Transcript
You ever gotten a new job that’s like kinda completely new to you, to the point you don’t even really know what to expect? Or maybe you like lied your way into getting a job because you figured you could do it but you’re, on paper, not qualified in the least for it or even have any experience in that line of work?
Or have you started a new job and it’s really not what you expected at all and you feel the slow dawning realization on you that you might be – just a teensy bit – in over your head?
Naw, I ain’t never felt like that either.
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy where sometimes it’s just story time. And we catapult much gratitude over the digital divide to our patrons for their awesome support. Thank you very much.
All right, well, I’ve been known to talk a lot and I’ve been known to talk a lot about myself. Welcome to YouTube, the narcissists’ platform!
So, I thought I’d tell you the story of how I actually got into the Hollywood special effects industry because I think it’s kinda funny and kinda unexpected. And I personally kinda like origin stories, cause I’m always curious about how someone got to where they are, way more than where they are when they’re at the top of their game.
And no, I’m not implying that I’m at the top of any game, let alone my own. But some of you expressed some interest in “war stories”, so I thought this was a decent one to tell. I’ve told this story before on my short-lived podcast, but there’s definitely a lot more of you in the audience today, so I figured I’d archive this one on the ol’ YouTube for posterity.
Okay, so the year is 1995. Or 96. End of one, beginning of the other, somewhere in there. As I’ve mentioned before, I was working at Starbucks. Assistant managing a Starbucks in fact! One of the highest positions I’ve ever held, to be perfectly honest. And I had started working weekends at my friend’s hobby store in Torrance, California, Freiler’s Historical Models. It was a fairly well-known hobby shop in southern California, and I’d met the owner’s son when they had opened a second store in Palm Desert California, where I lived. That branch didn’t stay open too long, but I met a bunch of guys I ended up gaming with and eventually working with in the effects industry later on.
Because … one day we’re just hanging at the shop, in Torrance, doing gamer stuff, I was probably looking at the Games Workshop catalog and adding up how much my employee discount would take off this brand new game called Necromunda and this fax comes in on the fax machine.
A fax machine is an ancient device that was installed in every commercial business and worked like a photocopier connected by telephone lines to every other fax machine in the telephone network.
Telephone lines were these wires that ran through the ground –
Okay, okay I’ll stop.
But yeah, the hobby shop got a fax that literally said – well, I’ll paraphrase here – it said, “Hey, do you like to build models? Do you like movies? How would you like to build models for movies?”
Yep, a fax came in with a hiring notice from a special effects shop in Culver City. What’s weirder is that most of us didn’t even think about it very much. But one of my best friends, who didn’t work at the hobby shop but was – and is – a fantastic model maker, the hobby shop owner told him about it and he called the number and went in for an interview. I’m pretty sure he got hired on the spot, and he had to move up to Los Angeles from the desert where we all grew up, and yep, he started working for a company called Vision Crew Unlimited. And his first job was working on deck details for the 40 foot long, museum grade 1/20th scale Titanic model for Cameron’s Titanic.
So a few weeks go by, maybe a month, I don’t really remember, but my buddy says, hey man, you need to come work here. So I got an interview set up and I remember asking like what should I bring to the interview. I was told to just bring some of the models I’d worked on at home. I remember taking a selection of really not great miniatures, I think I had a full Dwarven Blood Bowl team and I took an 1/8 scale resin garage kit of Deunan Knute from Appleseed I’d painted up, and that was about it. I really hadn’t built a lot of kits, I’d just painted figures for games. Not even terrain, I didn’t have a lick of terrain at that time.
So I drive up to Culver City to this effects shop, which is inside a building that was originally like an auto body shop or something like that and I go up to the office with my little cardboard box of gaming and anime figures and I sit down with who I later find out is the CEO of Vision Crew – Evan Jacobs, he’s currently a Creative Finishing Supervisor for digital effects on a ton of Marvel flicks. I show him my minis and he’s just kinda like yeah, ok, this guy can hold an x-acto knife, can you start Monday? This was a Friday. And I still had two jobs. So I said, you know, sure, I can do that. Oh and what’s the pay rate? Fifteen bucks an hour, 10 hour days minimum so always 10 hours of overtime. I think I was only making like eight or nine bucks an hour at Starbucks so this was a pretty significant income jump.
