The Making of Adam Savage's Chewbacca Mask!

hey guys it's Adam and I am in my friend Tom Spina's shop in Long Island a wonderland of exploration and film love and you know I have a cosplay problem within my cosplay habit I have a Chewbacca habit and my Chewbacca mask is one of my favorite possessions and it was built by Tom and we were able to talk about that on Twitter but we haven't done a video covering the construction process of just how intricate this mask and in the reproduction you did really is it was it's quite a project and I you know you say built by me I'll say built by our studio because there are lots of people that had a hand in this and it's will go through the process of I think people will start to see just how much went into it for me I became obsessed with Chewie during this project we had started you came to us at just the right time we were working on a number of Chewie projects and one of them was working on a skin for the Innovas chewy that they were prototyping to do a test to see if they can do something with that and so you hit us just as we had made a few molds and started researching the hair at the very beginning of the process that replicated so it was just perfect timing on your part so you know this being sort of the finished piece we can probably speak to the level of finishing that goes into this and I'm gonna take a knee and get into it because so this is a combination of I'll just start from underneath there's a fibreglass under skull that's fit to your life cast there are toggles in the lips that key into the lower lip and the two sides of the top lip that have cables that run to the other jaw so that when you open the jaw it actuates the lips and it does it in the proper snarl with extra on the one side now this is a mechanic designed by stuart freeborn the maker of chibok who also did watch her from 2001 and this is a super ly super impressive innovation he was making in makeup it really was and it was what was amazing about it was how simple he made it you know there's the old saying or at least it's a saying here you know complicated is great but simple is genius yes Stuart was that kind of genius Stuart devised simple ways to achieve amazingly lifelike results people don't realize you know Chewie wasn't dragging a bunch of cables and operators right Chewie was Peter and that was it it's it's really incredible and now he's you say I love wearing this thing so much people lose as you've seen people lose their mind and they see their full-size Chewie they come up and hug you so let's walk I mean that I guess we should start at the beginning and gum all the way back to the hair okay so that's maybe another the most complicated things to get yeah let's do it will come back okay no this is this is me this is you this is I we have a casting of my head from when I did you can live forever for the Discovery Channel nice and Frank Ippolito has the molds for that and he sent you a foam casting he did and we pulled a mold off of just the face and then clearly shaved off your beard because from there we needed to make a chin Cup and the sort of Batman mask that goes inside to support your mask and when you say chin cup that's how Chuy's Starla's activate that all I do because the mask fits my head so exactly is open my mouth like that and that activates a cable that pulls the lips back and there's little toggles that that angle up their little hinged pieces amazing that's just a real quick silicone mold for that with a plaster jacket now this is really neat what is so that is a 3d print of a scan that we made of one of the original skins so this is how we were able to make sure that everything was so true in our sculpture for him well so this is the thing that's really fascinating there's a whole bunch of really amazingly dedicated Star Wars cosplayers and at least a dozen people I can think of have embarked on making their own Chewbacca and when you do you have to figure out what is the shape of what's under all that always challenging and always hard when you so this is truly what was underneath Chuy's hair it is so this was a collector that we work with on Tom subpoenaed sins on and design somebody we do displays in restoration for he had this from Stuart and as you can see though it's all torn up it was aged deformed a little bit in places tears at the corners of the mouth etc so we did a 3d scan of it we then made a mold of that yeah you can see that that lines up pretty nice that really does you made the profile is so important on him and I think that's something that sometimes gets missed well that's something interpretations I'm curious about is when you finally saw this and you started to work with it was there some aspect of it was like oh that's the thing I could never figure out there's a little bit of an arch in his eyebrows and it's a little tough to tell from this because this one's deteriorated but once we saw certain things in here and then could look at yeah you know other images of a clean skin we were able to figure out a few things but a lot of it you know it just sort of clicks what's all the details are right everything starts so we made a mold of this and we did a clay press and then by hand we repaired the damage and we loosen it up when you say clay press yeah you took the mold of this and you pressed clay into it so you could come out with a affixed malleable hai6 of old oak say and then from there oh well here's something neat about this though so this was a skin on a biscuit foam form a rigid polyurethane okay two-part rigid foam correct okay now the underside of this is hollow because this is just a 3d print but the underside