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The Eurostar to Miniatures: A Modeling Masterclass with Fenris Games
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Oct 2, 2023
This week we chat to one of the only sculptors who hasn't worked at Games Workshop, Ian from Fenris Games. Ian's sculpting and modeling story is incredible, he's worked on movies, made 1:1 model trains, and now runs Fenris Games making loads of miniatures and scenery for the tabletop. https://fenrisgames.com/ Army of Duckness: http://kck.st/3EHYnRk Join our Patreon: https://patreon.com/thepaintingphase Merch: https://thepaintingphase.creator-spring.com Streaming: https://www.twitch.tv/thepaintingphase01 Help Support the channel with our affiliate links: UK & EU: https://affiliates.waylandgames.co.uk/idevaffiliate.php?id=1214 UK: https://elementgames.co.uk/?d=10835 EUROPE: https://taschengelddieb.de/?affiliate=tpp US: use code paintingphase to get 10% off at https://www.goblinshut.com/ We Print Miniatures: https://weprintminiatures.com/thepaintingphase THEPAINTINGPHASE for 10% off Follow us: https://www.instagram.com/thepaintingphase/
View Video Transcript
0:00
hey I'm pachy hello I'm Patrick hello I'm Jeff and if you're enjoying watching
0:06
these fabulous chats that we do from a regular basis and would like to ask questions as well and have the opportunity then join our patreon you
0:12
get to watch them early and have the opportunity of asking lovely people questions about what they do why are they here maybe me and Pat and Jeff as
0:19
well you don't have to it's fine but today I am joined by my twin Ian from Fe
0:25
games hi Hi Ian hi how you doing I say my slightly ever slightly older to yeah
0:31
more piercings SL thank you for coming on the channel have a chat about all the stuff you do what we normally Prelude
0:38
this with is uh because we get a few people asking questions like who are you and what is fenis games obviously we
0:44
know you are it's Ian yes what is fenis games us a brief fenis games is basically what
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um kind of evolved out of my own hobby stuff essentially so like 99% of people
0:58
in this I got into this via air fix kits initially I suppose and then Workshop stuff and whatever so all
1:04
the way back in the early days of um well before Rogue Trader but so my very first um my very first Citadel miniature
1:12
was a c36 fantasy tribe skeleton with a cimeter based on the Jason and the Aron
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ones um which was 10 P 10 whole Pence um can't get them prices now no exactly
1:25
exactly so I mean that that dates me obviously um but yeah so we' we'd kind
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of come at War gaming from airfix you know the little kind of tiny airfix soldiers um and did lots and lots of um
1:39
model kits tank tanks and planes all the usual you know tank planes hanging off the ceiling and cotton wall and all that
1:44
kind of stuff um and yeah one day on the school bus would have been about 12
1:50
years old uh one of one of the bigger boys uh one a mate who was a year above
1:55
me had been given a copy of um D and D basically d and d and I hadn't a clue
2:02
what it was and so we we both sat there on the bus on the half an hour drivein sort of reading it and going what the
2:08
hell was this you know um and and first chance we got we played it and then it was like oh there's mines to go with
2:14
this and we found a shop in Lincoln um that as well as being a um basically a
2:19
charity shop sort of secondhand ladies dresses and and tea and weird kind of stuff bit like an oxam shop I guess had
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got a cabinet full of early Citadel stuff and one bookcase full of d and d and traveler and and all those kind of
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early RPGs uh role playing games for anybody who doesn't do acronyms yeah
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yeah good good um you'd lost me yeah so yeah our our first Love U me and my
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brother so fenis is me I'm a brother I I run fenis full-time Joe is still an
2:50
industrial model maker which I'm sure we'll get to um but he does most of my organic sculpting for me um but yeah
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RPGs were our first love and we still did a bit of um Skirmish stuff and when 40K came out a road Trader originally
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came out we played a fair bit of that as well and and warmer first edition which we still got in the box and still nice
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you know with the John blanchart you know the Harry the hammer The Original Classic one um so yeah we we did all of
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that and then um had a period of I don't know lots of years between um art
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college and um model making College um where kind of went into deep freeze and
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didn't have time for games of any sort we did have a blood bow
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um well not a tournament but a league all the way through um mod Mak and college and various other sort of
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related stuff but we went through a period like everybody does of you know girls and beer and motorbikes
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and yeah some of us keep doing that and some don't um but yeah so we we kind of
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dropped out of the whole thing for a while was you know aware of it on the periphery and and still keeping an eye
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on stuff um and we had a um so backing
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up a little bit industrial model making is what we did for a living for a lot of years which is you're saying mold making
4:09
College I didn't even know that yeah so at at the time I went to Medway art college um this was the only model
4:16
making course in the world um it was set up by a guy called John gaylard who' realized after uh 2001 the kubric film
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was made um that there was a need for training professional model makers um
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the British film industry for 2001 had basically had to cannibalize people from
4:38
any trade to go and make models um so I apprenticed when I was at College I
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apprenticed under guys who'd been um sval Road tailor and um basically people
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who were good with their hands just out of the blue got a phone call from the production company for 2001 said do you
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want to come and make some stuff for us and be on a film that's brilliant so this guy bill I apprenticed under one of
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my one of my first kind of trainers had been a a saval roow tailor and got this phone call and his day one on set was
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making the eight masks for 2001 wow and he then did you know 25 years in special
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effects and film and TV so um so yeah there was this need for people to be
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trained to do this because the British film industry was suddenly um had got this desire and this need for proper
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model makers rather than hobbyists rather you know not people making air fix kits but people how to make stuff to
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a deadline fast turnaround all that kind of stuff so yeah Medway was set up for that and it was the only course in the
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world for at the point I joined 26 years it had been running it was the only
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course worldwide that had got 100% employment at the end of it oh wow because you went straight from that into
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the film industry basically there was that much demand for uh I think there were 12 places yearly and about 2 and a
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half thousand people would apply oh for those 12 places so you had to be good to get in in first place yeah well
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fun yeah I mean I've had people from Herford say it's basically selection but for model making I mean
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yeah so yeah and it was run up a mountain while sculpting yeah pretty much um amazing so
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yeah and because it was that one course it had that reputation of if you'd been to Medway you could get a job anywhere
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yeah um so guys that that's kind of my lead back into Games Workshop because I was at college with um Tim Adcock who
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did the Thunderhawk and um the original Scout Walker the original metal yeah yeah yeah yeah so Tim was Tim was a year
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above me at College um and rented a room off me we were in digs together um and
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Ivan Bartlett who did the first or won the first Slayer sword the very first golden demon with the Chalice of Doom
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don't if you remember seeing it it was like a giant goblet with a a necromancer summon in a load of the old the the
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original plastic skeletons it was the very first golden look at that I don't remember that speak to my my uh my
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bestie Tim he was he was at that very first golden theme and he still got his T-shirt in the rapper nice in the rapper
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yeah in the he's never wore it he's still got it yeah yeah cuz it was held at um snon swim baths yes the very first
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one the bath I wonder where it might have been an adjacent room but I can't guarantee
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it just everything's on floats flat oh I've been to some trade shows that are in the not actually in
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the pool but you can still smell the chlorine from the they bored over it or yeah yeah um
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so yeah Ian he basically completed that diarama as his finally a piece and then entered it into the golden demon and and
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won cuz that that very first year you had to win a local heat to get a place in the in the main competition oh so you
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had to win in a local model shop or a local GW wasn't just to turn up and go it Tim
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won his in Wales and then got to go I won my local one in Lincoln and got my so I did um one of the original um when
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GW had the ad and license and they did some bug bears and I converted one of those into a stander bear with a kind of
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Rodney Matthews uh design on it and all kind of Egyptian hieroglyphics and dripping chorus eyes and stuff sculpted
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with a um saber 2 tiger skin with all kind of hanging off it and whatever and it got smash the bits on the way up so I
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I that it never got as far as even being looked at let alone you know 96 it wasn't smash the bits but it got
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broke off but yeah so I went through college with with guys who were um you
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know end Ian ended up being in the painting Studio off the back of that and did a lot of those early you know the
