Last month, Adam spoke at Wired’s inaugural live magazine event, Wired by Design, sharing the story of how he fell in love with prop-making. The video of that talk is now online at Wired. In the 20 minute presentation, Adam chronicles his early replica propmaking, from Mission Impossible gadgets to cardboard armor inspired by Excalibur. He covers some of the projects we’ve shown here on Tested, like his Blade Runner Blaster and ZF-1, but also reveals an in-progress piece that you may see more of here in the future!
Adam Savage’s WWII Uniforms from HBO’s The Pacific
Another surprise package arrives from our friends at Prop Store! This time, it’s a pair of screen-used World War II soldier uniforms from the HBO show The Pacific. Adam and Norm examine the costumes and discuss the ways they’re weathered and distressed to simulate combat wear and tear for filming. And of course, we can’t resist trying the costumes on–that’s half the fun!
Shot and Edited by Joey Fameli
Testing a Vacuum at NASA’s Space Power Facility
For his BBC show Human Universe, Brian Cox visited NASA’s Space Power Facility in Ohio and used its massive space environment simulation chamber to demonstrate the effect of dropping a bowling ball and feather in a vacuum.
Tales of Halloween Past – 11/4/2014
The Graphics Technology of Disney’s Big Hero 6
While visiting Disney Animation Studios to preview Big Hero 6, Norm gets briefed on the graphics and rendering technologies developed for the film. The studio’s Chief Technology Officer, Andy Hendrickson, explains how the rendering of complex scenes and characters were tackled with new software, and how Disney artists were able to build out an entire fictional city based on San Francisco. We love the technical stuff!
Show and Tell: 3D Printing a Lightsaber
This week’s Show and Tell is another awesome project shared by our 3D printing columnist Sean Charlesworth. Norm visits Sean while in New York to check out a beautiful 3D printed lightsaber hilt that was assembled from 14 individually printed pieces. The designer of this model also created a four-piece kit for ease of assembly–all the files are available online. With some proper finishing work, it looks as good as the original prop!