of the real one from Stuart's had a negative impression of a face inside of it and so we scanned that then inverted it and this is actually a young Peter Mayhew this is just an amazing thing to unearth out of that right we and it's a little lumpy because it was this biscuit foam form that's just you know that wasn't made as a mold of his face but it is a really cool thing to just have Peters face from the time also you and I both know Peter he's one of the kindest gentlest you I mean he is Chewbacca yeah if you love Chewbacca you will love Peter Mayhew there they are one in the same for sure that is it lovely an amazing art it's just such a nice little bonus that we get to hang on the wall from doing that so now from here we make our clay press from that we make this and now what this is a super elaborate this is a big fiberglass mold yeah this is epoxy fiberglass this is Frank Ippolito style hmm it's a little bit of freeform air in there as well and this is the negative where the skin is poured into okay so the reason I'm looking at a very complex inner buck and outer casting is because you when you cast into this you end up with a shell that fits both the under skull correct and gives the outer details that right or other molds that aren't featured here but we actually have a mold of this which is the inner core for this mold the negative of the face skin that mold is our mold to make the fiberglass shell for the face which then this amount amend your face has to fit in the night of yeah it's challenging there's so many steps and if you look in here we've got little registration points and those are negatives in the skin to receive the little lip pulls and toggles and things like that so let's talk about the skin because the original Chewbacca's skin is a foam latex correct and like a lot of movie props that are made that way because it's super lightweight and very lushly yeah this is not long for this world correct and you guys know where one of your biggest businesses is restore store and finding foam and it's always a challenge and what we did for yours was silicone and which is much more durable will last for a couple of decades so probably yeah that's a platinum silicone and actually it's funny this was a test skin we did for yours and we rejected it because you can see there's a little oh okay so the is a test skin and I can see right so these are the voids and you glue in the little toggles that would actuate the lip curls and on this test skin we weren't happy with it we felt it was too too tough Oh like this one is definitely softer correct so this is I believe is Dragon Skin FX Pro what we wound up with was a mix of FX Pro and an eco flex I think 30 or Oh 20 to get us a more soft skin but still not one that that would weep at all or you know leech any oil we wanted something that was self-contained and smooth on stuff was great for this no this is this is common for you to have to almost chemically engineer the properties of the rubbers and the plastics that you want it's sort of like the business if you don't have the job you want make it if you don't have the material you want right right right make it creative solutions to everything it's it's there's this picture of stuart freeborn starting to punch oh yeah the chewy and it looks a little like the Cowardly Lion mask from music Alice it's got the cat and this is what I think of when I look every time and in here we've just got a set of teeth stuck in for the sake of and these are so those are the Masters for the teeth now this is another thing about chewy that has been fascinating is that a lot of people who make their own Chuy's grossly overestimate the size of chewy does not have massive tears not much bigger than mine no no yeah and and they are really neat in that they're sort of animal teeth and the way that the the various incisors work and things like that the the gapping and stuff like that we wanted to make sure that we actually did three iterations of the teeth before we hit on the final we had castings of original teeth that were started with sure we then clean those up did a mold off of that clean those up realized that we had there was an extra little bit of flex we needed to get we said alright well just gonna like no matter it again we've just you know had to get it right and then these are you know just a nice little open back mold for those it's nothing too fancy what's nice about these as they come with the sort of palette which then gets built into this and some of that gets removed so you can put in as you know inside your amass there's a little tongue and palate that goes in place and we actually stitch those in just so that glue can't become loose over time we embed power mesh into the silicone out a little bit of stitching into the fiberglass just because I'm a little nervous that way on all of these sort of molds and the reefs Kulp ting all of that there's really one key guy here at the studio that did most of that and that was Steve Richter and he and I worked together to figure out what the mechanics were but in terms of you know nuts and bolts making all of these molds refining those sculpts those were his hands on there and he did some really great work on what were there any mornings when he came in and just said do I have to mold to eat parts again I don't think anybody I said said nobody ever right now one of the things that you get when you sculpt when you cast a fiberglass or vacuform cast of my face to get inside this is that it really aligns my whole face perfectly into chewy so that my chin does the activation correct but also that the eyes stay on top of my eyes and we did something