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kind of 2in deep diaramas that were in the cases he did a load of those for the studio uh and Tim obviously did lots of
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work for Forge World and for bits and pieces he now works largely for himself but he does a lot of work for renedra
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and the Perry's and stuff still doing vehicles and um Cannon and all that kind ofu say he's still obviously recogniz
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him from the old Publications but yeah for the life me remember what he I've not actually seen him for probably about
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salute 2012 was the last time I saw Tim In the Flesh uh so he's still about I know he's still doing bits and pieces
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but I've not caught up with him for a while and Ivan seems to dropped off the face of the Earth none of us in the industry know where he is or what yeah
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yeah definitely yeah so I I kind of went through college playing DND D and stormbringer and r quest and that kind
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of stuff with those guys uh and and yeah so um I always kind of joke with with um
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with people that it feels like myself and Annie at bad squido we feel sometimes like we're the only people in
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the industry who didn't used to work for GW but um yeah that seem to be quite R
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yeah I mean obviously you know that's it's an obvious way in but yeah I kind of came at it from the periphery and the
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backside if you like and um I'd certainly say you got more accolades behind you by being in the the elite of
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the SAS of the world yeah I mean this was kind of the point of the of the
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Medway course it was to tr people not just for film work but for so there's a demand for um architectural planning
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models product design um prototyping engineering um all anything where a
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product doesn't exist in the real world that's what a model maker or patent maker is a very similar job but not
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quite you know they they tend to be more involved with uh tooling and with the actual production side of things so yeah
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we we would do anything in [Music] from I mean so much product design but
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um and this this was in the days obviously long before CG so if somebody wanted a 6ot tall JVC video cassette we
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made a 6 foot tall JVC video cassette out of MDF and lots of vinyl and lots of
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paint and everything else and we did um 7 foot tall toothbrushes for Chris Evans
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for don't forget your toothbrush and we did um we did uh we worked on um why did
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you start with that then I mean well yeah I mean you know it's the way I was
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dropped into it when I first went on work release and apprenticing um from college cuz that was kind of the standard thing year one you did all the
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basic machine training year two you went on work release and you were supposed to do six weeks and and our year we
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basically all got hauled back in because we were all doing so much for release because there was it was a period where
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there was just loads of film work loads of prototyping loads of whatever so it was like well I'm earning money while
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I'm doing this and actually that's where you learn stuff it's not sitting at bench in college with a tutor telling you this is how you use a lathe it's
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it's going and actually using a Miller Machine yeah for real you know using it in war essentially and learning on the
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job and and the same with film work or with whatever um so yeah we were we were
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building you know everything and the very first Work Release I I did was um a
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company who got the planning models for Cardiff Bay development you know the whole big thing with the the the barrier
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that was built and the new housing and everything else and it was just a stack of 50 big blueprints like this and Away
12:06
you go make that and I'm like oh God where do I start but what we were kind of training to do was every big job is
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just a, little jobs so just pick someone you know how to do and do that and then do the next little bit and do the next
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little bit and that's how you break a job down so that's how I've you know now that I teach and and train other people
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that's how I teach people to do stuff is just like job you know break it down into little bits because an entire job
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as a whole living thing is kind of insurmountable you're not going to you don't know where to start house make a
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house you got to like and funny enough building the house is one of the things I always say it's basically model making
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but I'm one to one scale it's the same it's the same as what I do in the workshop but it's just with one to one
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scale bricks instead of yeah um so yeah and that that was what we were trying to do was basically problem solving so
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you'd get a client say can you make us a a life-size iguan and you go yep and
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then you sit down and figure out how to do it rather than sitting there oh I don't know I'm not sure and you see it
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on all the um funny enough I've just been watching all the uh appendices on
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all the Lord of the Rings movies again this last couple of weeks just in the background while I'm sculpting and um
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there's a bit in there where where um they're talking about the life-size Mill
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you know the Dead one at the end that they're all kind of huddled around and they they were kind of like oh we could
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CG or we could do and um forgot the guy's name the head of wet Studio
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Richard tayl thanks yeah uh he said yeah we'll do that and then was like oh [ __ ] how we can do this but that's that's
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model making that's what you do you know he just and we we've had lots of jobs like that but he just quote it and then do it and break it down in the jobs that
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the team knows how to do you know it's it's very much a teamwork kind of thing generally I've got to be honest and I
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say I'm quite surprised that um I was watching the uh one of the little add-ons for behind the scenes for the
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new Ahsoka TV series and in my brain I was just convinced now all spaceships were just
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were just CGI and then watch them building the one that CH flies from scratch all the way up and I was really
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surprised cuz I thought surely I think that's largely down to um again my
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brain's going with this morning the guy who played The Bodyguard in um John fa
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John fa thank you yeah he's very much a models guy they built the razor Crest in Mandalorian and did it like the old
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because he's the main producer that's what he grew up with that's what he likes to do so he's kind of right and
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proper yeah yeah um a mate of mine from college from Medway College who was the
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year two years below me Jim actually runs the Lucas film model shop oh wow so
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they're really pleased to go back to that because he said for a lot of years his job was basically an office manager
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it was just 20 guys in monitors can you tweak that bit of Animation can you do that he said it's not model making
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anymore so now they've gone back full circle you could tell they were you could tell in a in a in a positive way
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not a negative way you could tell they were models when you looked at Rogue one cuz when they did a lot of the uh Star
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Destroyers buzzing around the the de star you could just they just had that feel that they went still you know with
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with good model work and a lot of it comes down to scale it's got to be big enough to photograph well uh as you know
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from trying to photograph this stuff the smaller it is the harder it is to photograph and look real um but yeah
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good model work is always going to outperform CG well I think one of the good things about good size model work
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as well is it um when you're creating uh like a space of passing over
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the other one and you create Shadow and stuff it works better when when you when you can Bounce It Off something real doesn't it the the phes I always using
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it's a bit of a cliche but it's it's just don't reinvent the wheel you know it's and whether it's making a physical
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model that cast Shadows or whether it's um you know making a tree on a Model don't don't sculpt a tree just use a bit
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of Branch you know um and and even down even down to ston work you know I I make molds from real
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Stone yeah and cast up lots of little Stones yeah um don't necessarily work with real Stones because glue and cement
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and everything else but if you make them in resin or in plastic you can work with those materials and and again don't
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reinvent the wheel if you want yeah if you want a texture of you know whatever
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wood or or what you find something that's about the right scale um and it will reproduce properly and look you
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know without having to sit there and wood grain onto something or whatever Fe are been told off by our viewers I'm just going to point at this building
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because there's a couple of like broken bits of Timber that and it just looks like it's probably a lollipop stick or a bit B it makes sense right CU it's kind
