Gadgetory

now this might look like your standard corporate office in Thousand Oaks California we've got the Rolling Hills outside here but inside these doors is Sideshow Collectibles they have statues figures life-size replicas of all your favorite geek pop culture icons so we're going to talk to the people that make the magic happen so sideshow looks to express itself as a Renaissance studio by combining the the modern cutting-edge technology of digital sculpting digital painting with the classic mediums of clay sculpture actual you know wet paint on statues and I think this is the element that brings this sort of old and new world ethic together and is the heart of our presentations to the collectors this big boy right here is Thanos from the Marvel Universe sideshow put it together and it's really one of the largest and most intricate pieces they have ever made but the other thing it took a lot of traditional methods as well as new technology the things that you and I are using to make him come to life I use ZBrush in Maya almost exclusively one of my biggest tools that I that really helped me transition from traditional sculpting into digital was my Cintiq screen that's the Wacom screen that lets you work with a pen directly on the screen I honestly do a lot of my sketch development work on them on an iPad but sometimes I just have to break out and get messy and with it this piece we thought wasn't working and this one as well we felt didn't have enough there so actually I photoshopped in gray this component of the armor and then send it back to him and then we broke this line up and just edged a few more things to bring it back to that same language and then I would send him the Photoshop file on Thanos he's got a lot of really cool textures that are really difficult and tedious to do by hand but we can design it that way and then when it comes to molding cast we can work around those and create seam lines outside of those things and really spend that time in the design process to make something that really is so amazing and would be so difficult to do and his suit pattern is made up of these intersecting pyramids which is really cool and if you get up there you can see that we really push brushwork airbrush work sponge work and we have some techniques that we really like to use you know a lot of times we will sponge a color on or something and they will break it up with denatured alcohol is like misting it carefully out of a mist bottle which kind of causes the paint to crackle and separate on its own and give you a kind of organic broken up quality about it the amount of fidelity that we can get the amount of detail that we can get you can't compare to what the way we used to do it in the past I think you know in the in the 20 of the 20 plus years that you know we've been doing this at sideshow I think the interesting thing about with the technology that is you know pretty readily available now you know I'm 51 now so you know to me this is a goddamn magic trick at this point because it didn't exist when I started this I think that that has been both frustrating encouraging and most certainly inspirational you