So I had to actually go quit my jobs, it’s the only time I didn’t give my current employer a two week notice – except that time I got fired from the pizza place. I walked into Starbucks on a busy Friday afternoon and told the head manager that I had to quit. The manager, who I liked, he was a cool guy, he was like oh, that really sucks man, when’s your last day? And I said, uh, well, yesterday was my last day. And he sorta freaked out, I don’t blame him. I told him I got a job making stuff for the movies and I had to start Monday. He just sorta ran to the back room and so you know I went, uh, I went shopping.
My buddy helped me out with a list of tools I needed to buy over the weekend, so I went to Sears and purchased a tool box and a screw gun and a bunch of other like normal sized tools I’d never owned in my life, like wrenches and full-sized pliers and stuff like that. I mean all I had was stuff for miniatures, you know, cause I built and painted miniatures. So now I’ve got this, what to me is a huge Craftsman toolbox and it’s full of stuff and it’s heavy and I just, I just don’t really know what I’ve got myself into yet.
This is the “I forgot something” camera. And it’s the first time I’m trying to do this, whatever. There’s something I forgot to mention when I wrote the original script and that is WHY all these effects shops were actually hiring. And when I say all these effects shops are hiring, literally every special effects shop in the industry was hiring people all around Los Angeles, and the reason is because three movies were in production at the same time. Three very large big budget productions. First there was Dante’s Peak, which we worked on, there was Titanic, which also we worked on, and The Fifth Element, which we also worked on. So those three movies alone were doing so much miniature and, and practical special effects work, that they had just basically tapped out the industry professionals that were in the area. So that’s why they were just literally hiring anyone who could hold an x-acto knife. And uh I guess I was a beneficiary of those three movies all happening at the same time. Back to your – back to the regular, scheduled – get outta here!
So Monday rolls around and I gotta leave my place at like six in the morning to get to work by 7 in LA traffic and my buddy Hoffman helps me set up my toolbox at what’s gonna be my desk, which is basically a 4×8 table built outta two by fours and it’s got like a shelf thing along the back and on the other side is his desk. He’s got all kinds of stuff piled on it, it’s all this deck detail for the top of the Titanic, like little cranes and those weird funnel things you see sticking up out of the decks of boats, there’s little brass ladders and resin molding stuff and it’s all pretty cool, if like a little overwhelming at the amount of stuff he’s got on the desk.
I get a quick tour of the facility and I see this massive thing in one of the main open build areas, it’s ten feet long, and it’s got a frame welded out of two inch box steel, it’s shaped kinda like a giant ice cream sandwich. After the little tour, Evan tells me my first job is to build the front end of the Earth warship for the Fifth Element. I was like, ok, and he points out that steel frame ice cream sandwich thing, that’s the warship. The front end is like almost four feet across and a foot tall. I was completely taken aback. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that a “miniature spaceship” was as big as my car and welded up out of two inch steel.
And then Evan shows me a rack of raw materials, it’s full of 4×8 sheets of plywood, MDF, Sintra, Plexiglass, different thicknesses, just like big industrial sheets. And he says, yeah, you can cut like a base for the front end out of this six millimeter Sintra stuff. And he asked me if I’ve ever worked with Sintra before and I was like no, I don’t, I’ve never even heard of this. And he says well, you can just rough cut the base out on the table saw and then use the band saw over there to shape it, et cetera.
And I was like, okay, what’s a table saw?
And he points to this thing that’s next to the racks of sheet material and it’s what I know now is a table saw and the table part of the table saw is another 4×8 sheet piece of melamine with a giant saw blade sticking up outta the middle of it. And he’s like, you never used a table saw before. No sir. Okay. So he gives me a tutorial on it, stressing you know safety and stuff and explaining to me that if I fuck up pushing material through the blade it can “kick back” and I think he demonstrated with a piece of foam core that like goes flying backward when he sort of jukes it into the blade. So don’t that, he says. And yes, during my couple of years there, I did get kicked in the stomach with a chunk of wood that the saw didn’t like, so there’s a lot of fairly dangerous stuff in a shop like that, but you know, this was sorta like a “hey, welcome to the real world” sorta place.