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of bolser is is absolutely the perfect thing for scale if you get a little brass brush to it you know the little suede brushes that you get from
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poundland um and just drag that across it it it just brings the grain up because of the softness in the in the
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Boler and yeah put a little bit of stain on it and it's you know it's far more real than trying to sculpt wood grain on
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a bit of green stuff yeah there's a guy on um Instagram forget his name um but he does a lot of medieval architecture
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very similar like lots of like little bricks and stuff like looking at the stuff you've got here um and the buildings look really nice but his he
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has lots of peasants and civilians that are quite I I won't say amazingly painted but quite well painted but
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mostly base coats with the odd watch here and there because he photographs it outside with the blue sky in the background it looks real it looks like
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an actual scene that you're just like witnessing like someone's photographed it's so well done again you know you're
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always going to get best Photography in real natural light than under any amount of artificial lights
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and reflectors and whatever because that's what your eye is has evolved to see yeah yeah so uh and it's the same
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with model work like you say with you know it it stands out it's that uncanny valley that they talk and the funny and
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the funny thing is is like you know um Star Wars Lego figures they are as far removed from being anything remotely
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humanoid from something from a Star Wars movies you can get in in toys oh
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disagree but you can't I can't wait for winter to come around because they someone will be outside with a camera
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and it'll be H and it always looks great it always looks great funny my brother
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cuz he still works in the um industrial model making side of things and he's working for a company at the minute who do big um shopping center displays for
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toy companies and he's just finished about the size of this table a big Hof display using all the the current um
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atat and snow speeders else so it's in a huge big PC case and I can't remember
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where it is in the but it's it's one of these probably tour shopping Cent brand new amazing piece of thing a bit richer
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my tast is 700 qu really get quite a lot in there but yeah still it's a chunk of
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money it's a mortgage PIV SE I've seen it on the leester Square I've seen it in the Leicester Square Branch a about 18
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months ago and I was very taken with it but it was also like a where would to put it and B oh we're quite lucky
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sometimes charity shops are a great place to go sometimes you rare that you find Lego but Liz managed to find an
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X-Wing W was it X-Wing or it was an X-Wing yeah it was an X-Wing uh just full kit we look we got like the parts
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because had the instruction we looked at the parts and start a can on a while but like it's all there all there yeah very
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not very often you see not very often you see Lego in the
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wild was it the um the old well the cuz they have is it a Millennium Falcon that
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they scaled up so it accurately fits the people like you can f well they've done it twice now yes so the first one um
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like you you pay 700 quid for it and it was selling on eBay for like five or six grand that one when it came out cuz I
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became a bit obsessed with it yeah it had no interior other than the the cockpit and one and the the ramp they
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was always R up and down was on it but at one point in time unopened one of
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them on eBay had a was rising in price faster than gold was wow at one point in
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time and they were shot down when they remade it at scale again but with interior so obviously made that one not
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as interesting it's it's weird how the kind of the merchandise for the films
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has actually almost become more valuable than the actual stuff from the films so having worked in some of this stuff
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that's what I my I don't have a pension but my stuff I've got from films sitting
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in storage you know so I've got I've got um castings from two different
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Xenomorphs so from Alien one and from Aliens I've got the heads for both of those I've got a screen you got have
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them on like plaques on the walls if you I I haven't got them at the minute cuz I just haven't got room where I am at a minute but yeah I me I used to have them
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in the work just there you smoking hello well I've got to go to go with I've got a screen used pulse rifle that was used
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by um um Hudson um and yeah loads of bits and piece I've got the the original
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uh Giga sculpt of the tongue that comes out of the alien head and the molds that it was made that were made from it and
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stuff how on Earth did you manag to get all of that so guys I was Apprentice to basically worked on it oh Fant and they
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just got stuff kicking about the problem being is is I think sometimes this stuff ends up out out there because when the
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film is made it's sometimes a number of years before it becomes a cult touchone
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is people just got oh yeah take it cuz it's like that's how I got these pieces it was not a thing that things had any
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value so as a student freshman College it's like oh I really like alien oh you like alien have this tongue that was
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made by think and then and then you know and then and now going back to my mate Jim who who runs the um the Star Wars
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Workshop yeah like because they know that's a thing everything is under lock and key nobody gets a copy or you know
21:51
even if you made it you can't sneak one away it really is I think you have to be even as the actor now you have to be
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presented with your light just go I'll s that the car last day record the unless you're Ryan Reynolds
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in the deadpol suit where he just said yeah I'm having
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it I always remember that with um I don't know if you ever watch I but the TV series of um Hannibal with mads
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mikkelson when he the Hannibal actor character every single episode sometimes up to three in episodes these amazingly
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beautiful check suits that were just and at the end of it he went I'm taking
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two of them I'm just taking them and I'm just going to steal put in car and go he say I took these two suits that were my
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favorite and they said then we had like a bit of a a wrap-up party they came in and they s of said come with us M went
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picky s assum already he said he felt so embarrassed
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and guilty that he's already robbed to already like great I've got three that's
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amazing yeah it reminds me of like work whenever anyone new start started at Workshop there'll be like drawers of stuff that just people just like
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cluttered up like you know oh I have that I mean I remember Dave Andrews gave me a giant that you sculpted on like an
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empire state trooper cuz it had like a salot Helm and stuff like I was like John that I'll never paint it I was like
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uh yes well same I mean I was a couple of years below Chaz Elliot at Lincoln art
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college who did a lot of the early um Rogue Trader stuff and and stuff like chaos snake man and of early early Roma
23:25
chaos stuff um and yeah it was the same which has it was like I've got these unreleased olog ey from the original
23:31
Lord of the Rings license and stuff do you want them yeah all right and now they're like worth God knows what but
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but yeah it was just like you say throwaway stuff cuz everybody had got 10 so yeah oh wow so after all this amazing
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career about the sounds of it all time at College when did you and your brother decide to start making random stuff for
23:48
d and d and toys so we'd always made dragons dungeons dragons someone someone did say we used
23:55
Too Many acronyms I don't think we did but we we'll we and then and then now I'm like RPG d and
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d and that's just stuff I take for granted it depends on the p and theop this is true I I thought I used a lot of
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acronyms until I started teaching the military and the police and yeah they my
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part works for the Civil Service and and it's just a phenomenal amount of acronyms I mean it's just and acronyms
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that mean one thing to the army that mean a different thing to the police when I when I transferred
24:25
regiments um the the the regiment join being the Royal Irish Rangers as they were called at the time I hadn't really
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put the connection together but the their regimental motto was fala f a u g
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h a b a l a g h fala and in in gaic it
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means clear the way right and it took me about a year before I realized that all
24:48
the sergeant majors weren't just big Thunderbirds fans cuz they at the end of a call they go thanks very much John Fab
24:53
and put the phone down why everyone love Thunder B about a year before went oh
24:59
[ __ ] eventually got down okay random Thunderbird question what does Fab mean fireal boosters is
25:06
apparently it but apparently Jerry Anderson said it doesn't really have yeah he just like the sound of
25:11
it fireal boosters is what it's commonly people think it is but no one really knows what they'll be like okay I'm just
