Adam Savage's One Day Builds: No-Face Animatronic Mouth!

hello cosplay lovers Adam Savage here in my cave and I am currently getting ready for a New York City comic-con it is just about a month away and it's time for me to get started and the costume I've chosen for New York comic-con is in fact an old costume I am rekindling my romance with it is actually the costume that is the primary subject of my TED talk a love letter to cosplay it's no face from Hayao Miyazaki's spirited away now I wore that costume on San Diego's comic-con floor something less than 10 years ago and it was wonderful big white floating face over this void but this time I'm going to add a mouth not the mouth up here in the floating face I'm gonna add the giant mall with which no face begins to eat everything in the movie at the beginning of act 3 and this is this is not unique other people have done this before they've added the big mouth with teeth and the tongue and all that I am adding some real animatronic flair to this costume I want it to be creepy I want it to be awesome and this isn't me adding this to the no face costume I'm actually totally dismantling and rebuilding it from scratch except this time with a mouth there's gonna be a lot of mechanical problem-solving right up front to make this thing work effectively and that's where we'll begin all right it's time to take him down he's he's been there a while and he's not he's not mechanically very sound he's held together with a lot of tape and stuff come on Betty come on buddy so there's a couple of aspects of this costume I was really pleased with one was this big vacuform hood behind his head allows you to kind of both see at him but also see through him so he's makes him kind of translucent which was a unique aspect to this costume when I built it the difficulty with this no face execution is that the mask in the hood all hang off a kayak helmet off of my head that is a bad deal Ripley that's a bad call Henson they have a rule never to make the puppeteers support stuff on their heads is so hard on your neck so I have I'm gonna build a new chest harness similar to the one that I hold on to my Totoro costume with in order to hold this on my shoulders and my torso rather than on my head so he's actually likely to get a little bit taller but I had to play around with all these relationships in order to understand exactly where the mouth goes it's gonna go right about here and the activation for it's gonna be my left arm so I'm gonna have a fake left arm yes there's a lot of logistics the first step is to kind of start to take this guy apart figure out the main relationships where this mask hangs in relation to my face where my arms are and then I determine where the mouth is where's how does this all work let's see here Oh a lot of fabric in a no-face costume oh there we go that's why yep it's all coming off hello old friend you could get an entirely new persuasion all right oh not bad I think the old no-face was very hard to wear is all on my head on it the whole thing was sitting on this kayak helmet that's bad for my neck oh there we go okay good yeah okay that's a little bit but that's fine it's actually quite nicely balanced front to back plus I've got this room here so I can this can fall flat and the mouths its ears okay right so that's the next thing is for me to figure out exactly what the shape of the mouth is and how its mechanics work but I had to get this part done first that went faster than I thought while Adams working on the no-face build he's tasked Mel and I with creating some food for no face to eat yeah and since like in the movie spirited away no face just consumes a bunch of different types of food or Anna's probably tried to start out with some fish and then maybe some buns and some Tam and all kinds of stuff yes so we're starting out with this upholstery foam pretty much straight out of a chair cushion it looks like and we'll cut this up with a foam cutting saw to start and then go in with shears and rough out the shape in a more 3-dimensional sense yes cool all right so I am just taking the shears in and adding more refined feel a little bit more comfortable doing it this way just because especially for SI the lips and stuff I'm just afraid of taking too much off and so I basically just start out by shaving away and more than likely what I'll also do is go into the sander and start to get smooth out these sort of jagged edges and essentially start to look at it especially now that I can just rotate and rotate and rotate I can start to like sort of shape out what it's going to look like in three-dimensional space for like even finer details I really like these little sheers they're so cute you kind of kind of feel like your head were to Scissorhands or something just trimming away bushes but they're really good for only taking a small chunk out once I got the shape mostly roughed out you can see it's got some good movement dimension I want to go ahead and hide all these trim lines by sanding it smooth and get a nice soft curve all the way around I can do most of the rough