MythBusters' Adam Savage - Dodos, Maltese Falcons, and the Art of Obsession

fora tv' the world is thinking about four years ago The New Yorker published an article about a cache of dodo bones that was found in a pit on the island of Mauritius now the island of Mauritius is a small island off the west coast sorry east coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean and it is the place where the dodo bird was found was discovered and extinguished all within about a hundred and fifty years everyone was very excited about this archeological find because it meant that they might finally be able to assemble a single dodo skeleton see while museums all over the world have dodo skeletons in their collection nobody not even the actual Natural History Museum on the island of Mauritius has a skeleton that's made from the bones of a single dodo one of the well this isn't exactly true the fact is is that the the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century it was actually mummified skin and all but in a fit of space-saving zeal they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire if you go look at their website today they'll actually list these specimens saying the rest was lost in a fire not quite the whole truth anyway the front piece of this article was this photo and I'm one of the people that thinks that Tina Brown was great for bringing photos to The New Yorker because this photo completely rocked my world I was became obsessed with the object the the not just a beautiful photograph itself in the colour the shallow depth of field of detail that's visible the wire you can see on the beak there that the conservator used to put this skeleton together there's an entire story here and I thought to myself wouldn't it be great if I had my own dodo skeleton [Music] and so I want to point out here at this point that I've spent my life obsessed by by objects and the stories that they tell and this was the very latest one so I began looking around for see if anyone sold a kit some kind of model that I could get and I found lots of reference material lots of lovely pictures no dice no dodo skeleton for me but the damage had been done I had saved a few hundred photos of dolo skeletons into my creative projects folder this is where I states a repository for my brain everything that I could possibly be interested in there's the dodo skeleton folder this folder has 17,000 photos over 20 gigabytes of information and it's growing constantly any time I have an internet connection there is a slew subgroup stuff moving into there everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos stuff I might be interested in the key that the Marquis de Lafayette sent to George Washington to celebrate the storming of the Bastille Russian nuclear launch key the one on the top is the picture of the one I found on eBay the one on the bottom is the one I made for myself because I couldn't afford the one on eBay stormtrooper costumes maps of middle-earth that's when I hand drew myself it's all in there and one day a couple weeks later it might have been maybe a year later I was in the art store with my kids and I was buying some clay tools we're gonna have a craft day about some super sculpey some armature wire some various materials and I look down at this sculpey and I thought maybe maybe I could make my own dodo skull I should point out at this time I'm not a sculptor I'm a hard-edged model maker you give me a drawing you give me a prop to replicate you give me a crane scaffolding parts from Star Wars especially parts from Star Wars I can do this stuff all day long it's exactly how I made my living for 15 years but you give me something like this my friend Mike Murnane sculpted this is a mad cat for a Star Wars Episode - this is not my thing I this is something other people do dragons soft things however I felt like I had looked at enough photos of dodo skulls to actually be able to understand the topology and perhaps replicate it I mean it couldn't be that difficult so I started looking at the best photos I could find I grabbed all the reference and I found this lovely piece of reference this is someone selling this on eBay it was a woman's clearly a woman's head hopefully a woman's hand and i assuming it was roughly the size of my wife's hand I made some measurements of her thumb and I scaled them out to the size of the skull a blew it up to actual size and I began using that along with all the other reference that I had comparing it to it as size reference for figuring out exactly how big the beak should be exactly how long etcetera etc and over a few hours I kept whoa and over a few hours I eventually achieved what was actually a pretty reasonable dodo skull and I didn't mean to continue I it's kind of like you know you can only clean a super messy room by picking up one thing at a time you can't think about the totality I wasn't thinking about a dodo skeleton I just noticed that as I finished this skull the armature wire that I'd been used to holding it up was sticking out of the back just where a spine would be and one of the other things I've been interested in and obsessed with over the years is spines and skeletons having collected a couple of hundred I actually understood the mechanics of vertebrae enough to kind of start to imitate them and so button by button vertebrae by vertebrae I built my way down and actually by the end of the day I had a reasonable skull moderately good vertebrae and half of a pelvis and again I kept on going looking for more reference every bit of reference I could find drawings beautiful photos and this guy I love this guy he put a dodo leg bones on a scanner with a ruler this is a kind of accuracy that I wanted and just every last I've replicated every last bone and put it in and after about I'd say about six weeks I finished painted mounted my own dodo skeleton hey you can see that I even made Minh made a museum label for that includes a brief history of the dodo and tapp plastics made me although it didn't I didn't photograph it a museum vitrine I don't have the room for this in my house but I had to finish what I had started and this actually represented kind of a sea change to me I again like I said my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell and also making them for myself obtaining them appreciating them and diving into them and in this folder creative projects there are tons projects that I'm currently working on projects that I've already worked on things that I might want to work on someday and things that I may just want to find and buy and have and and and look at and touch but now there was potentially this new category of things that I could sculpt that was different that I you know I have my own r2d2 but that's honestly relative to sculpting to me that's easy and so I went back and look through my creative projects folder and I happened to cross the Maltese Falcon now this is funny for me to fall in love with an object from a Hammett novel because if it's true that the world is divided into two types of people Chandler people and Hammett people I am absolutely a Chandler person but in this case it's not about it's not about the author it's not about the book or the movie or the or the story it's about the object in and of itself and in this case this object is place on a host of a host of levels first of all there's the object in the world this is the Nippon Hauser Hawk it is a ceremonial pouring vessel made around 1700 for a Swedish count and it is very likely the object from which Hammett drew his inspiration for the Maltese Falcon then there is the fictional bird the one that haven't created for the book built out of words it is the engine that drives the plot of his book and also the movie in which another object is created a prop that has to represent the thing that Hammond created out of words inspired by the Nippon Hauser Hawk and this represents the Falcon in the movie and then there is this fourth level which is a whole new object in the world the prop made for the movie the representative of the thing becomes in its own right a whole other thing and whole new object of desire and so now it was time to do some research I actually had done some research a few years before it's why the folder was there I bought a replica of really crappy replica of The Maltese Falcon on eBay and had downloaded