25:17
going to go to the shops Fab like I'm I'm
25:22
walking I think it's be get on with it I always wondered what is it Al that's up
25:28
in the space station what what did he do to the family Thunderbird five why was he always up there one
25:35
thing being the black she the press
25:40
and yeah they put it up there so yeah there'll be um the accusations will
25:45
start something we'll give it a few more weeks might be like J might have to wait till after his death Poss possi God yeah
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oh Jesus so yeah we sorry
25:59
to be fair and that was late for us so uh yeah we would so we bought
26:05
these early Citadel skeletons and whatever we were using a lot of those early um Citadel models for for games of
26:11
D and D basically with the old floor plans and a dungeon layout and whatever and pretty much from early on because
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we'd already kind of gone through the airfix uh figures and models route we were already chopping and changing and
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converting stuff so we pretty much immediately started converting and and
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sculpting our own stuff um and back in that there was no green stuff back then it was all Milli put so you um so it's a
26:36
lot harder to sculpt an entire miniature out of milliot as you can see from some of those early sculpts you know from
26:41
from everybody even the people who are amazing you know early early work in milliot alone is is hard work or even
26:48
you know Plumbing potties or whatever potties people could get old is that cuz um is it to do with the dry or how
26:55
brittle they are um it's so Millie put is where green stuff is kind of like chewing gum consistency milliot is much
27:01
more uh fibrous a bit it's kind of like blue teack but with fiber in so it's a lot more stringy and a lot more and as
27:08
soon as you get water there it Smooths down brilliantly and everything else but it's it becomes a a paste and then a
27:14
liquid where green stuff just kind of what was that one that Bob used to work in wasant siant yeah yeah shant we used
27:21
that a lot and film stuff cuz it's obviously you know you can if you no
27:26
that's that's which again is we use it so if you use it we use that and another one called Monster clay uh or wed clay
27:33
it's sometimes called which actually um I use that a lot in my teaching stuff so anytime you see one of these making ofs
27:38
where they're doing the full um bust of I don't know Hellboy or whatever that they're going to make a suit out of yeah
27:44
that will be siant or or wed clay um and yeah we use them because they don't dry out basically um so you can keep
27:51
resculpting them when the uh art director inevitably comes down on a Friday afternoon and says we've changed
27:57
everything and we need it by Monday um which is one of the reasons I got out of film a TV um yeah so so yeah we Ed those
28:05
materials um for exactly that reason um wed clay slightly differently that's that's actually a normal clay um and
28:14
you'll see it on Amazon or wherever craft shops has written down as wed clay which is Walt e Disney because it's the
28:21
stuff that the Disney animators used to make the little mettes of Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck out so that an animator
28:26
could look at Mickey from any angle and get the the right drawer so it was named for Disney rather than for any chemical
28:33
property or whatever but yeah we still use that now um quite often that's used for bulking stuff out cuz it's dirt
28:39
cheap and whatever pound for pound compared with shav and Clay which is you know through the roof um but yeah I mean
28:45
there's in the in the kind of professional model making world if you like there are so many other materials
28:51
that are um that are commonplace so I was I mentioned on Twitter the other day
28:56
that I was doing something with car body filler and people like why' you use that and it's like well cuz wait for wait
29:01
it's a thousand times cheaper than Milli put or green stuff or whatever it cures in 2 minutes yeah and it's you know and
29:08
you can buy it in hords you don't have to go I told off uh years ago at Workshop because I we had a load of the
29:15
bastions and they're all in resin and they're all warped a bit and no matter how hard the mle maker was trying to get
29:21
him as straight as he could and this that and the other and Dave Andrews have made the the master so there's only one
29:27
of so Mark was frantically trying to do all these CU it was an apocalypse display we were doing I think and we had
29:33
to do like 20 of them of these um bastions and they're all different shapes and sizes and I started with green Stu fill in the gaps because the
29:38
gaps were big yeah this is going to take forever and day was out just use Ready Mix f up be quicker I was like so I got some ready Mi for to started doing it
29:45
one of the managers walk past going that's not games short product so I have to explain that I can either spend four
29:50
weeks yeah filling it or two hours yeah it's one of the very first things we
29:55
were taught at College was the whole the difference between somebody who makes an air fix model or a warmer model you know
30:01
a hobbyist and a professional model maker is speed it's all about cutting Corners knowing what you can get away
30:07
with um what you can avoid making all together so like early uh not early but
30:14
I mean stuff um picks something like I don't know aliens so when the cako first comes on screen and goes from left to
30:21
right right to left whichever way it is that model was only detailed on one side cuz it's just a single pass across the
30:27
yeah abely so you save yourself 3 weeks of work by not building the back of it yeah and we do that all the time you
30:33
know I still do it now for for model shots you just model the side that you're going to photograph for the
30:38
website um and yeah and that's that's what kind of 80% of professional model making is is knowing what you can get
30:44
away with knowing the shortcuts to a thing and sometimes that's down to a material rather than a technique or
30:50
whatever we would get guys coming into the studio all the time saying oh I'm I'm a model maker I'm looking for work
30:56
and what what do you do oh well I've you know I've made this model of HMS Victory and they pull out photographs of this
31:02
fantastic thing with all the rigging and the Cannons and whatever that's great how long did it take you two and a half
31:07
years but if you can make it in a week I can give you a job and I I did a I had a
31:12
period where I was working for um Lloyds of London the insurance company and um
31:17
or not directly for them but we were making models for them because every time they brought uh or a company bought
31:23
insurance through them for a ship they would have as part of the the package they would provide a big scale you know
31:29
these big kind of coffee table models you see of ships in in boardrooms and stuff so we were making loads of those
31:36
and you got seven days start to finish to make one about 4T long fully detailed and whatever but again they were always
31:43
going to go on the back wall yeah yeah against so you never made the back of them so I did I don't know the seink cat
31:49
and and a couple of um seink fairies and um oil tankers and whatever and they were always 34 you know whichever which
31:57
rounds the model going oh I'll just this which way round or where's it going yeah yeah literally literally and it's the
32:03
same exactly the same thing it's all about cutting corners and like you were saying about filler that's why we use we call it pla in the um in the the kind of
32:10
model um effects World um but yeah car body
32:15
filler it sets in 2 minutes or less so we use it for everything and it's polyester so everything sticks to it
32:21
super glue loves it and and yeah I mean the only downside to it really is because of the huge amounts of chalk in
32:27
it as a filler is that when you come to sand in it and whatever it's the dust is horrible so yeah I thought red Mi filler
32:33
was bad yeah I mean we used so we we built um um one of the one of the models
32:38
we built when I was working in Ashford um for a couple of years we did uh pretty much every model for um again
32:46
going back to what I was saying about what if things aren't real you make a model of them so before the channel
32:51
tunnel was finished we built um all the interior display models for the folks
32:57
and Exhibition Center which was down at the where they were digging and we made models at every scale you can imagine of
33:04
the front of the Train the carriages trucks you know all the loading system we built a full- sizee interior of the
33:10
vehicle system with monitors and everything we built um a 135th working
33:16
model of the boring machine that actually had all the little bits moving around and the gears and the little caterpillar tracks and everything and
33:22
then you built the on to one tunnel we did we actually built the the ENT section for the boring machine full
33:28
scale and then we built we then built one to one the prototype for the actual Eurostar Terrain in this hanger in in
33:36
Ashford because the real thing didn't exist so Seymour Powell the um the designers who who were involved in that
33:43
um you might know from they did a lot of the early work with ducatti when ducatti first started breaking back into the UK
33:48
Market but they're proper big industrial Designer Guys you know so they designed this thing and we got again all these
33:54
all these drawings and we started building a fulls size Eur ostar train in the in the workshop cuz I I went on the
34:00
yeah like I went on the Eurostar for the first time like last week and as and
34:05
then you do the whole thing where you Google how old it is and it opened like in the early 90s didn't it and that's
34:11
like the only well I know hs2 is being constructed but currently that's that's
34:16
like hs1 isn't it cuz I had good I was like hs2 what is hs1 oh [ __ ] Z stuff so
34:22
the original model we made is at the York Railway Museum it's actually when we finished it yeah it the day we
34:28
finished it we got it loaded on a van in Ashford it went straight to the BBC and was filmed for tomorrow's world and it
34:34
was on tomorrow's world is the next big thing and then he went straight from there to the coach builders in Derby
34:40
quote for the real thing because although they got drawings and Scale Models they wanted the full-size thing to go right if we've got to build this
34:46
it's going to take X weeks or whatever so yeah we spent there were 12 of us spent 16 we weeks start to finish to
34:53
build a fulls size Euro star with a full interior as well the cabin was all fully detailed all the doors worked and
35:00
everything I mean it cuz I'm like thinking of this in terms of like you know model building cuz it's like hey
35:07
we're like a miniature Warhammer podcast and then I'm like right okay so you sculped a chair out of couple boxes and
35:15
then put stuff on it and I'm like how how what so yeah I mean on the EUR star for
35:22
instance that that started as a steel frame so we got steel gers and we had there was a steel fabricators in the
35:28
unit next door and we got them to fabricate a skeleton and we then built a plywood sub skeleton around that and
35:35
then sheet supply wood and then every we every week for four weeks we had a pallet of 240 tins of car body filler
35:42
delivered and we were just skimming that onto the thing to get the main body shape and then we fiberglassed that and
35:48
then we did all the final fit and everything else what were the chairs made out of just to have interest they were existing chairs from British Rail
35:55
we just got the real thing don't reinvent the wheel and and the same with all the cockpit it was existing switches
36:01
and whatever and one of the guys I apprenticed under on that um he was he
36:07
was an ex um well he was he was a he' done a lot of film work he worked on Airwolf and stuff like that so he' got
36:14
loads of helicopter bits one to one left over from where they did the Airwolf build so We snuck in a load of Airwolf
36:20
triggers and I was I was literally just going to say oh wouldn't have been really fun to
36:26
like sneak in some Millennium Falcon control standard thing in the in the professional model making world it's a
