Adam Savage Examines the Props and Spacesuits of The Expanse!

look the show is set in the future and there are weapons and gear all that are from the future but what you don't really think about when you visit the props department which is where I am right now is that when you design a futuristic weapon you have to give it a past and that's where Jim and his team come in they design the things so that they have a weight and aware and a beat-up look to them so they feel like they're really part of the universe Jim what am i holding here this is a missus gun from season two so it's basically become a signature weapon so ty and Daniel the writers of the book yeah basically came to me one day and they said listen you gotta make a missus gun this season so we secretly started developing what we were going to do and doing designs for it because we didn't really have it in any script it wasn't scripted piece yet so we figured out what kind of style we wanted we knew it was going to be a pump-action shotgun and from there we basically just ran with it all so it's both the piste smoked a gun and a pump action yeah oh yeah nice and the way our our ammunition works in our show is that one round could be a thousand shots okay so you don't see them load very much right and it could be a shoot different projectiles as well it looks like the base here is an airsoft gun we base everything off airsoft and then you've got some aluminum bit some resin bits do you guys use 3d printing as well we've done a lot of 3d printing this year we try to some stuff we 3d print but mainly because the guys get beaten to hell we really try to do everything in aluminum as we can and once we start cladding the airsoft guns we try to add aluminum to them this is great really I mean it's just like I'm holding it feels like it's about 20 years old yeah it's great we really work hard on getting the textures right for them so what we do is we do a graphic of paint pass first yeah then we do our graphic passes and then we send it into the paint department to agent up talk to me about about like layering in the details on the stickers the history the the beat up I mean you got this as a brand-new piece and then you beat the crap out of it right yeah after the concept art comes in we try to mimic it as closely as possible so you've got sheet metal machine components like you said 3d printed parts which keep it real and metal as possible because they're going to get drops they're going to get things are gonna get smashed into things that one got thrown last week this one yeah oh it looks like it held up pretty darn well that went back you having view cat I know that on some productions they have the guns in Rupp do you guys have you had it we haven't had very many applications where we have to do that we've got a couple of our hero weapons cast and rubber and plastics but generally it's what you see is what we use I mean and we're constantly sending stuff back not because it's not built in a bad way it just gets beaten up like this gun from school and you don't know this like it looks great in a drawing but once we actually build it and we make it then like once what an actor for instance drops this the barrels are going to break off or they're going to get crooked so first season they're always straightening these barrels out before we roll but that's just the nature of the prop Department it goes well this is what I remember as a model maker is like the drawing can show you a lot but then once you put it together you realize oh this detail needs more finesse I mean that that's my favorite part about the beauty of putting the chassis on existing guns is you can go and get as many as you want when you need them die hard part is when they like for the shotgun they only wanted a pump after we had started and weld gun isn't a compact I'd ended up essentially rebuilding the entire insides just to make a pump happen all right talk to me about the helmet well it says first thing this first season helmet I had been on a show previous to this and I learned quickly that we have as soon as you put something on an actor's head you've got to light them you've got to give them sound you've got a big they have to be able to communicate with the directors any other actors and air they need airflow because you don't want your visor to to get condensation on it and fog up and that airflow can't affect the sound either exactly and sound is never happy so what we what we basically did is we had to figure out what we could do so we had 12 weeks of prep so our time timeframe which is quite tight so we started bringing in a bunch of different helmets we started with motorcycle helmets we then we want to be like skateboarding helmets we went to skydiving helmet right and then we found the versa flow which is a 3m system make sure said this is a painting respirator okay exerted probably so that gave us our base structure to work with and it had all the duct work so we could install a prebuilt with your big problem solved already exactly so we use their actual system to feed the air to this so that was the big problem and taken care of so then what we basically did is we took that helmet and we took it to a local builder named Walter clocks in his shop and then we designed around that helmet on let's bring this one over here this is a new season helmet right so second so we learned a lot from season one because the learning curve on helmets is incredible so gorgeous and we also used sky diving how much but what happened with sky diving helmets and there was too close to the actors face right so you couldn't light them so I had to come up with a different way of doing it this season that was inexpensive because we had to does a lot of them and worked for the show and so I found these low altitude fighter jet helmets on eBay awesome so we bought a bunch of them and then again the same builder that did this we brought them in and buy them we modified them and this system doesn't have air in them but we can shoot air there's a little fan that right add a little whisper on there and it's the dividers far enough away from the face that you don't get the condensation and then we've lit these up and added microphones in them as well I love this and this is like how construction workers will wear hardhats with their union stickers and different jobs they worked on you've gone for the same look here yeah exactly because the belters really travels from station to station and basically they would just accumulate their stickers like construction workers would so that's the idea for this and this helmet gave us the freedom to beat