cutting on the belt sander and then I'll go back in with a dremel tool to get some of the finer details and more delicate parts like the tail I can even get some detail like gills if I just gently run this you can start to see I'll get a gill shape there so I can get some details on here I just have to be careful not to get too much purchase because the sander will bite and just pull the phone right into it just yeah I know this is so inconsequential to the total thing but I'm like and it's also like a dead fish it's not a living fish that's correct yeah yeah okay I like this though that allows me I'm super positive clothes I can park it right there and then that's nice and organic what have you've done domains rah rah rah rah rah rah rah okay this is about the right distance maybe just a tiny bit shorter here is no faces mouth and my goal is that the mouth is hidden in no faces costume until I reveal it and the way I want to reveal it is that I will pull a lever underneath my no face robes that will peel the lips back exposing the teeth there's one and then the mouth will open now I'm gonna control the mouth from the bottom here and this dynamic hinging where I've got it mounted up here that's the end result of about a day of experimentation at first I thought the mouth would go here and that my hand would be the tongue it turns out there's not enough room inside the costume for me to do that so I had to modify that and come up with a different arrangement and I'm really happy with this one because I didn't want to lock this top jaw to no face because if that's a perfect relationship it doesn't look natural doesn't look biological but by doing this I end up getting this sort of ancillary movement out of it that I really like every time I delve into animatronics puppeteering Mechanics for costumes I end up having an even deeper amount of respect for my friends like Rick Baker or Mike elizalde or Richard Taylor all of them amazing animatronic engineers and designers with beautiful teams I become so frustrated by the process right because I've got a certain amount of spring to lift these lips and to open this mouth but as soon as I load this up with fabric all of those mechanical relationships change and shift and I'm having trouble right now if you can tell that I'm a little flustered frustrated frustrated because I'm not able to get the lips to fully extend with a single actuator so I'm playing around with some mechanical advantages look this whole thing and this is the check-in pista camera in which I'm a little frustrated so that's what's happening that's why I'm sort of rambling about other people in their work while I'm trying to solve mine we have figured out how to make the teeth we've got these beautiful teeth there's only one right now but this piece of white translucent plastic is actually an old cutting board which I cut and modified to screw down to this so the teeth will be really nice and robust they're gonna look awesome I just have to figure out a way to reveal them by opening the lips I finished most of the sanding and smoothing out of the shape I'm pretty happy with how it's looking I'm just gonna go in with a dremel and get some of these finer details around the mouth it gives me a little bit more control because it's handheld and it's got obviously a smaller surface area once that's done the fish as you can see it's got great little wobble and wiggle to it but in that scene where no faces just gobbling all these pieces of food up we need it to have a little bit more structure because it's not very delicate it's not a very graceful scene so he's just gonna be shoving all this food in his mouth and chomping it and this tail seems a little bit fragile for that what I'm gonna do is take these pieces of rattan which is rigid but has a little bit of flex and I'm gonna use that to create basically a spine for the fish so give it a little bit more structural support one thing that I learned on this project working with the foam initially I thought of it as a purely subtractive process so it's a monolithic shape and you can just carve and trim away but Adam brought up the point that you can also add to it so it doesn't just have to be removing material like stone because of that we can glue things to it we can add all sorts of features like fins and leaves and it doesn't just have to be removing one of the things I have to do now is to glue my fish back together with some barge I'm gonna set that up to dry and while I'm doing that I'm going to cut some details fins and leaves for the carrots using some foam nice it's like a magic art mm-hmm so this is a trick Adam showed me it was just to take a plastic Chicago screw poked through the head with an awl and then feed the screw through and then I can take these little pieces of styrene that I'm using for eyes and glue those right to the heads of the Chicago screw on either side so it gives that indentation and a little bit of dimension around the eye socket I think that'll look pretty good hit that with a little CA glue and actually I'm gonna do this the smart way