36:31
standard thing to see what you can get away with the other people in the industrial spot straight away but that your average film go will never see so I
36:38
wish I had a bit of a Prelude of these questions before because I could have asked mentioned this to our P cuz they are loads of question you're going to
36:44
get cheese and like your favorite there's obvious ones like I mean I think it's a well-known one like the opening
36:50
sequence for uh Blade Runner all that cityscape there's a model of the Millennium Falcon there in amongst all
36:55
the towers it's just the on its end I had no idea cuz I thought as well I'm sure I
37:01
seen the um the siluku going over in Blade run 20149 and it's in um what's
37:07
the Kurt Russell film Soldier it's in there as well yeah there's a SP there's a Blade Runner spinner isn't he in the
37:13
rubbish when they boot him into the rubbish there's a blade R spinner in in the uh in the rubbish as well trying to
37:19
and they they s sort of they with Soldier they sort of have made this idea that it's they're connected them because
37:25
um yeah I mean according to Ridley Scott and some of the writers it's all the same universe so Blade Runner um and
37:33
alien and Soldier yeah cuz in um in Soldier he's got um one of his battle
37:38
honors as a tattoo on his arm is the tan housea Gat and it's mentioned as a it's mentioned as a war zone in in Blade
37:45
Runner by um by Roy bti yes yeah yeah yeah yeah attack ships off supposedly
37:52
it's the G I enjoyed Soldier but I really would have preferred a film where
37:57
he his backdrop of like all the battles he's been in i' like to have seen that actually that's okay four words the
38:06
whole is Soldier the one where he kind of like he's this badass kickass space
38:12
soldiery dude and then they upgrade them yeah kicking and the they boot him into
38:18
the rubbish and he ends up on a planet where I remember watching that multip Samurai but with one guy yeah I remember
38:24
watching it multiple times at my dad's when I was really really young and yet it's literally just popping back in is
38:29
it he has like a family that makes teaches a kid how to kill a snake with a
38:36
boot but yeah so it's always been a thing that we try and even in architectural planning models if we do
38:42
if we were doing planning models for what's the worst one you've done then or theere I mean oh God I mean so we did
38:51
like every time you go to one of these new housing Estates where they're building you know 300 new houses we've done so many of those models that you
38:57
see in the showroom where it's you know what the finished estate is going to look like where it's all bricks and mud when you turn up on the Sunday um and
39:05
yeah I mean we used to try and hide St in those all the time but they're because of the nature of what they are and they're seen daily by 300 people you
39:12
kind of can't get away with so much but certainly on architectural planning models we would always have you know um
39:18
people dogging in the woods and with a little tiny you know one
39:23
to railway set where there's like a car and people dogging in it and loads of people still around the
39:29
car are they all in gas masks and we do headless corpses and we
39:37
do you know zombies and we do but all at once 200 so tiny little 10 mil tall figures that's amazing just because
39:42
again you know you you can but also you B stiff I mean the worst one we did or
39:48
potentially the worst one we did I guess was was one we were doing uh so I was working for one studio and we were doing
39:54
work subcontract uh for one of the really big um architectural firms and I'm not going
40:00
to say who cuz they're you know big sort of name in terms of um uh let's just say they made things like the Millennium
40:06
Dome um but we we were doing um models for them and they were as subcontracts
40:12
as we were kind of bottom of the food chain and we were getting all the really crap parts of the job and whatever and at some point we hadn't realized till we
40:18
went to deliver the job and we had to turn it on its side so this huge 10ft Square baseboard with uh parts of London
40:25
modeled on it and it was only when we turned it on its side to carry it through the doors thankfully with the model facing the clients that we
40:32
realized somebody had written on Sharpie underneath that XX model makers are a bunch of you know oh [ __ ] get some spray
40:39
can and for anybody oh God yeah I mean it's yeah it that kind of stuff went on all the time but it's it's one of the
40:47
worst environments SLB environments depending on which side of the the joke you are for practical jokes is a is a
40:54
film or model making effect Workshop where everybody knows how to make stuff and there's pyro hanging about and
41:00
there's you know explosive squibs and there's whatever so I mean things like You' turn up on your first day and
41:06
there'd be a Thunder flash under your seat the first time you sat down or You' go to the toilet and there'd be light
41:11
fluid under the door and a match put to it or you know um yeah I mean just
41:16
ridiculous realistically they shouldn't allow model makers to be women shouldn't they they just come to work and get on with it and sensible I mean let men just
41:24
play with toys who make toys for a living essentially you know I mean I always say it's better than working for
41:30
a living model making but yeah I mean everything down to you know exploding cups of coffee so you literally go and
41:36
stir your coffee and take the thing out and the coffee would just go bang in your face or environment the mechanics when they
41:43
do when they have the The Apprentice sitting down on a chair and they put the airbag underneath it and interesting
41:49
I've seen videos of people go flying yeah yeah yeah it's like it's it's not like a mild bump it's like 4 foot in the
41:54
air off an airbag under your seat oh it looks so painful I always wondered if those videos were fake or not but there
42:01
we go yeah yeah interesting stuff you know you I suppose we should say
42:06
probably toxic male environment and all that kind of stuff but yeah I mean it was it's Again part of that's how you learn to make stuff I guess and you know
42:14
it's it's in action isn't it yeah and again you know it's it's kind of um it's
42:20
practicing stuff that you've been taught to do as well and again like going back to what we said earlier it's not you don't learn um or you know you learn the
42:27
basics of using a lathe or a mill machine or whatever in the in the studio at college but it's only when you've got
42:33
to actually manufacture um a piece of an aircraft that's going to be flying in two days
42:39
because so I worked for about 5 weeks for uh short Sunderland in Rochester um
42:45
they were rebuilding or restoring a World War II flying boat um and we had to machine some bits for that that were
42:51
going to be parts of the engine and whatever so again you got to know what you're doing but it's it's part of the skills we were taught to do it Machining
42:57
it was you know whatever um and all by hand in terms using a big Miller Machine but doing it by hand with a little rotor
43:03
Wheels rather than pressing a button on CAD you know yeah so real sort of breadth of skills was what we were we
43:10
were taught I found myself chatting um yeah my day job as lots of our viewers
43:15
all know is in weddings like a film and photograph weddings and um I bumped into a a previous groom um at a wedding and
43:25
he's a model maker and he's currently working on the new Gladiator oh film yeah um and he was telling me all these
43:31
cool things about how like they don't they don't build big busts anymore they
43:36
all design it in Cavs and then just be likeo and they're like a massive 3d printer or something and he said that
43:42
cost you know five grand to make instead of a ludicrous amount of money and and
43:48
like the time and all that sort of stuff it's like all these Technologies I mean three I first used 3D printers in 1989
43:55
so everybody think it's a new thing and we were working for Rover UK at the time and we were building um as if Rover used
44:03
3D printers yeah that's insane so we we were building um I can't remember what model of car it was but we were building
44:10
the engine block and the exhaust manifold and whatever and at the time it was Big Blocks of acrylic and lots of
44:15
car body filler so for the exhaust it was lots of PVC pipe and a heat gun and bending it and more body filler and
44:22
everything else and we came in one Monday morning and and the bosses said look we we bought these new toys at the
44:28
weekend and took us into one of the hangers on the on the edge of the site and they bought these two 3D printers
44:34
and they were both about the size of warmer World each each machine Oh my days and the first first 3D printers in
44:40
the UK and I think they played a Million quid each for them there um and suddenly instead of us spending six weeks bending
44:47
plastic pipe they were able to do it on on the cad terminal and print it overnight so it was a straight away it
44:54
was a 7h hour print to do a full you know bigger than this table Yeah via exhaust manifold but the resolution of
45:01
those machines back then when we all worry now about 02 of a micron the resolution step was 2 mm wow so we were
45:08
still going in for 2 weeks filling all that resolution and sanding it back but it was still cheaper to do that to a
45:14
print than it was to physically you know so it was it was interesting and it's
45:19
something that's been repeated in all the years I've been model making is that new technologies come along whether it be a laser cutter CAD cam Milling
45:26
machines lathes uh 3D printers and the old boys would always sort of go oh well
45:31
that's me out of a job and my attitude was always if I learn how to use this it's just another tool in the tool box
45:37
absolutely um so I've tried as best as possible to just keep up with everything so I've always had laser cutters I've
45:43
always had 3D printers I've always and and as they get cheaper and better I just upgrade and keep on top of it as
45:48
best I can like you said earli it's it speeds up yeah process it it's again it goes back to
45:55
that cutting corners and and so a laser cutter will do an architectural
46:00
elevation the same way I would used to do it with a scalp and a steel Rule and cut out each individual window and
46:07
whatever the laser cutter does exactly the same job but it does it 50 times faster 10 times more accurately being
46:13
generous to myself um and and repeatable and it can be doing that while I'm doing
46:18
another job that can't be you know can't be um replicated so again it just becomes a talk and same with 3D printers
46:25
you know I'm a big fan of using all these things but using them for a specific job so there's lots of people
46:32
use a laser cutter to do the whole job Soup To Nuts you know it's kind of if you got a wheel we'll do a a stack of
46:39
discs and stick them together and that makes a wheel where for me it's like no I'll get on the Miller machine or the 3D
46:44
printer and make an actual wheel and then make a mold and cast it in resin because you got five different
46:50
techniques to make the finished product rather than you know making one machine do all the jobs and the same with a lot
46:56
of the modern 3D printed stuff you know 3D printers aren't necessar well it's a rapid prototype of machine it's not a
47:02
production machine so the resins that we're all using on these machines haven't got the longevity that the cast
47:08
urethane resins have these are designed to last a lot longer 3D print resin
47:13
because of you know I think how it cures it cures under UV light and what we what we surrounded by on a daily basis if you
47:21
overcure your 3D print it's immediately brittle and whatever so what's going to happen to all these 3D prints 5 10 years
47:27
down the line you know so yeah we we do 3D print elements and models and whatever but we then take molds from
47:34
them which we do production molds from which we then cast in urethane resin um
47:39
urethane is just a it's a better material overall um it's and and ultimately you know you can cast 20
47:46
models in urethane in the time it will take you to print half of one yeah you know um so if you're actually doing
47:52
production of something um a 3D printer is not not the tool for the job um so
47:57
