Tuesday, February 25, 2020
Adam Savage Tours The Expanse's Practical Effects Shop!
Tested: In Toronto, Adam Savage tours Tim Barraball's shop Acme FX, where many of the practical effects for The Expanse are produced. From electronics to metal-working to pyrotechnics to even RAIN and SNOW, Tim and his team do it all, and Adam is in heaven seeing what tools and materials they use to achieve their amazing special effects!
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Another week, another Tested video of Adam Savage visiting somewhere I want to go. The Acme FX shop that Adam seems like the candy store that the kid inside me just wants to have an absolute field day in. The Acme FX shop seems to have just about every tool one could ever want, and I truly want nothing more than to just have free reign of that shop for a week with unlimited access to materials just to see what kind of things I can make. My childish dreams aside, I have always been fascinated by practical effects. I always love to see practical effects in use over visual effects, because no matter how good computer-generated images get, tangible, real effects will, in my opinion, always remain supreme. My favorite example of practical effects vs. visual effects is Christopher Nolan, primarily in the film Inception. Christopher Nolan implements practical over visual effects as much as possible, and in Inception, instead of using visual effects for the classic hallway fight scene, he built a one hundred (!) foot long hallway that was suspended among eight I-beam rings, allowing it to completely rotate 360 degrees around. It just goes to show the full spectrum of practical effects, from something as small as a blood pack, to something on the scale of the hallway from Inception.
This shop looks like an absolutely an amazing shop full of a lot of talented and amazing craftsman, artists, fabricators, electricians, and more. I would love to work in a shop like this. While I haven't had the opportunity to do a lot of special effects, I have always been interested in the field. In highschool, I toyed around with small special effects here and there, but obviously, never anything to this level. One of the things I found incredible to listen to was how many diciplines are needed to do the job they need to do. This includes everyone from welders to plumbers to electricians, to seemstreses and more. On top of that, Tim Barraball seems like a jack of all trades. While many say, "jack of all trades, master of none," I don't get the sense of that from Tim. He definitely seems like someone who really knows a lot about many disciplines.
I get excited every time I see an article/video with Adam Savage! He always seems to do and show the most interesting things. I’d love to be able to visit the Acme FX shop and see in person how their things are created. The craftsmen they have are so talented and all of the equipment and materials they have available is my dream. I’ve always been interested in making props and special/practical effects. I always think that the ability to figure out how to make an effect or thing exist in the physical world is always more impressive than making it all out of visual effects. Of course I’m not trying to discredit the VFX artists who are also extremely talented and work hard at what they do; but as someone who really likes interactive and immersive things, I’m more partial to the physical objects. I’ve made some things before but I really hope that I get a chance to work in an effects shop like this in my life.
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