Adam Savage's Indiana Jones Grail Diary Prop Replica!
hi kids adam savage here in my cave with a uh a show-and-tell that is um it's one of those spikes in the graph this show-and-tell and by that i mean um in any set of endeavors that we embark upon uh and in this case i'm discussing making for me and specifically prop replication for me in my history of prop replication there are some props that stand out for me as really important little moments in which i understood something i didn't understand before uh so the first time i took a wooden slat and covered it with aluminum foil tape and turned it into a sword that was that was like a really powerful moment my five dollar sword hangs directly above my head right now and it's inspired by that moment uh the the samaritan which i've only just wrapped uh is maybe the most involved prop replica i have ever embarked upon but it carries you know its execution uh uh uh its execution involves everything that i've learned before that and this show and tell is one of those pieces that taught me a lot early on um this ladies and gentlemen is my henry jones grail diary from indiana jones and the last crusade and this is a prop replica which i lovingly and carefully recreated back in if i remember correctly 2002 2003 yeah right around there 2002 2003 because it was right around the time the myth buster started uh right around the time of my divorce i remembered this because i was alone in an apartment for long periods of time which helped engender the creation of this prop but let's get to this prop this is the grail diary now indiana jones uh fans love this prop this is a very oft created and recreated prop and there are a lot of wonderful copies out there it's sort of shocking for how intense and complicated this prop is how many different people have tackled it but i think it speaks to what a pleasurable build it is because i personally found it insanely rewarding in fact i didn't just make one i made ten i made ten of these yeah where are the other nine um i do not know they are out there in the world i you what's funny is well i'll get to that at the very end of this okay let us open up this wrapper and talk about it from uh from the get-go uh the wrapping paper is it looks kind of nifty it's like a pinstripey brown wrapping paper um turns out that's what all of the uk uses as craft paper so if you watch number file they write all their equations on this kind of paper so it's not that exotic um i found it at flax back when i was doing this the postage stamps here are absolutely correct uh to the movie and the cancellation stamps are too i actually laser cut these on ilm's laser cutter i made a positive stamp and loaded it with ink and pounded it down on there i actually think i made uh 13 of these in order to get the 10 that i that i really liked the more i wrap it and unwrap it the better it looks the diary itself um is about 210 pages sewn into signatures so i learned uh the rudiments of book binding in order to put this book together and both binding is fun book binding is fun and satisfying uh so uh when you are book binding how do you join all these pages at their ends you actually uh you actually end up uh hang on just a second all right so in order to talk about how the book is constructed i want to do a ridiculous simple little lecture on book binding in the way it was originally done um your basic paperback is all the pages are clamped together and then glue is laid down the back and they're held together pretty okay that's uh that's a perfect binding i mean i know they're like a bunch of different names and it's been a while since i've been in this space so forgive me if i forget a couple of terms um but back in the olden days they did what was called signatures and that is how all like hardcover books and good books are assembled and a signature is it breaks a book down into a discreet set of package packets um in this case the grail diary is in um 12 page signatures uh and a 12 page signature looks like this it is composed actually of only three sheets of paper but when you fold them you get page one 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. then what you do is once you've gathered your whole book in signatures you line them up and you uh there are many different ways to do this but you can use a saw you actually add a couple little holes and you sew the signatures together there's this whole way of binding it's really thrilling and fun and when you finally get it all together and you open your book it's like it's freaking christmas is what it is but back to the beginning how do we have images of the grail diary yeah that's a good question well there is a magic of myth book about lucasfilm that covers some of their biggest early films like empire strikes back and raiders and a few others and in the raiders section there are reproductions of like i think over 20 or 30 pages maybe 20 pages of the grail diary full double page spreads in this in this book uh and those many of us who replicated this prop did what i did which was i scanned those pages uh blew them up in photoshop until they were large enough to print well then i removed all the artifacts from every single image of weathering right so like i would take i would take one of these pages here's one here's one and in the scan there might be like blotchiness all around this so i carefully went in in photoshop and removed everything but the black text so that when i printed it it would just be a blank page and i could add my weathering this as you can imagine took a while um weeks and weeks and weeks of photoshop work and you know as i said i was had been recently separated from my uh my then wife and uh i had lots of time on my hand and i needed to do something with my hands and this was the perfect like way to kind of zone out and so i did for weeks in uh in early 2000 uh early 2000 it's 2002. i'm like my brain is fried sorry it's early 2002. it doesn't matter why am i even worrying about it okay so after i've the book which is about 200 pages long is not 200 uniquely different pages it's a prop uh and a prop department isn't gonna write a whole book to make a fake book they're gonna come up with a couple dozen pages and then they're gonna repeat them and that is exactly how this book works there's like i can't remember the exact numbers but maybe there's like 30 individual pages and they just repeat throughout the book like six times um so after i photoshopped all of the images i found in that lucasfilm book i found some others online there are pictures of hero props here and there there's screen grabs from the movie which some of us traced in order to create the