enough pictures to actually have some reasonable reference but I discovered in researching further really wanting precise reference that the bird had one of the original lead birds had been sold at Christie's in 1994 and so I contacted an antiquarian bookseller who had the original Christie's catalog in and I found this magnificent picture which included a size reference I was able to scan the picture blow it up to exactly full size I found other reference Ivy Tech Mayan a New Jersey editor actually found this resin Maltese Falcon at a flea market in 1991 although it took him five years to authenticate this bird to to to the auctioneers specifications because there's a lot of controversy about it it was made out of resin which wasn't a common material for movie props about the time the movie was made which is it's funny to me that it took a while to authenticate because I can see it compared to this thing and I can tell you it's real it's the real thing it's made from the exact same mold that this one is and in this one because the auction was actually so controversial profiles in history the auction house that sold this I think in 1995 for about a hundred thousand dollars they actually included you can see here on the bottom not just a front elevation but also a side rear and other side elevation so now I had all the topology I needed to replicate The Maltese Falcon what do they do how do you start something like that I really don't know so what I did was again like I did with the dota scale I blew all my references up to full size and then I began cutting out the negatives and using those templates as shape references so I took sculpting I built a big block of it and I passed it through until it you know I got the right profiles and then slowly feather by feather detail by detail I worked out and achieved you know working in front of the television and super sculpey here's me sitting next to my wife it's the only picture I took a entire process and this little voice in my head at the time said shouldn't you be photographing this and then another voice said don't you get photographed enough so as I move through I achieved a very reasonable facsimile The Maltese Falcon but again I am NOT a sculptor and so I don't know a lot of the tricks like you know I don't know how my friend Mike gets beautiful shiny surfaces but his sculpey I certainly wasn't able to get it so I went down to my shop and I I'm old Edyta and I cast it in resin because in the resin then I could absolutely get the glass smooth finish now there's a lot of ways to fill and get yourself a nice smooth finish my preference is about 70 coats of this matte black auto primer I spray it on for three or four days it drips to hell but it allows me a really really nice gentle sanding surface and I can get it glass smooth Oh finishing up with triple zero still wool now the great thing about getting it to this point was that because in the movie when they finally bring out the bird at the end and they place it on the table they actually spin it so I was able to actually screenshot and freeze-frame to make sure and I'm following all the light kicks on this thing and making sure that I'm holding the light in the same position I'm getting the same type of reflection on it that's the level of detail I'm going into this thing and I ended up with this my Maltese Falcon and it's beautiful and I can I I can state with authority at this point in time when I'd finished it that of all of the replicas out there and there is a few this is by far the most accurate representation of the original Maltese Falcon than anyone has sculpted now the original one I should tell you was sculpted by a guy named Fred Sexton this is where it gets weird Fred Sexson was a friend of this guy George Hodel terrifying guide grieved by many to be the killer of the Black Dahlia now James Ellroy believes that Fred Sexton the the sculptor of The Maltese Falcon killed James Elroy's mother I'll go you one stranger than that in 1974 during the production of a weird comedy sequel to The Maltese Falcon called the Blackbird starring George Segal the Los Angeles County of art hat lozenge County Museum of Art had a plaster original of The Maltese Falcon one of the original six plasters I think made for the movie stolen out of the museum a lot of people thought it was a publicity stunt for the movie John's grill which actually is seen briefly in The Maltese Falcon is still a viable San Francisco eatery accounted among its regular customers Alicia cook who played Wilmer cook in the movie and he gave them one of his original plasters of The Maltese Falcon and they had it in their cabinet for about 15 years until it got stolen in January of 2007 it would seem that the object of desire only comes into its own by disappearing repeatedly so here I had this Falcon and it was lovely it looked really great it the light worked on it really well it was better than anything I could achieve or obtain out in the world but there was a problem the problem was was that I wanted the entirety of the object I wanted the weight behind the object this thing was made of resin and it was too light and so there's this group online that I frequent it's a group of prop crazies just like me called the replica props form and it's people who trade make and travel in information about movie props and who makes them and you know where to get them how to make them and it turned out that one of the guys there a friend of mine that I'd never actually met but befriended through some prop deals was the manager of a local foundry he took my master falcon pattern he actually did lost wax casting in bronze for me and this is the bronze I got back and this is after some additives acid etching the one and I ended up with and this thing it's deeply deeply satisfying to me here I'm going to I'm going to put it out there later on tonight and you can I want you to pick it up and handle it you want to know how obsessed I am this this projects only for me and yet I went so far as to buy on eBay a 1941 Chinese San francisco-based newspaper in order so that the bird could properly be wrapped like it is in the movie yeah I know there you can see it's weighing in at 27 and a half pounds that's half the weight of my dog Huxley but there's a problem now here's the latest most recent progression of Falcons on the far left is a piece-of-crap replica I bought on eBay there's my somewhat ruined sculpey Falcon because if I had to get it back out of the mold there's my first casting there's my master and there's my bronze and this might not be easy to see but there's a thing that happens when you mold and cast things which is that every time you throw it into silicon and Kassadin resin you lose a little bit of volume you you lose a little bit of size and when I held my resin my bronze one up against my skull p1 it was shorted by 3/4 of an inch yeah no really it's this was like why didn't I remember this why didn't I start and make it bigger so what do I do I figure I have two options one I can fire a freaking laser at it which I have already done to do a 3d scan there's this 3d scan of this Falcon I have blown it up bigger than originally size to accommodate four I figured out the exact amount of Frink shrinkage I achieved going from a wax master to a bronze master and blown this up big enough to make a 3d lithography master of this which I will polish then I will send to the mold maker and then I will have it done in bronze and then this this model the Adam Savage version will be finished I have another option I've run in 3d lithography yeah forged and or there are several people who own originals and I have been attempting to contact them and reach them hoping that they will let me spend a few minutes in the presence of one of the real birds maybe to take a picture or even to pull out the handheld laser scanner that I happen to own that fits inside a cereal box and could maybe without even touching their bird I swear yet a perfect 3d skin and I'm even willing to sign pages saying that I'll never let anyone else have it except for me in my office I promise I'll give them one if they want it and then maybe then I'll achieve the end of this exercise but really if we're all going to be honest with ourselves I have to admit did the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with was it thank you [Applause]