and wait to attach these until after I paint that way you don't have to worry about masking them it even looks so cool with the just the flat heads of the screws okay yeah so we have human teeth on this table and I figured why not put human teeth and fish you know just really enticing has a soul now that kind of sort of thing yeah I'm gonna put fish in it i'ma put teeth in fish not fishing teeth there we go glob you're on oh man oh dear it's so disturbing yeah whoever thought human parts and other creatures would be mortified it's like you are asking for the song because I love you creepy no no no thank you for listening Alexa yeah seriously okay I can't tell you how many days that we have been plotting to shoot this piece to camera about catching up on the no-face mechanism and the reason is is because I thought the mechanism itself was gonna take me like two days the answer like six seven days of work however my no-face costume is back on track to be reconstructed this time with an entirely new development which is the mouth here we go you ready yeah yeah I am so pleased let's talk a little bit about what it took to get here so what we have here is a fairly straightforward animatronic mechanism a mouth with lips the wrinkle being its size it's a very large mouth and that I only have one hand for activation my other hand will be no faces hand so my left hand will do all the activation which means I wanted to design a rig in which the lips and mouth moved with me only doing one thing and I think I tried like at least five different mechanical solutions I'm not kidding five completely different mechanical solutions of bolting different things to this like cables and take-up reels and bungee cords and stuff only to have everything fail until today so what I have now is a mechanism in which the top lip is connected to the bottom jaw by a cable around a pulley the bottom lip is connected to the top jaw by a cable going around a pulley this is kind of a modification of Stuart freeborn's mechanisms that he used in both Chewbacca and in moon watcher Chewbacca obviously from Star Wars moon watcher the ape from 2001 and so here is that dynamic movement I open the jaw and both lips curl back which is really cool I also decided to not do a hard mount of the jaw against my body so I have this kind of movement going on and that is this extra bit of dynamic motion that I think makes this feel far more biological when you add into that these giant Delrin teeth I haven't even even added yellowing to them when I do it's gonna get real and I've got a mechanism that is really robust and super awesomely disturbing the problem I kept having with this is because of its size I wasn't making my mechanics robust enough I've never built an animatronic this large before I needed heavy duty Springs I needed to use bolts instead of rivets because I was asking too much of the rivets mechanically there basically was a whole bunch of learning curves here for me to get to this point of a single handle on a pivot still a few bugs in the system activating the mouse this is actually one of my failed attempts at one point I thought I was going to use cables to activate the lips so that I would squeeze a paddle pull the lips back and then activate the mouth and this was an animatronic paddle I made using Delrin aluminum in a wooden slot I've got some brass soldered tubes here to hold the cables in the housings so that they could go around and activate the lips it was too much work to ask of such a thing and the travel I needed was too much at this scale the mechanics become kind of diabolical because you build it to work on its own but then you add cloth to it and that adds all this other weight and torque on the system and it doesn't sound like it should but actually it's way more than you would expect so let's take a closer look at the mechanism what I've got is this is the top lip this is the bottom lip both of them hinge here on the jaw that's the main hinge for the jaw the bottom hinge and you can see that I've sprung the bottom lip to the top jaw and I've sprung the top lip to the bottom jaw and in addition I have this cable this is for model aircraft coming around this pulley down to the bottom jaw so as you can see I move the bottom jaw it pulls on the cable it turns that pulley that moves the bottom lip up and the same thing is happening with the bottom lip I'm really really abusing this right now and my testing I'm bringing everyone over and showing them because if anything's gonna fail I want to know about it here instead of on the floor at New York Comicon well now that I've tackled what I think of as the hardest part of this build which is the mechanics its hopefully slightly smoother sailing from here on in now it's time to work out how to actually cover this thing with fabric and some of the pieces you saw in here we're temporary just for me to sort of learn how the fabric will move how it will change the mechanics as I put it on and then my goal is to make a single piece of fabric that covers the mouth and then drape the rest of the fabric on no-face