artwork that we needed uh hold on a second i gotta blow my nose we're coming on spring in san francisco and it's been raining and that means that we're getting some pollen blooms and um the way i know about that is because of this very careful detection instrument for pollen that i possess on my face so i was talking about photoshopping tons and tons and tons of pages it's uh it's tedious work especially with old 2002 photoshop but it was also super pleasurable i remember it being an incredible education uh in photoshop once i had those then it was gathering the other images that i could then there are actually some pages that no one had seen or that you know we knew existed but no one had found anything remotely good so there are some folks who developed a uh uh henry jones font and i'm trying to find an example in here of the henry jones font and so some of these pages yeah here we go um the text on the top of these two pages uh is a henry jones font it's it's okay frankly some of the best grail diaries out there are the ones that are being hand drawn by people who are both insane and deserve all the credit because that is insane and holy hell what a beautiful thing to do um also you might notice there's stuff pasted in here uh across the grail diary and this is what makes it such an exciting prop for replicators there are tons of little inserts there are there is a silver certificate dollar there are letters from characters within the indiana jones cannon there's the hindenburg ticket letter uh each piece of paper stuffed into the the the spine of this this bus ticket these old quotes every single one had to be researched and replicated so in doing this it's not just that i you know went and found a picture of this painting i found the original painting and then photoshopped it until i had a picture that worked for me right uh with these bus tickets and things like that i found originals uh and in many cases the originals had already been found i can't remember the degree to which i was doing any new research here you know it's arguable but uh i mean this is what makes prop replication so much fun is you get to like tackle these questions with well i mean in some cases you get to tackle these questions with a whole group of people and uh those threads in an rpf where tons of people are like trying to figure out where where stuff comes from it can be really exciting and it can go on for years all right so now uh in this theoretical construction of the book i have all of my photoshop pages i have all of my inserts um i have all of my photoshop pages as uh as master drawings and then in order uh and then i had my inserts and in order to sort the inserts of which there was like 30 or something i i had a a binder with pockets in it and one insert went into each pocket along with each of its uh you know with all of its compadres so i made 10 books i like in general made 15 of every insert so that i'd have extra and those all went into the folder so when i did the final assembly i was able to like put the inserts in as i went but each insert is also a completely different piece of paper so some of this is newsprint and some of this is copy paper and some of this is linen laid paper and some of this is fool's cap what is fool's cap um frankly i'm not exactly sure um but it's some kind of paper they used all the time in detective novels in the 40s um there's onion skin oh onion skin this prop got me obsessed with onion skin paper this is onion skin um this is my um white star line titanic ticket which just seemed appropriate to have in here um that's like a go with but this gossamer paper that's like barely there this is onion skin and this is what everyone used to type on and i think the main reason we all used to type on this is because you could put sheets of carbon paper between sheets of onion skin and you could make carbon copies that's where the phrase comes from you make carbon copies of uh of what you're typing and the onion skin allowed because of its incredible thinness for reference your average piece of copy paper is about 4 000 of an inch thick yep uh your piece of onion skin here is two thousands it's half the thickness of normal paper which means the impression your typewriter key makes on the first paper and then on the carbon and the next paper behind it you can make many more copies than with normal like 20-pound paper and you can still get this stuff on ebay and no one's really paying attention to it so you can buy reams of this paper 500 sheets it's like half an inch thick you buy 500 sheets of this paper um for you know 15 bucks so i have probably 15 reams of onion skin from across the 20th century i've sent letters to friends on them uh i made birthday invitations out of them one year but they're phenomenal for prop replication uh yeah it's just it's a beautiful feeling paper and sometimes they have water marks that you can see when you hold them up to the light staidler or strathmore yeah paper props are a really really fun and often quite low-cost entry into high-level prop replication yeah um definitely paper props were like one of these places i cut my teeth on exactitude and precision uh and you know this is 2002. i didn't have a tv show yet i'm still just uh working at ilm um and i was making a fine living but i you know this is exactly the kind of project that my budget could totally afford i'm going out getting lots of different kinds of paper making lots of experiments tons of printer cartridges but i'm walking you through the build slowly i know it doesn't seem like it but i am walking through the build so now i have all my photoshop pages and i have all my inserts so the next step is to make a book out of all of those but this is tricky because i can't just print it out because i'm i'm making the book as a set of signatures which if you remember are nested folded sheets of paper in this case nested three sheet paper bundles that will eventually 15 or 18 of them or so will be lined up to make this whole book what this means is that when i print this thing out i have to print it out like this page 1 and 12 are opposite each other on this side and on this side pages two and eleven you see where this is going ten and three four and nine eight and five six and seven right i have to do layouts like this and then i have to print those double-sided so i get heavier sheets of copy paper and i do a cut line blue line layout like i used to do in graphic design and then i paste each of my sheets 1 and 12 2 and 11 3 and 10 etc right to do the the layouts of these signatures and because there's like 35 pages i think it's like three separate full signatures that i had to