Channel: FORA.tv

Views: 278,053

Rating: 4.9559312 out of 5

Keywords: mythbuster, adam, savage, mythbusting, discovery, channel, talk, presentation, lecture, powerpoint, slides, dodo, maltese, falcon, hollywood, movie, movies, prop, props, arts, crafts, hobby, fora.tv, foratv, fora, tv

Id: 29SopXQfc_s

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 19 2008

Reddit Comments

[u/scottycujo]

I wish I had 1/10th of Adam's ambition. Some have it, some don't. I don't.

[u/judokalinker]

I wouldn't quite call it OCD because I doubt its a compulsion, just attention to detail. I get your point though.

edit. granted, I know little about OCD

[u/Alfierulz]

A lot of people think they have OCD but they really only get annoyed by little things or like to have stuff neat. OCD is "obsessively" going through your house and open and closing the doors 3 times each.

[u/kruchone]

Adam Savage really a brilliant man. You can tell he has a love for learning. Even if you aren't into the same things as him, you can still learn from how his mind works.

[u/tramdog]

I love this guy.

[u/optimist-prime]

Now I want to make a hand-drawn map of Middle Earth...

[u/themeroyale]

While Mr. Savage has an incredible attention to detail and a love for collecting, this is not OCD. OCD can be a crippling disease that destroys people's lives. In short, it is the need to do certain things out of an anxiety that terrible things will happen if you don't.

For instance, an OCD sufferer might feel the need to get up every couple of hours and check that their doors are locked because of an overwhelming fear that if they don't their entire family will die.

It is a condition that is completely misunderstood. Please don't just throw the term around, it's offensive.

Edit: wording.

[u/[deleted]]

Re: The Maltese Falcon model he did-- the wings are reversed on the back. Compare @9:29 and @10:04...

[u/jandrew_]

that's not OCD, that's passion.