that's not on the real mask and that is we built a back of the head for you because we had your full life cast right we decided to finish out that fiberglass down to the the bottom of your skull we split it we gave it the velcro and that means that when you go to open your mouth it's not gonna pull the eyes down on you as sometimes can happen when you have a mouth actuator lutely thing okay so now you've got all of the mechanical parts of chewy and there's me on the inside the fiberglass outer skull the silicone outer skin and the next stage is to make him hairy because he's hairy bastard so we gotta make a merry I am I'm known to be slightly obsessed with hair in general Bacchus specifically and this is this is these are two two primary colors of Chuy's have rekt yeah they're the primary colors for his body and his head they're both lighter and darker than I originally thought they would be and they're to me a little bit a warmer in this then I think most people think and maybe a little less orange than people think a lot or gray ray and Chewie what's what's really neat is you know to be able to go through I ain't your Stuart had a great eye for everything but he and Kay came up with really beautiful blends for Chewie and you can still see a lot of similar sort of blends going forward other things that he did and in other things they do they've done in other things other people have done right that sort of two-tone look that Chewie has a mirrors a lot it's really surprising when people see the custom up front they don't realize how abandoned Chuy's color oh yeah he's just pop pop yeah and so in here you know there's brown there's red there's gray you know silver and black okay so this is I know who makes us about this absolutely yes national fiber National fiber technology they're up in Massachusetts I've been getting fur for them from them for over 20 years they're the industry standard they they make the law mostly in regular furs you can buy about a three inch nap yet or inch that medium that's yet but national fiber technologies makes banking air or whatever you want right and for yours we did a mod acrylic hair and what we did is we had them do a texturized pass on it which I think gives it a little more of an animal look to it makes it a little Wilder well the Greek I've said this is a great thing about packing chewy for a con is that the more messed up as hair gets they're more accurate he looks too chewy well that's the way all of these props are like if they're too clean and they're to new they look like a replica you get a little bit of life in them a little bit of age so yeah we went back and forth with them with a lot of samples till we got something that you could put on the real suit and blend and it would just disappear do they have some special machine they do they have the only minute in the country or the world world so they say that will do lotta hair this long so it's and this had really made no it is you know I'm not sure if it's loomed in too fabric or vice versa but it is a four-way stretch fabric that we use certainly on this mascot comfortable super breathable it's so good and if you're doing like a statue or a you know we do creatures all the time right to be able to work with their fabric on the four-way stretch you can wrap it around complex curves and it just takes the form so beautifully so I will tell you that one at one point out of out of a garbage can in Industrial Light and Magic I pulled a little handkerchief Ridge '''l hair oh they were upgrading a costume in this lake it's just piece like this it's still on my shelf I figure if I ever finish a boba fett all hanging off the doll okay so once you've got the hair from national fibre technologies that's just that's only the color right or a mask can we bring this back over here in just some of these here so what's interesting here is the the hair down here is pretty much this mm-hmm we do a little bit of a layered thing under here to give a little impression of extra length because he does have a little extra length in the curls there right the rest of the face you know so the cowl much like the Cowardly Lion right is on the fabric backing okay so that's everything like from about here around the face the gray basically okay and the bib and that's how the real mask is made the cowl and the bib are a single piece on a backing except theirs is all hand tied for yours now when you say hand tied that means like latch hooked exactly yeah one you know little batch of hairs at a time but when you look at the real chew you can really see the tying on it you see there's a lot of air between the hairs he's not super dense he's not poofy he's stringing and it works it gives him a age and I had heard that some of the tarfu costumes were really hot for the actors to wear and they went back to the lab looking from what I understand the Peter told me for the force awakens the costume was again very breathable for him nice it's it's a it's it's old-school you know so what is that the ski howl so the cow goes in place and then what you do is you on the original mask it's actually glued it's not punched it's well good and there's you know we do a lot of both I'm a fan of really well glued hair though if you do it right you can really give the impression of direction and growth and things like that because this is silicone we went with punched tell me to describe what punching actually right so what punching means is you would cut a bunch of this off the backing or you can buy loose hair as well in the same blend and then you wrap it around a finger and you take a needle and the needles got a little fork on the end so you take