At this point, I was truly standing there thinking, I’ve made a grave error in judgment. I should go back to serving lattes and cappuccinos. I mean I’m thinking this whole time like how cool, I’m gonna build models at a desk just like at home but they’re gonna be filmed for the movies. But I’m standing in an industrial workshop where people are welding stuff, everyone’s wearing safety goggles and respirators, there’s compressed air tools whining in the back ground, grinders and sanders and drill presses and massive saws and tool boxes that are as big as anything I’ve seen in a car mechanic shop, and also I’m gonna be here for 11 hours, cause there’s an unpaid hour of lunch in the middle of this 10 hour day. It was a shock.
So eventually I get this piece of Sintra cut that’s like four feet long and I take it to my desk table and it fills most of the desk when I lay it down and I’m just sorta looking at it and I’m wondering like okay, what’s the front end of this spaceship supposed to look like. So I go up stairs and ask Even, uh, what’s the front end of the spaceship supposed to look like. Are there directions that I can follow to make this or you know blue prints or whatever I’m supposed to use to build this stuff, this front end piece.
And he says, well, they want something like the front end of the Sulaco, the ship from Aliens. I was like okay, are there any drawings? Or plans? Sketches? Instructions? He’s like, no, just go make a bunch of nurnies and you can cast some pieces in resin to replicate them and yeah, just, just build the front end. You know, like, just go do your job now.
I was flabbergasted. Like I just did not understand what he was telling me. Which was exactly what I thought he was telling me, I just couldn’t believe it was really how this was supposed to work. Just go make stuff up and stick it on this faceplate thing I’d cut on the largest most terrifying power tool I’d ever used. I went back downstairs to Hoffman and I was like hey man, what is going on here? They want me to build something without telling me what the something is I’m supposed to build. And I don’t remember exactly but I’m pretty sure Hoffman was confused by my confusion.
So I have to say one thing, I got through my first month in the industry for one reason, and that reason is my buddy Hoffman. Had I not had a friend there like him who actually knew what he was doing, I probably would’ve quit within the first week. I distinctly remember having a cigarette after lunch one day, sitting way out in the back leaning against the chainlink fence that bordered the empty concrete canal behind the shop, wearing my old military overalls, covered in dust and lacquer primer and super glue, and just thinking how this whole endeavor felt like I was in like a work camp or something. I was like, who works 50 hour weeks minimum? Who does this stuff voluntarily. But I eventually got over it, mostly, and I learned quite a bit. Not necessarily about building models, I mean, yeah I learned a lot about fabrication but I learned more about life and myself there.
Looking back, it definitely had the same sort of impact on me as having been in the Army, there were general life lessons that I learned there. One of the biggest ones was the very idea that people just do stuff. From scratch. Like you can be given an idea or have an idea and then just do it. Or make it. Without being told how to make it or exactly what to make. That sounds dumb but it was kinda like the opposite of the military, you know where we were always being told exactly what to do and when to do it. In the effects shop, there was a ton of just constant problem solving.
Anyway, I used to tell people that a group of special effects guys would be the best at robbing banks if they decided to pull off a heist. Not only because of the vast array of skills and materials and weird research we’d have to do sometimes, but because of the constant problem-solving that we did. You know, a client is like hey we want this on screen and it has to do X,Y, Z. And then the client leaves and we have to figure out how to do X, Y, Z. It was pretty cool even though when you’re in it, it’s tough as hell and very hard work. Like most adventures, it’s super cool to call it an adventure when you’re not in the middle of it, cause when you’re in the middle of it, it just sorta seems like a terrible life experience.
But yeah, that’s I got into the industry. And it’s from that experience and the people I met there that I got into filmmaking itself eventually. So, just like the Army, it was a formative experience and not one I’d give up. It’s definitely not the kind of work I would wanna do today. I mean, it’s not even the kind of work I really wanted to do back then, but at that time it was the coolest thing I had going. And it was the stepping stone to other things.
And quite a few of you have asked about me bringing more tips and tricks from the fx industry to apply to our tabletop gaming hobby, and while there will be some, it might surprise you to learn that a lot of the stuff we did would relate far more to construction projects – and I mean like building houses, stuff like that – than it does to, you know, our hobby sized models. But the main tip I would say is just reiterating what I mentioned earlier. If you have an idea, you can just make it, or do it, even if you don’t know how. Whatever the idea is, it just means you have to do some problem-solving to achieve it. Even if there ain’t no blueprint. Especially if there ain’t no blueprint. I mean, you gotta make the brand new blueprint!
See ya!