so it hides me underneath then I also have to work out how I'm supposed to see out of the thing and I'm thinking maybe a camera with some fpv goggles or I may just put a screen here and try and see out of the mouth the last time I did no face the head was down about here this time as you can see I've raised it about 810 inches and that is so that I hopefully have a little more ability to see through the mouth if I put a good screen there I'm starting to do the final touches on these in terms of paint and finishing so I've laid a base coat onto the fish and started to on these carrots and what I'm doing is a airbrushing and spray-paint detail so I did a test yesterday of some scales which I ever on here and some color patterns for the koi fish and I'm also doing some detailing on the carrot leaves so we'll take a look at that basically what I did was I just cut some stencils out of card stock and I'm using those as a mask to give it kind of a graphic pattern that matches the sort of animated feel one of the things I really like about the foam as a substrate is because it's porous the paint sort of sits on the surface but you can still see some of the color coming through from the inside it lends the fish this almost translucent luminosity that's really great for this animal in particular so I'm pretty much done with the detailing of the main overall fish and I was heavily inspired by sort of the own like an Oni I wanted to try to make since it's got teeth and everything maybe make it look more demonic and so I've got this craft foam that I've cut out and done sort of fine details that is the eyeball that I'm gonna be placing in the center here as well as just eyebrows and little extra you know details kind of similar to that what you've seen in like say a Japanese woodblock except layered on top to give it some more dimensionality and such and so I'm gonna be hot gluing this guy on and seeing how it goes something like that I can kind of finesse it to what I want and then the eye will see right there it's something like that yeah give it that angular okay so we mash this off so that we can do the fun sprays and have you and since now it's we're good to go um we're gonna start unveiling it I can't wait it's like an unveiling after plastic surgery yeah except teeth were lost instead of gained it's just had braces for four years and finally gets to see the results of all its suffering oh gosh with a million cavity is apparently oh my god it's so weird I love it oh my gosh no great smell it is so creepy it's yeah it's like I want yourself ah well off camera I did some preliminary draping on no face here and I'm kind of excited about how it's starting to look deceptively simple really really hard to execute but I'm about to put this on and just try out the overall arrangement before committing to it by sewing okay here we go not even sure how to get in all right that feels very good my question is can I stick an arm out of here let's see hmm I I don't know if this no face has arms I mean I can kind of do a fake arm here but that's sort of weird isn't it maybe I've got to do the matter out of out of here like here yeah maybe that's how I have to do it okay I'll work that out later all right here we go here's the first mouth test do you guys ready dad what have you done to me give me something to eat I'm hungry I wanna eat I'm gonna give it away with my voice right away I should have a frog that's the first thing I think I can now pin and sew my drapes and then I have to figure out what to do with the arms alright I'm about to do the what I think is one of the final dress tests of no-face before I call it done but I wanted to walk you through some of the problem-solving that I've been doing some of the early tests I was doing with the mechanism were with this a four-way stretch lycra spandex that's black and really nice and one of the problems I had with it was it was actually too smooth it showed the seams and I felt like I could see too much of the structure of the of the draping so I asked my shop assistants for a compendium of some Velvets from local fabric stores and we got this wonderful thing this is what ended up becoming the velvet of the inside of the mouth there yeah and then I asked to look at the black Velvets and I was looking at them and looked at this one and I really liked its brownness there's a way in which there's a way in which black super super black is cold it doesn't feel quite natural I mean unless it's like a raven or something but this brown felt like a seal Pelt or something so we bought 10 yards of round crushed-velvet and that is now what no face is clad in I've got my right arm covered because that will be my active arm and the left arm is just vestigial I'm just going to sit there I'm going to try and eat a fish let's just see how this goes this is a test of the mechanism and a test of how this looks and depending on how it looks to me on the camera we're almost there I think I have to kind of crawl into the environment that is no face so left side belt on right side belt on oh I can see my armhole