yeah we'll we'll 3D Print and Design components so Joe my brother who who does a lot of my organic sculpting for
48:04
me and who did the same course I did so three years after I finished Joe went and did the same course um he's he spent
48:12
all of lockdown uh and his redundancy money training himself to use um digital
48:17
tools and he's now got to a point where he can replicate his physical sculpting style exactly in digital form so he can
48:25
it's recognizably one of Joe's models yeah if you compare the digital to the physical ones there's no difference
48:31
between the two like Bob Bob n Smith Bob's another one you know and obviously
48:36
trained himself for it yeah and you get some studios you know the obvious elephant in the room who who just kind
48:42
of drain the individual sculpting style out of people just to get the digital house style yeah which is what Workshop
48:49
do yeah absolutely um because obviously of course they do you know because that's the business that's their need of
48:54
of the business it's the same it's got to be a recognizable Space Marine in that armor that it can't like the early Rogue Trader stuff you could see where
49:01
different sculpts had done it because the armor was different and the scale was different
49:06
elves exactly exactly so for you know love it or hate it the kind of whole um
49:12
not saying who the sculptors are that's not the business they're in you know they're making a product they're not they're not as much as they love to say
49:19
the hobby it's not a hobby is it to them I'm going to throw a sort of not C ARG you but to the to the work mentality
49:26
which is like Lego they're all the same it's all bricks but they do credit the artist that made that kit or the
49:32
designer that made that kit yeah some of them have a whole essay if you buy one of the really big expensive kits the the
49:39
designer will have like an essay at the beginning of the of the the the instruction manual saying about his
49:44
thought process and how he figured it out and all the rest of it is Lego perhaps more if you dedicate
49:51
your life to being a Lego designer yeah say if you if you went to Workshop to design Miniatures you could take the skills that you have and leave and set
49:58
up your own shop could you do that the same with Lego probably wouldn't be
50:04
quite as easy would have thought no like I'm going to make Lago yeah I mean there
50:10
have always been kind of um knockoff products at Lego so and funny enough
50:16
going back to the college thing the year below there were two students the year below me at College who ended up going straight to Lego yeah when they finished
50:24
um Lego and Windsor was brand new at the time they finished college so what would that be about
50:30
91 um and they wanted full-time professional model makers to design the exterior stuff but they had to go to
50:37
Lego school in Stockholm or wherever it is yeah also we're pointing out that as hard as that modeling school is to get
50:43
into both you and your brother managed to go to yeah I don't know what went wrong there um we were obviously primed well
50:50
at Lincoln art college um cuz the year I went so the the way it came about i' was
50:55
was going to be uh graphic designer and illustrator that was always what I'd done um as much as i' always mocked
51:01
about with models and conversion everything else my kind of my love was in drawing stuff and illustration and
51:08
all that kind of stuff so that's what I went to art college to do um and I did
51:14
um I don't know if it still exists as a thing but it was called Gad at the time another acronym um General Art and
51:19
Design so you did a bit of for the whatever it was two years three years you did a bit of 3D product design you
51:26
did a bit of fashion design you did a bit of Graphics you did a bit of five different disciplines over that time and then you had to pick one of them to
51:32
specialize in so I did all of those and realized fashion wasn't my thing and whatever and and went down the
51:38
illustration route and then we'd gone as a a college group to London for a week
51:44
to do all the um museums and the art galleries that sounds familiar and one yeah and one of our tutors spotted a um
51:51
a prospectus from Medway art college um in one of the you know kind of um
51:57
displays in a in a shop or something and said to me and two other Lads of my year
52:02
Ben and Richard oh this looks like it might be your sort of thing cuz we' already kind of started to Veer towards
52:07
3D as well as illustration so we uh along with our tutor we we jumped on the
52:13
train from from um London to Medway and went to this open day and uh we walked
52:19
in the door and everybody was making Ray Harry Howen style stop motion models and
52:24
I was immediately balls to illustration I'm doing this so I I applied yeah um but Ben and Richard
52:32
also both app so three of us applied and we're like there's no way one of us might get in yeah so it was immediately
52:37
like oh God here goes the end of the Friendship sort of thing and somehow all three of us got in oh that's amazing so they were obviously putting somethingone
52:43
in the water at Lincoln for us to for us to all get in and and Ben now runs um
52:48
another model making course in Bournemouth Richard runs a model making Workshop in Hong Kong um so yeah I mean
52:55
it's you know everybody from those kind of few years we did it has all ended up running workshops or whatever um and
53:01
like going back to Tim and Ivan you know they they both went directly into Workshop where I just kind of skirted around the edge and and came back at it
53:08
yeah well I mean you know I've been trolling perusing uh your website a vast
53:14
array of like scenery that you do um architecture I mean these buildings in front of his they quite modular and
53:20
stuff but you've recently done a Kickstarter haven't you yeah so we've got a Kickstarter running at the minute
53:26
um which is Army ad Darkness um we got a lot of um a lot of Kev Adams old Goblin
53:32
Master Kev from Citadel uh he's he now works freelance for everybody but um so
53:39
I I've known Kev for a lot of years um I was one of the two people who set up the
53:44
goblin a charity when he was attacked and injured and stuff about 10 12 years
53:49
ago um so I got p with him back then I'd kind of known him on periphery before then but um but yes we've stayed mates
53:56
and and stayed in touch and whatever so um like nearly every sculptor every
54:01
model maker Kev likes something different he gets asked to do goblins all day every day and or Orcs or some
54:07
variation of um so when I said Kev I want you to do some ducks he was like oh yeah something different you know so's
54:13
he's really enjoyed doing them but it goes back to again to my um to my first love being RPGs um so um one of the uh
54:24
original kind of big RPGs was room quest which is a kind of Bronze Age Fantasy
54:29
Versus your standard eurocentric D and D sort of setting and one of the character
54:34
races in that has always been ducks and in the in the um the kind of early books
54:40
and whatever they were always kind of represented as basically Daffy Duck or Donald Duck but but we've kind of always
54:45
tried to push a bit more towards realism with stuff again because of what we do for a proper job if you like um so yeah
54:51
we've always kind of tried to to have a bit more of a as as much as a three foot tall duck bipedal duck with a sword and
54:58
armor can be you know push push towards realism a bit more um so yeah and it's
55:04
it's that's the current Kickstarter so we're just doing uh there's about 20 models in that that's amazing um but yeah these ones that you talking about
55:10
pachy this was this was about three or four kickstarters ago um this is a a
55:15
range we call Rubble city um and this was a um a guy I've worked with uh in uh
55:23
he's based in Italy guy called and he'd come up with this modular design where the corners of these buildings are uh
55:29
jigsaw sort of finger joints um and there's there's 20 odd pieces in the basic set and you can just
55:35
build it in any configuration you like separate bits of rubble and all that kind of scatter as well and gradually
55:42
over the course of three kickstarters and and other bits and pieces of work I've expanded that into one piece
55:47
buildings um and all the periphery that goes with it but what I've tried to do with that and part of what we designed
55:53
it with from the outset was to make it as generic as possible in the best
55:59
possible way so that you could use it for World War II you could use it for sci-fi L looking at this going there's
56:04
not a single game system you can't use this with I mean you so I was like looking at I can use this in war cry I can use it in theonics because you
56:11
almost got like a Spanish Peninsula F but also Europe as well um you can use it in any kind of like fantasy setting
56:18
but I was also cuz I've got Stargate stuff there's several times when they go to off world Planet ruins it's just
56:23
ruins mostly Canada isn't it every planet looks like Canada yeah
56:29
yeah if it's not Canada it's Iceland but yeah absolutely I mean I love stuff when it's like you can see it
56:36
fit into any any game system and I've I've intentionally tried to steer it away from having specific things on it
56:43
that Mark it out as Inca or Greek or whatever which is why you get which is why we do separate things like columns
56:50
and I do a lot of um incubates and pieces like jaguar heads and whatever but designed to stick onto it if that's
56:56
where you want to make it rather than that being the kit from the off you you add the flavor to it exactly exactly um
57:03
and it's also designed that if you want to you can you know take it to bits and and put it away flat again if you need
57:08
to um obviously not one like this that's been finished the different but again
57:14
everybody's got limits on space so if you can if you can flat pack stuff and put it away and it's one of the things that laser cut stuff gets ad advertised
57:22
as or some of the card type sceneries or you can fold it up and put it away and you can but it it soon shows its age
57:29
when you start disassembling it where because this is resin and it's good solid quality material it it will come
57:36
to bits and it will go back together again if you want it to and whatever so but again that's that comes
57:42
from a lot of years working with these materials you know these these first came in as a product when I was still at
57:47
College urethane resins prior to that it was polyester resin so the stuff you would fix the car with or a boat hole or
57:53
whatever the stinky stuff um and urethane resins when they first came in were were kind of an antidote to
57:59
that they're a lot faster curing them polyesters um environmentally a lot friendlier um they're not nearly as U
58:06
toxic in terms of um ingestion and that kind of stuff there's still all
58:12
materials have' got an issue with water table and that kind of stuff in terms of if you pour it down the drains and that but um but these are you know it's as a
58:19
plastic it's it's about as good as you're going to get with with environmental concerns um and again yeah
58:25
it's it's uh it's much more UV resistant um wait for weit it's it's a good middle
58:32
middle price range you know so you can use it to make bigger stuff which is why the likes of Forge World do big stuff in
58:37
racing you know um and for short production run it's it's it's way cheaper as a as an option um but
58:45
certainly since um lockdown and the big b word that none of us like to talk
58:50
about but infects us all every single day as small businesses uh the one ending in xit yeah um
58:59
materials raw materials have gone through the roof um and unfortunately most of these materials are made outside
59:07
of the UK so we're paying more and more for all of these materials um that said
59:12
um white metal that we've all you know kind of certainly My Generation grew up with for Miniatures uh and which is kind
59:19
of still very much a thing in in a lot of the Indie companies uh because it's
59:24
from a production point of view it's far easier to do stuff spawning metal than it is in resins yeah um but yeah um post
59:31
uh postco metal prices are absolutely through the roof yeah heard so one of the things we're pushing more and more
59:38
with kickstarters now is that is that our stuff is resin yeah yeah um you've
59:43