lay out and then it turns out that you can't just take those masters and feed them into a copy machine why you ask it is a great question because i thought that's what i would do i thought feet inside one feet inside one of a hundred sheets turn the motor feed inside too i mean there's some information management there but it seemed pretty tacklable until you realize that copy machines do not have perfect alignment from one side to the other no no no draw a dot that's one inch in from each corner and edge on four sides of a piece of paper and make a copy of it and then turn it over make another copy of it they're not gonna line up perfectly they're gonna get close but here's the reason close isn't good enough pages like this so in this case i have a drawing which is complete across these two pages but this is part of one part of the signature and this is part of another this isn't a single page this is two separate pages their alignment has to be plus or minus like 16 of an inch all of this meant that in order to make 12 diaries i had to find someone local who owned a xerox machine go to their house that's 2002. it's like printers weren't everywhere and spend an entire day hand feeding each sheet in in the right orientation doing every signature managing all the piles it was like 10 solid hours of copying just to make sure everything was lined up on both sides so that when i cut the pages they would all line up like this ah it sounds grueling and in that moment where i realized i had to hand feed everything it was a little grueling but i remember it with nothing but fondness truly um so now in this theoretical build i have all my signatures it's time to clamp them up i believe i clamped them up in an old wood clamp let's see here my grandfather was a surgeon uh and also a maker and i have a couple of his tools in my collection and this is one of them i own uh two of his original wood clamps and this clamp i believe yeah this clamp was uh one of the i used both of these clamps to do this this book clamping one on one side and one on the other uh and then i tighten them down like this onto the signatures and then i did that thing i made two cuts with the saw here two cuts of the saw here two cuts like that then i sewed them together bound them inside the end pages ah and the cover the cover right so in 2002 i had not done much leather working i had made my first whip in the 90s yes but that's different than the kind of weather working for doing book covers it's just different thicknesses different applications and i knew i wanted to worn leather and i knew i wanted it consistent across all the books and i was living in the mission district at that time not just a few blocks from here and i could have gone over to sh frank here in the mission one of the great leather suppliers in the world is just right here a few blocks from us um but i couldn't afford a half hide that was like over 100 bucks there was no way i could afford uh to purchase a brand new piece of leather for this so i went uh around the corner to the community thrift store and i bought a leather jacket i bought an old 80s leather bomber that was like you know that fake worn that all of our jackets were in the 80s and i got uh i got nine books out of it i think i had to get one more jacket to get that tenth book um i got nine jackets out of sorry i got nine books out of one jacket it was a really really like i remember it being very therapeutic i remember it being a delightful place to put my brain at that moment in time and there is also something intoxicating as a maker making making multiples of a thing and making them all perfect that that that is that is a particular and unique kind of uh maker's high for me um that's different than just making one thing there's an assembly line process which i also love but that moment when you are really dialing in the final parts of something and your rap you're you're like putting the inserts into ten books and you're weathering them with with a wash and you know you're banging on them and giving them each a kind of a the specific weathering then you're wrapping them all on paper just seeing i i didn't document any part of this build back when it was happening which is my big regret um it's probably because that was exactly a transition point between film and digital cameras i was an avid film photographer on 35 millimeter film um but by early 2002 i had stopped doing it for the most part because it's expensive to develop all that film and i kind of lost the bug for a while it wasn't until uh it wasn't until late just around after this that i picked up the canon sure shot 110 i think it's perfect perfect perfect little early digital camera weirdly exactly the size of a pack of cigarettes which i don't think was on by accident at any rate i don't have any evidence of this which makes me sad because i'd love nothing more than to go back today and look at pictures of stacks of indiana jones grail diaries um like i said somewhere in this book i included oh i didn't say it yet somewhere in this book i included a tell um i included a way to identify the book as mine and you know what i went and i forgot what the i forgot what the devil was so if you're wondering if you possess one of my books i don't know what to tell you uh i've got a tell in there somewhere uh i should go back and figure out where that tell is i mean i don't even know where to begin thinking about what i would have done i feel like i would have written something on a small piece of paper you know on a on one of the inserts perhaps but that's see the ends you can't make a tell on an insert it has to be on the actual thing right um yeah it is hard to say ladies and gentlemen but uh like i said i made 10 of these i traded them i sold them back then um every single one had individual water coloring on the pages that have water coloring um every single page was weathered with a wash of raw umber which is why i had to use copy paper and not inkjet because the inkjet tends to smear in the presence of water yeah that's the story of my indiana jones grail diary thank you guys for joining me for this show and tell it's a bit more involved than i expected but yeah it's a fun one thank you guys stay safe and i will see you next time thank you guys so much for watching that entire video if you would like to support tested even further well i'm here to tell you that you could become a member if you follow the links below you'll see there are several tiers of membership depending on how much you'd like to pay and how much access you would like to me and the tested 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2021-04-20 15:43