from here so I'm gonna try and feed out of it there we go alright so now I have a fake arm and a real arm fake arm real arm and no face is ready to animate and m8 where is some food I'm hungry ah is it possible to grab the fisherman here let's see did that work kinda okay I think no-face the monster is ready for prime time this build has kicked my ass I thought it would be like three days maybe in and out and it's been more like eight yeah it's well more than twice as much time and energy as I thought it would but I'm really pleased with the result what's that I am really pleased with the result yeah the mouth is it feels great it actually reminds me weirdly of the Muppets sweetums the big monster I realized that sweetums has a secondary lip motion and I'm like doing a muppet callback with this but like I've added all the final details the little epiglottis they're the Bugs Bunny the heck of the throat lines on the roof of no faceless mouth these are clearly visible in the animation and my my reference photos and then I've also added a little bit of yellow to the Delrin teeth to just make them a little grosser and I've mostly hidden the mechanics although you can still hear them that's just part of the cost of business at any rate because no face when he is in this monster face wants to eat everything because he thinks that eating will bring him comfort don't we all a problem arose of what should no face eat so I bought some fake peaches that he could enjoy and then I could literally grab from the back and take down a Jen and Mel have been working on some very cartoon specific items for no-face to eat and I have not yet glimpsed them and I'm very excited about what no faces meal is gonna look like oh my gosh oh one of the little chicken people you see from spirited away oh my god this is amazing you guys you know the vision coy and skeleton fishermen this actually delicious birthday cake and just for some vegetable my god you guys had fun this is great I want to build everything in phone now here you had not played with Matt the so describe the technique by which you built these things well we we started with blocks of furniture foam and sort of carved away at them roughly with foam knife and the bandsaw and then sanded down all the shapes and then did a lot of paint dealing detailing went to paint airbrush spray paint spray paint you did a lot of other detail yeah like worked with craft foam actually a lot and should I just add little detailing on top and then and the human oh yes human growth factor that's brilliant this is the mattress foam that the mattress place just gave us yeah they had it in their recycling pile yep this was just a trash mattress film oh my gosh these are so beautiful Wow yeah we get a lot of fun with like templates and stencils to do the airbrushing and right right right I saw some of the sample pieces of foam you guys were doing airbrush tests on it's just so like oh it's so much more elaborate than I would have gotten which is amazing like that's thrilling to me you know the goal when you when you work with the goal in collaboration is better than the sum of its parts that I would not have come up with anything like this I love the brick that was like a paint drip that dried there was a whole bunch of paint that dried up on the cardboard and I was like I'll just cut it out and drizzle some more hot glue on it and that's what the icing is on the top oh it is huh and wire these are little snippets of Oh Jimmy's our wires yeah I was looking around for anything I could find in here that would be theatrical and food like okay I want to do a test so I want to put them on and just see what it's like for me to gather one of these into myself and just try it and hopefully maybe we'll give some people at Comic Con some stuff to feed me what is is that craft foam as well craft foam with acrylic paint on it that's awesome this this is I'm so thrilled but the single I human this is nightmare fuel yeah yeah I mean why not demon fish I know I just touched his palate that's yummy fish and I can cry but there we go I'm hungry give me something to eat I love carrots more MORE nom nom how does it look you guys is it is it kind of working it's so grotesque when it's chewing really oh yeah you can see him chomping on it oh that's so cool bottom with a still working and not failing I'm very happy about that I can also see pretty well all right I think it's time to go to Comic Con

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 587,620

Keywords: tested, testedcom, adam savage, one day build, mythbusters, adam savage one day build, one day builds, adam savage tested, tested adam savage, tested adam savage one day build, one day builds adam savage, adam savage one day builds, one day builds tested, costume, no-face, no face, spirited away, miyazaki, animatronic, mech, adam incognito, adam savage incognito, miyazaki movies, adam savages one day builds, adam savage cosplay, adam savage costume, adam savage cosplay build

Id: kjxdWnUBmpU

Length: 37min 16sec (2236 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019