got a whole generation who grown up with GW plastic stuff so people are more used to uh more model making friendly
59:50
material and resin is much easier to work with than um than metals are um and weigh as well you know you look
59:56
at some of our early stuff like the Deep ones and they're in metal and they weigh a ton uh where these weigh you know a
1:00:02
gram and a half each as a motorcyclist having to take armies to warmer worlds and losing like your actual uh uh
1:00:09
feeling in your arms because you being pulled off backwards by the C resin and plastic are great yeah I felt like well
1:00:16
I guess there a you know relatively new uh hobbyist that yeah I got into it again plastic
1:00:23
plastic plastic everything else is crap and then like I feel like resin has made a real Resurgence resin obviously was
1:00:30
was dealt a real Blow by finecast um so we and again we'd been
1:00:36
working with these materials for a long time before GW decided they we were going to do fine cast and without rubbishing the whole process too much it
1:00:42
was basically the wrong process for the material yeah uh and that was why there were issues but even now how many years
1:00:49
later that is I still got people going oh resin resin's crap it's an awful material it's not it's probably the the
1:00:54
best material out of all materials that were used um in terms of you know recyclability and reusability and all
1:01:01
that kind of stuff it's it's at least on a par with hips that GW kits for instance are made out of yeah well I
1:01:07
mean when we used to do the um sorry another acronym hips high impact poly styrene it's that plastic isn't it
1:01:13
plastic yeah normal styrene is what we call but yeah when we used to get like the metals you wouldn't get Metals you
1:01:19
get the resin if it was a metal kit so if there's a metal kit coming out in workshop and like a character you'd get the resin and a lot of the Plastics
1:01:25
before the whole process cuz it took years to get all the molds done you'd get the resins and you'd build them I
1:01:32
always some of the resin casts you get some of the early like prototype stuff was just really because it was expensive
1:01:38
stuff at the time that it was expensive cuz weirdly like metal and plastic were quite cheap resin was a bit more costy
1:01:45
um they're always really nice quality I've still got loads of resins at home I just like I want the paint cuz they're
1:01:50
really nice yeah um and better than metal yeah and and one of the reasons I
1:01:56
so I mean you'll see from those columns for instance they've got a I put a stone powder in with these that gives them a
1:02:02
little bit of color and texture so actually you can pretty much go straight although it's more gray plastic it's not
1:02:07
flat gray and actually if you put a wash on it doesn't need we I use the minimum
1:02:12
amount of um release agents so actually you can pretty much go straight on with a wash that's your model maker kick in
1:02:19
yeah well absolutely yeah yeah totally speed yeah I assume the um the rubble City stuff's a similar kind is it a
1:02:25
similar kind of C yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's it's um well again like that that's the same resin we need to talk about
1:02:30
this egg cup yeah yeah yeah yeah about but yeah it is it's exactly that it's a speed it's a speed thing so you know I
1:02:37
always recommend on paper yes you should always wash resin or whatever I never do
1:02:42
I never wash my resins um I always go straight on with alford's gray primer it's the only primer paint that I've
1:02:49
used in 30 plus years of doing this that sticks consistently every single time to any resin yeah really it's just it's
1:02:56
some it's because it's formulated for car bodies which have got a lot of plastic aluminium whatever and it's just
1:03:02
something in that formula is designed to stick to plastic so it always will stick yeah yeah and it's cheaper than you know
1:03:09
off the shelf hobby shop stuff just standard gray standard gray hords or any of the hords primers they're all really
1:03:15
good so that's what I use and I I never wash my resins I just don't um and again
1:03:21
it's it's purely because of speed um there are there's probably some old models that I've got in the in the stock
1:03:28
cabinets and whatever that I've gradually started to lose paint after 20 years but you know it's not for for
1:03:33
normal certainly if you want to get something on the table quick whack some hords on it and it doesn't need to be a heavy coat it just needs to be what we
1:03:39
call a get it very often but every now and again I'll I'll have a can of black alfords and then I'll go think to myself
1:03:45
how did I end up with this and I go ah windscreen wipers I went in for wind screen W went oh I'll grab one of them
1:03:51
to get one like every three or four years when something's broke and the black one especially is like all
1:03:57
the black plastic that's on modern vehicles that's half with black primer and it's not going to come off
1:04:03
it's not it's not expensive at all it's not it's it's a much more affordable thing so so you have a thing that you
1:04:08
like to make M to use out of Terin was alluded to as earlier and I love so we
1:04:14
got an egg cup we have yeah so this was so again the the whole product design
1:04:20
thing um part of what I was trying to do was you you know and obviously nine times out of 10 a designer will actually
1:04:27
come in with a thing and we will build a I don't know the ball that you used to put the detergent in for washing up or
1:04:33
for you know detergent for for washing your pants and your socks we did all the prototypes for those and we went through
1:04:39
50 different variations of things with flip lids and screw lids and God knows what um but part of the whole product
1:04:45
design thing is just making things do several things and eventually finessing that down to a finished product so so
1:04:52
when um when a lot of the manufacturers started doing contrast type paints and
1:04:58
the kind of paints that where the bottles were unstable basically um I'd
1:05:04
always um so one of one of the other materials of um a glue that we use in in
1:05:11
film work and TV work we we call it um uh Toy but it's dorine it's basically
1:05:17
it's the same chemical family as chloroform so you have to have a a chemical license to even get it in the workshop but it's so all the kind of
1:05:24
model cement that you guys use is is basically that but we get the raw chemical version of it because the
1:05:30
tiniest brush of that along two bits of of plastic it's an instant weld there's no hanging about what against speed it's
1:05:36
just it's doing things as quick as you can and and yeah okay the by Friday afternoon the entire workshop's high as
1:05:42
a kite because they've been on chloroform all week but um so yeah and we have because you've got these kind of
1:05:48
bottles with that and you don't want it spilling all over the desk so we would always make holders for things to to it
1:05:54
upright so when I first saw these contrast type things I was like I've got to make a a pot for it so I made a got
1:06:00
on the lathe 20 minutes later had a had a contrast po um and on the most recent
1:06:06
kickstar on Army ad Darkness uh Louis my Caster um he said to me when we were
1:06:11
talking through prices beforeand he said look you always do like a mug or a something like that for for your
1:06:17
kickstarters I said well because we've done this one in a Hur we haven't really got any artwork we can use or anything else so uh I wasn't going to bother and
1:06:24
he said well the last one you didn't do a mug but you did a dice cup so I'd done a kind of Aztec based on a something in
1:06:30
the British museum a kind of Aztec dice cup that's 2,000 years old and I made a
1:06:35
replica of that and we did that as part of the kickstarter and a dice tray that's actually made out of rubble City so matches as a piece of
1:06:41
scenery um so Louis said why don't you do an egg cup cuz it's all ducks and I'd already themed the whole thing to be
1:06:47
eggs and you know so immediately I was like oh God I'm going to have to now I cuz that's a challenge and if there's
1:06:53
one thing I'm model make can't resist it's a challenge to build something so I basically got the the existing um paint
1:07:00
holder the existing yeah and I just I just happened to have one on the desk and that looks the right size and put an
1:07:08
egg sat in it perfectly I'm like well I'm not just going to go there as an egg cup I've got to make an egg cup so we
1:07:13
made a full piece of scenery that again matches the stonework of rubble city that is um a dungeon entrance so there's
1:07:20
a little ladder and a um a dungeon grill that goes with it so you can put a little bit of water effects in make a
1:07:26
piece of scenery it will hold have you got a you don't got a contrast paint Andy yeah yeah I've got got some on the
1:07:32
on the desk yeah perfect there we go cuz I never clean it got it got it got it got
1:07:40
it so it sits in there perfectly got a nice little hold of your paint it's not
1:07:45
going to spill anywhere and it will actually even hold that's going to snap back but yeah
1:07:52
it will it will clip under there there and hold it yeah um smart and
1:07:58
uh the I've actually done it as well with so if you get a real egg sitting in there the ladder sits up against the egg
1:08:05
and we haven't we haven't got a miniature made for it yet but we are going to have a little King duck who sits on top on a little cushion so it's
1:08:11
like the holy egg that's the you know whatever um and yeah if you wanted to hollow an egg out and put it in the
1:08:17
whatever you you can do um if the if the kickstar goes well we're going to we're going to put one of those free display
1:08:25
like a little wooden egg in with it as well um and yeah and for the kickstarter because I had to I made it it's nice
1:08:30
space for tap and you brush off after you oh yeah totally totally and you know even if if you've if you've not primed
1:08:37
it or anything else as you gradually build up a patiner of paint over that it's like naturally worn St I'm sorry
1:08:42
but that's that's a piece of scen to me now that sacrificial totally totally well that's why I brought you
1:08:48
you got it there to to you know to experiment with and and give it another a fourth purpose so yeah um but yeah so
1:08:54
I had to do a shot for the kickstarter of a nice dippy egg with soldiers and it was good Peg although wasn't
1:09:01
theoretically it's not uh food safe as long as you're not actually eating off the surface it's fine so so yes that was
1:09:08
that's the the uh the holy egg Throne amazing but yeah using Cen making D but
1:09:13
it still makes a functional piece of Cen or like yeah yeah yeah because again you know there's for me it's it's kind of
1:09:19
that whole thing of um suspension of disbelief and as soon as you've got a big logoed Up dice tray in the middle of
1:09:26
all your scenery and whatever it kind of takes you out of what you're looking at where actually if it's another ruined building and you're just rolling the
1:09:32
dice in that one it's like it's not taking you out of the I mean obviously you know even a tape measure is
1:09:37
immediately going to take you out of it but when people have themed templates and all that kind of stuff then you know we see a lot with dice Towers trying
1:09:44
people do dice towers as bit cast yeah and you know it's there's a um a Kickstarter I back just recently for 3D
1:09:50
printed um it's kind of a uh do-it-yourself version of one of these super expensive gaming tables you know
1:09:57
you see these ones at Expo that are like 20 grand what they look very nice they're beautiful but yeah I mean you
1:10:02
know you could buy a motorbike for that sort of money or two or two yeah um but this is like 3D printed modular sections
1:10:09
that clamp onto the edge of an existing table and there's a dice tower and a cup holder and a whatever and you can just
1:10:14
build it to any that's like yeah that's a really clever I like that solution to the thing um rather than yeah let's
1:10:21
build another table and charge another you know reinvent the wheel yeah um yeah
1:10:26
yeah so so yeah I've done it myself you know we've done laser cut um Range markers for Saga that we just got old
1:10:33
lengths of Oak and engraved the in runes and whatever along the length of it and then just stain it up with wood so it
1:10:39
