How This Guy Makes Record-Breaking Balloon Sculptures | Obsessed | WIRED

if you're a fan of stranger things you'll recognize that this monster is a demo Gorga but you probably never seen one quite like this welcome to Jeremy tell firts world where everything can be built with balloons you can create just about anything out of them it's inflatable etch-a-sketch he's made a ton of cool stuff including a 65 foot long record-breaking balloon dog it used eight thousand eight hundred and sixty seven balloons and it took me 80 hours I worked 15 hour days and another five hours on the very last day the Guinness Book of World Records awarded Telford's pink dog the title for largest balloon sculpture in 2015 shattering the previous world record by over five thousand balloons the world-record balloon dog took me about two weeks to plan but I did it all on paper and well the calculator I drew it out I had no circumference and area all sorts of stuff in order to plan the number of balloons I got very specific and drawing out exactly what it was going to look like how much time I thought I was gonna take it took a lot of math so if you're going to be twisting you do need to know your math especially geometry to twist a telford expert level you need the right gear this blue apron holds about a thousand balloons but at home I have an inventory of about half a million Globes and even with having a half a million I typically order more balloons every couple months so I have balloons that are different diameters for example this this is called a 260 right here when you blow it up it has about a two inch diameter this is 160 when you blow it up you get about a one-inch diameter I also have 350 s 3 inch diameter telephone relies on a one step floor pump for inflation there's hand pumps pump about 5-6 times in order to get a balloon pump if you have a four pump it takes one pump obviously yourself save a little bit time if you're one of those crazy people you can blow with your mouth but after about five I get a splitting headache so I don't do that anymore and then there are the gloves the gloves help protect my skin because when I'm building for 10 12 hours the friction it does not love you and the reason for the band-aids is I need my thumb and my pointer finger to be able to feel the balloons and stuff while I'm building the rest of the fingers not as much so I can keep those covered with with the gloves and when he needs to take down a lot of balloons in a hurry he reaches for what he says is the best tool I took a weed whacker and I split that Babylonian towel we ran out of the thread that weed whacker uses and I still hadn't where that dog left I was like Oh what are we gonna do and we finally we just let the kids come in and they just destroyed the rest of it it was so fun to watch Telford started balloon sculpting in college I first got into the balloon world when I met my wife at a juggling Club in college her brother taught me how to make the small balloon animals at restaurants in order for pay for my degree and I kind of took that and started making a little bit more than they were talking about but I loved it so much that eventually started making more record-sized stuff during his career as a professional balloon artist Telford sculptures have gotten bigger and more intricate and more creative in 2013 I changed my living room into Bag End from The Hobbit I took I think three days and about 2,600 balloons they had a roof had walls that had a fireplace at a table with apples in it had fire utensils like the poker and the billows it was exhausting Telford creativity doesn't stop at sculptures either he even builds out full-on human-sized costumes out of nothing but balloons I started doing balloon costumes more than a decade ago our family celebrates little known holidays one of the ones we really celebrate is international Talk Like a Pirate Day and we made it kind of tradition to build a giant balloon pirate costume and we build about 20 30 balloon swords and we go out and any child that's willing to talk like a pirate will hand them a balloon sword has just become a fun kind of family tradition even recreated van Gogh starry night that one was a little bit different because it uses mostly these these round balloons so I took van Gogh's Starry Night and put it on the computer but I used Photoshop and you can just kind of plug it out there it's almost like working with pixels and so you can put a dot here a dot here it represents the balloons it was 16 feet tall 23 feet wide I believe when it was all done his favorite project allowed him to build room size balloon recreations of some of the world's great monuments including the seven wonders of the world he built the Statue of Zeus Great Pyramid of Giza Colossus of Rhodes the Coliseum the Great Wall of China the Lighthouse of Alexandria the mausoleum at halicarnassus the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and a few others I gotta go six days a week ten hours a day for three months straight just building these magnificent sculptures and I got to end on my favorite one I built the Taj Mahal and I was able to build just all these little details into it and it just turned out so beautifully it's probably my favorite sculpture that I've built tofu runs a balloon entertainment business in Utah and will