a sewing needle that you've snipped the back of the eye on yeah you kind of snip it at an annual angle and you hook one hair and inject it into the silicone and then you pull the needle out and it stays so the needle pushes the hair into the silicone and then the pressure of the silicone holds the hair in correct so we're looking at hundreds and thousands of years really and every single one is individually punched exactly that way Michele Nyree knows some of the works with us on a regular basis spent a lot of time with your Chewbacca getting to know every inch of his face you sent me a lot of wonderful interim pictures of it's slowly coming together like someone's crochet project covered and what's cool about doing it and punching and same with gluing is you can adjust your blend as you get in so with chewy you get a little lighter as you come in and that's something that a lot of people do affects guys do just naturally yeah you punch a head of hair you get a little lighter towards a hairline you're doing a creature you got a little lighter towards the features you said something to me when I came to pick this up and you said you know the hardest part about Chewbacca is you could get it ninety five percent right and you're gonna end up with Joe Baca Chewbacca cousin that doesn't really look like you in you Baca yeah so let's help out Chewbacca cosplayers out there what what what primary mistakes do you see them making um a lot of people go a little dark on the face his mustache isn't as contrasting from his face as you'd think it's actually kind of a blend of Brown and a bit of the black but it's it's you know it's it's not super contrasting his hair isn't as long as most people think a lot of times you'll see folks that assume that you know his hair kind of comes all the way down here from here and then feels like it felt like Kanekalon you know that they're getting out of a bag for the most part the hair is you know seven or eight inches long it's not massively dangly and I remember early and chewy cosplay people are really getting to understand chewy more as a cosplay a community but early on there's a lot where the hair from the bottom lip just came right down yeah you need that top it's really key right absolutely how many how many imperson hours goes into something like this you know I don't we were lucky in that we were working on a few projects at once right so there was some sort of shared overhead basically sure shared mulch aired time working on things but I mean if you think about all of the numerous molds that were made each of those days ya know all of the time hair punching casting skins testing it painting the skin making sure that we had the right durometer on the skin and then getting the mechanics making three or four times you know there's all kinds of things yeah and the mechanics don't go in mechanically right for lack of a better term I just want to show thee I want to show the activation of them yeah yeah because it's really it's it's the lip curl is very is still quite subtle yes but boy does it sell there's chewy opening the mouth and you can see that on the right side it curls a little bit more yeah and that's just how it pulls up there I feel like Chuy's admonishing me whenever I hit this and I want to say I'm sorry now the inside of the mouth can you talk about that yeah yeah so that's sort of an interpretation of what's there on the real one there is there's a little difference in how we did it there for some simplicity there but again we use silicone instead of foam we wanted this to hold up over time but that is a single piece or palate and tongue right that goes in it's got the two holes this sort of tonsil holes whatever you yeah they're on the real one that were kind of weird but and if you look in there I can see the springs and you have yeah yeah holding it yeah and the original master or not I guess it depends on the mass some of them are elastic some of the things like that you know for this we were talking about fiberglass we need a little more attention so we went with Springs peter mayhew told me that one of the things that drove him nuts is a lot of people who make a mask make the mouth all the way closed it's like cheese mouth is never all the way closed it's really true and it's funny we in tinkering with him you know one of the reasons this is sitting here with some teeth in it is I felt like it didn't look like chewy like that right but as soon as you do that look he shaved but that's him this is um this turns out to be your business really it is the exploration of an infinite number of subtleties you have to get them all right yeah in order for the final thing to feel genuine absolutely absolutely no and I think that I hope that people found the process interesting here so I this is an it's a magnificent piece and thank you me understanding and walking to the engineering only makes it even more of one of my most prized possessions in my collection Tom thank you so much let's thank you man thank you and yeah here we go

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 739,575

Keywords: tested, testedcom, adam savage, prop, costume, gremlins, rick baker, puppets, animatronics, restoration, museum, auction, tom spina, horror, chewie, mask, chewbacca, star wars, adam savage chewbacca, mask making, chewbacca mask, chewbacca costume, tested chewbacca, tested adam savage, making of, adam savage tested, the mask, making mask, adam savage cosplay, adam incognito, chewbacca cosplay, star wars cosplay, star wars costume, adam savage incognito

Id: A7u1CVe9BYE

Length: 23min 7sec (1387 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2017