them up which is great right right a lot of the times we just send the helmets out to get painted for new episodes or whatever but this is a three-part system as well so everything is not first met well nice all of our lighting basically is in here some channel lighting here so this these are on separate dimmers so the DP can light the face accordingly right right and then I see tiny little wires from the sponsor is it a heat advice it is a heat advisory is low it was low altitude it had the existing all this mechanism out here and able to heat up to maybe a lot reduce condensation we never actually tried we just love the detailing in this together is something that we we could do but it just kind of was a bonus we had it with the the prop it was in there so then these come apart nicely oh wow look at that so it also comes apart you and the activist puts it on yeah basically so this this was this was a great lifesaver for us this season because this saves us from we put this on the actors head and I don't have to worry about the neck collar right which is always an issue for light leaks and just to cover that up and discuss you know okay so it was great these were originally camouflage green so we just dyed them and in the dye bath that actually dyed this which was just a like a cream color so it was it was a happy ball another helmet yeah this is Season one Martian helmet which basically built off of a snowboard helmet okay so it just basically comes off today looks like a paintball mask almost pretty much yeah so originally in episode in season one we didn't see too much of the Martians we only saw them a couple times and we sent out a concept drawing to everybody and it kind of got approved like oh yeah that looks great and then when we got helmets delivered on the day everybody was upset that we couldn't see the actor's face but it was too late all right Madeline we season one we had like heart we can hardly see the actor's face so in season two we had to design a different style helmet it's all the same what's about the same right but with a full face visor so that's what we went with this it just melt off the same chassis as that either built off all the walls of noble house so we took a snowbird helmet and then built everything around it accordingly now I noticed that like this one has just a single curve it's a piece of plastic right but this one is a compound so this is this is the season two legacy home it's a legacy done in LA bill peace force so we had concept drawings done to legacy the desert did all the Iron Man armor etc exactly to get around this is there but bread and butter exactly that visor there have two curves to it where everything else is these two a flat single curve absolutely beautiful you can yes gently look at Bobby's suit yeah that's it over there right so this is this is Bobby's full armor and the actress has to wear this for extended periods of time am i right which will wear three layers so she under her like she's got a little jumpsuit on and then she'll wear a cooling vest okay so when in between takes and sets we can plug her into water so we can pump cool water circulating water oh yeah okay so we keep her cool and then we put her the under suit here which we call the on camera under suit so basically everything velcros to that so it takes about nine so it takes about three people to get her into the and I see a lot of magnets too helpful yeah together yeah you've got to not just build it but you've also got a payment and weather and beat it up to tell the whole story of its entire yeah everything's got history right so we sat with the producers and went over all the little details like Bobby's armor has more dents in it because we could get more beaten up it's a version before the other three because it's for the power suits the planner episode scenes so hers has a bit more history than everybody else's so we mapped all that out and we work with legacy on making sure they knew where that damage was so they worked out into the builds and basically we'd send everything down to legacy color samples paints a blanket though they knew where we're going with it and they had all the drawings and then I went down there for about two days to make sure everything was okay just oversee the build and then it basically arrived with two of their Tech's today she days before we shot it now I'm noticing also that it's quite flexible yeah that must be a lot more comfortable for the actress than heavy fibreglass rigid structures well because it's legacy they they did all the Iron Man suits because so they kind of had a really good learning curve on it so they I think the original Airmen suit was made of a hard plastic head and there was no flexibility at and the actors were getting pinched everywhere so now they build everything out of a foam rubber so it's great for us so sometimes on some close-ups you know something will Bend out like that does it go again but it saves the actor and it's a little bit more lightweight for them there's two microphones in the helmet there's two different lighting areas and the helmet is kind of since there's a little air system in there so everybody gets hooked the helmet goes on everyone gets out so it's not an easy process now these systems on all right now from the from the super militaristic and hardened battle armor to the misko and Mariska backpack with blood on it by the way what is this what what am I looking at well apparently in the books there's a there's a reference to this TV show everybody watches and we wanted we like to tip our hat to the books as much as we can sure so we anytime we can we'll say like there's a problem a has a backpack so we're like okay but can we can we add that tip of the hat to the book so we had our art department design something and then we put it on here so this will get switched out because in the show this is going to be animated oh it actually it's the future okay so these guys will be animated so we can take a pink patch put over top in the need the visual effects guys will animate it but it was just in a bloodbath a blood battle so it got some blood on it pretty curse yeah it's one of the writers favorite crops apparently Sam thank you so much for showing this amazing assembly this is always like one of my favorite things to look at on a film production yeah it's a fun show to work on for sure

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 541,774

Keywords: adam savage, the expanse, costumes, cosplay, syfy, behind the scenes, props, armor, spacesuits, helmets, build

Id: QXwe51lkJ6M

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2017