stop at nothing for a client I do everything from your typical birthday party and a lot of county and state fairs then they'll be corporate events where I'll do any kinds of decor like any jobs there are mornings when I wake up and I go I'd rather just sleep but nine times out of ten I'm excited especially when I get to build something large and something new like the dimmer gorgon he built for a Halloween party this year I decided to build the the demagogue or gonna screech er just it's creepy you know I wanted something kind of creepy somebody's coming out at you I always try and make some sort of a movement with the sculpture so that it feels like it's telling a story that you look at it you go it was doing something before you got a frozen in a moment if you unfroze it that would continue on doing whatever it was doing it took Telford about six hours and over 300 balloons to build this seven-foot tall monster he spent a lot of that time obsessing over the details what I'm thinking if I could just add a little bit more detail it might make it that much creepier the demography of Macy in the field kind of sunken in kind of like it doesn't get enough to eat so I knew I wanted to kind of create that so I filled in thereit's with black so it would look kind of give the impression of shadows so you'd still get that kind of sunken and feeling and when it was time to build the monsters terrifying teeth telford cut no corners to do that he blows up one long white balloon breaks off a section and ties it off creating one tooth then he breaks off a little more ties that off and creates another tooth and so on and that's just simply blowing up balloons now blow him up now I pop I get about five teeth every balloon up a pump up I'm gonna need you know 40 50 teeth on this thing so bring up the monotony and I'll make 10 teeth and then add those 10 teeth to the mouth and I go back and make another 10 teeth and add those 10 keep them out in the final few minutes of the build Telford adds on even more details so I've taken these clear balloons and I'm just kind of draping them on the demagogue and tried to give the idea of kind of this jewel that he has and now we have our finished Deming we're done it's creepy and reaching out ready to grab yeah I've got this kind of compulsive need to add these details the more you can put on there more people just go like how do you do that Atta balloons Telford has spent years perfecting his technique one thing he does is suggests the booth of balloons by popping one end and tying it off when you're building wind sculptures it's hard to know exactly how much you need to pump them up like you're making the fingers or the toes and you've just got way too much balloon and there's a way you can pull the balloon part tie the part you want you get rid of the rest use the scraps to tie things in later what his hands are full tying several balloons together he takes advantage of things like his elbows in his chin a lot of times you're gonna tie more than one bubble together at once you only have two hands but you have ton of places you can hold the boom on your body you can hold them under your arms your hold under your chin roll in your elbow press the balloon against your body it keeps them from untwisting as you're going until you can twist it back into itself that's one of the keys with balloons as always has to kind of twist back into itself or it all unravel and a lot can go wrong one thing you get attuned to is you can you can hear this subtle it's a very disheartening sound or you hear balloons shifting on each other and they'll make these little squeaks and you know the only reason that they're shifting is because something is deflating and letting other things move Telford has a tremendous amount of pride in his work he plans to continue to push the boundaries and what can be built using only balloons for as long as he can you will run across people that just they just don't get it don't look at your work and they'll be like why don't you do something useful you know why don't you learn accounting or why don't you you know become an engineer and I look at I'm gonna go you know what the world has a lot of accountants the world has a lot of engineers you know what they don't have I don't have a lot of people that can twist sculptures like this if you take arts out of the world if you take you know music if you take painting and yes even if you take balloons out of the world you can make it less there's not going to be as as much fun as much joy as much of that Lindsey they're squishy shiny colorful and they squeak and then when you can make things out of it there's just something magical about that

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,371,496

Rating: 4.9346538 out of 5

Keywords: balloons, demogorgon, balloon sculpture, jeremy telford, balloon, ballon sculpture, balloon sculptures, wired obsessed, balloon obsessed, obsessed with balloons, balloons obsessed, obsession balloons, balloons obsessions, ballon animals, how to make balloon sculptures, how to make balloon animals, balloon dog, giant balloon dog, balloon demogorgon, balloon guy, jeremy telford balloon, world record balloon animal, world records balloons, jeremy telford balloons, wired

Id: qIIzPzz4-ac

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019