nice costumes.
Why not a world where everyone has, say, one bespoke costume a year? I’m not imagining that everyone would make their own. Few people have the time to work up the skills Adam Savage has, nor does it make sense for every family to have such a well-equipped shop. But I’d think that in a world arranged for different (more playful) purposes such skills would be more widely distributed in the population and well-equipped community workshops would be common.
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Addendum: Multiple Totoros at Comic-con!