looks like an old piece of measuring sticker that's what I was going to say CU I'm looking at making a load of SC
1:10:45
anyway for when we move and whatever and I want to do some stuff for silver bayet it's just like this stuff is perfect
1:10:50
because it is like ruins it could be a cool Old Europe sort of castles that
1:10:55
would fit it would still be around and then on it was any other there but I want a graveyard and I was like the
1:11:01
workshop stop stuff is just too Scully and then you've just got a load of like gravestones that even have like like
1:11:08
epitaphs on it and stuff like that if you wanted to so there was there was an online Forum I was on at the time
1:11:14
and we when I made those it was one of the early things we did when we got our first laser 25 plus years ago um and I
1:11:22
just said look I'm going to do a load of Stones who wants to be on them so we just did a whole load of you know we we basically picked 20 names at random put
1:11:29
people on and gave them you know stupid like Carried Away by a giant dog or you know whatever um and and yeah did little
1:11:36
cuz again that's one of the beauties of the laser cutter is you can go super fine on the detail um so yeah and and
1:11:42
yeah try generally speaking I try and make stuff that's generic without being too
1:11:47
specific I mean obviously it's different with Miniatures because Miniatures are a specific thing you know whatever um but
1:11:53
yeah I mean so even our our very first Miniatures we did these deep ones um and
1:11:58
and everybody at the time was doing kind of bog standard frog-faced fish-faced humanoids and we went back to like we do
1:12:06
with film work we went back to the original script the original novel and he he describes them as being fish in
1:12:12
the shape of men rather than men in the shape of fish okay so we just went through and we did about 12 different
1:12:18
species of fish sorry what's the source material for them um um what's it called
1:12:23
Shadow over insouth HP Lovecraft all right okay which has obviously been used by a lot of the K cthulu RPG and but
1:12:31
yeah I mean everything is cthulu these days yeah but we just again we we made them because we got a need from them for
1:12:37
our own games and it was like we've been doing scener for a few years let's do some um let's do some Minis and uh did
1:12:43
those and about a year after we' done them uh there's a convention
1:12:50
in uh Germany called the Ken big RP PG convention and a castle um oh wow that
1:12:56
goes on for about 4 days and it's like it's lots of as well as being lots of normal players a lot of people from the
1:13:02
industry there a lot of the writers and designers and whatever so it's a chance to kind of hobnob with the guys who design the stuff and I couldn't make it
1:13:08
but I'd heard that um the designers of K cthulu and runequest and one of the
1:13:13
other big games we played were there so I sent a set over with a mate and said just give them to them and you know just
1:13:18
as a freeb and um and about two years later out the blue I got an email saying
1:13:26
oh you maybe don't know who I am I'm Sandy Peterson I wrote K cthul and this is the guy you know who came up with the
1:13:32
RPG and he'd seen the Miniatures and wanted to do a Kickstarter for a cthulu base board game and based on those would
1:13:39
we do the Miniatures for it amazing so um he he'd already tried to Kickstart it
1:13:45
once but just using a card basically a card game and it it didn't get anywhere
1:13:50
close to funding so we said yeah we can absolutely do them and he' he'd come in with two guys from uh the video games
1:13:56
World cuz he'd been working on on that for a while he worked on qu and doom and stuff uh he kind of moved away from
1:14:02
tabletop RPGs um and they wanted to go down the route of um digital models and 3D
1:14:09
printing and whatever and this was in the very early this was 2012 so still the early days of of what was possible
1:14:15
in in modern yeah digital work and I basically persuaded him away from it
1:14:21
said no we want to do it for what you want to do and BAS on the designs you've got we need to do this as a physical job because it's you know it's that's why
1:14:27
youve come to me you know that's what we do I've worked for production companies making tamy model kits or whatever um
1:14:36
and and that's the that's the process and I'll basically hold your hand through it so we did what did we do
1:14:41
originally 52 models for the kickstarter um pulled in 28 different
1:14:47
Freelancers from across the industry so people from all over the UK xgw people
1:14:53
and um people from America and all over Europe and Australia just to get enough sculpts on the job for the deadline we'
1:14:59
got sort of thing and yeah they went from a card game that didn't make 20,000
1:15:05
to a board game with our miniers that made 2.6 million wow so um so suddenly
1:15:11
it proved the point that you know the Miniatures were what solved the game yeah um amazing so we went back and did
1:15:17
was sorry was it the same sort of rules and stuff initially that the card was yeah so it was the same it was the same base game um it was just it got judged
1:15:24
up basically um and they they made a point of it you know initially they were talking about it being 15 mil and
1:15:30
whatever and I said no if you're going to do it do it 28 mil because then You' got cross pollination into the war games
1:15:37
industry as well people are going to if if You' got a box full of big plastic Miniatures at a good price people will
1:15:42
buy it just for the Miniatures and they did yeah um so off the back of that we obviously got asked to do the second one
1:15:49
um and then a third game based in the room Quest World rather than in in cthul um so yeah we did loads of models with
1:15:55
them over the years and and without going into too many specifics um there was a bit of a falling out along the way
1:16:01
and contracts didn't get paid and and thankfully I kept the IP on everything so I've still got all the original
1:16:06
models and um molds and everything else and and can continue selling them so uh
1:16:13
uh yeah it's Just sh it was the classic you know never work with your Heroes kind of thing they turn out to be not great businessmen and and whatnot but uh
1:16:20
it is what it is but yeah so that's a that's a typical cthulu Wars model that's one of the the dark young of sh
1:16:26
[ __ ] tentacles and Mals yeah so it's in the in the books it's um it's kind of a
1:16:32
somebody sees something in the trees and it's you know what is it and then it resolves itself into this thing that's not trees at all it's this huge
1:16:39
three-legged multi mouth monstrosity that eats your face off yeah and there's obviously a lot of that in mang fans by
1:16:46
there oh yeah no absolutely and that's that's still one of our most popular models that's I I sell loads of those
1:16:52
still it's just it's just a lovely sculpt and design and everything else so uh rich
1:16:58
long who was the designer on cthulu Wars one he went on to he now works for everybody from Winston Studios to um
1:17:06
sideo Collectibles and whatever he superb illustr but this was kind of his this was his kind of Launchpad and off
1:17:13
the back of that he's he's gone on to you know really big things as well so so that's good that's I don't know if you
1:17:20
interested but we've got some questions from our patrons if you absolutely going to be silly cuz our I've seen the show I
1:17:28
know I always put that warning on there well we love them because they're awesome uh Jack bell is coming first war
1:17:34
daddy um he's asking describe your perfect slice of toast perfect slice of
1:17:40
toast well on my on my toaster it's about one 1 minute 45 seconds so you go
1:17:45
in minutes as well cuz this is a debate well I've got a big old Jewel it style toast and it's it's a minute timer on or
1:17:52
you know it's one of those that's designed for Cals you know yeah we had them in when
1:17:57
when you used to go for breakfast in the Army put your own toast in they were great yeah I'd have one in the house but
1:18:02
my kitchen is so small there's no where to have one yeah I mean is a big old piece of Kit yeah definitely so that
1:18:07
that's your perfect size yeah yeah so not not you know not burnt but not pale and pal and whatever are we talking
1:18:14
margarina butter or uh L Pac oh and do you prefer for it to cool down
1:18:20
and then butter it or whilst it's still warm about halfway yeah yeah if it's a if it's a Crump it then it want to be
1:18:25
melting if it's a piece of toast you actually want the butter to sit on it melty butter toast then the PS
1:18:31
resistance is getting some brown sauce on it mixing it in with the butter oh no I do that with brown sauce and the
1:18:37
butter on on Crump it's definitely amazing oh yeah twins twins the Canadian Greg Davis
1:18:44
was saying that he doesn't spread um butter on a crumpy he pulls a chunk out
1:18:49
on a fork and just melts let just rotate It Around The Crumpet so the Heat and it
1:18:55
melts in instead of going at it you just yeah you not but The Crumpet right unless it's leaking out the bottom my
1:19:02
wife is mental sorry Liz she she doesn't put butter on a crumpit she eats she
1:19:07
goes in dry oh going in dry is never good but especially not with the crumpy
1:19:12
no definitely not I'm always like cuz they are like quite greasy in their own right I think AR they cuz I crumpets for
1:19:19
breakfast this morning and I'm always like um when I put loads of butter on and then I
1:19:25
might pick one up and I think oh it's leaked loads of butter everywhere and then once I think I just like forgot and left them on the side cuz I'm an idiot
1:19:32
um I yeah I didn't butter them and I still picked them up and there were still the little toast yeah see the
1:19:40
solutions that we go yeah sweaty crumpets just have a dog like me and you can't leave food laying around anywhere
1:19:45
it'll be me butter and Marmite for me on a crumpers oh very good yeah oh yeah
1:19:51
that's a good question Marmite yeah or NE no definitely not if you use it as an ingredient in cooking I will put it in
1:19:57
like if I'm making um good seasoning isn't it it's a really good seasoning so if I'm making um macaroni cheese then
1:20:04
loads them my might but yeah I don't I don't like it neat on its own yeah I'll put in the chili I use it I'll
1:20:10
definitely use it as a seasoning but I don't like it as a raw on its own more in the world for me that's the
1:20:16
way I yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah hick dead has asked if you had a if you had to design a cheeseboard which Space
1:20:23
Marine chapter would be holding up the cheese I'm not sure Space Marine chapter it could be something from your own
1:20:29
range if you well I mean back when when I did play Rogue Trader I basically like
1:20:34
we all did back then made my own chapter up so and again because I'd done a lot of um stormbringer RPG which based on
1:20:42
Michael morco elrick and and those kind of books so my chapter was the Eternal Champions they were basically all in
1:20:47
black with a white helmet and a big infinity symbol so it would be them just cuz that's the only one I can think of
1:20:52
better than my made up chapter that was Slash you I've talked about a few times
1:20:58
yeah the Hammers of be yeah the Hammers of F and it was uh two circles and a
1:21:04
shaft but it would turn upside down like a hammer yeah okay very you got to get that in somewhere i' man I've managed to
1:21:10
get a [ __ ] and balls into this current Kickstarter and he's designed one into her current Kickstarter launching this week as well so yeah it's it's got to be
1:21:17
done it's just standard practice absolutely dear uh Ross T is asking uh
1:21:22
basic tools would you recommend to someone who wants to start sculpting sounds like Ross is getting into the sculpting so in terms of sculpting
1:21:29
assuming you're going physical sculpting obviously um yeah I mean basically less is more you don't need to buy a thousand
1:21:36
different you know you see these kits with 20 different Tools in there I pretty much use one clay shape you know
1:21:43
the little rubber tip ones they're just standard conical one and one dental tool which has got a kind of um a wide like
1:21:51
about 6 mil wide Spade end and a kind of more Leaf bladed end of the other one and then a needle if you need it for and
1:21:58
that's it that's all I use oh smart yeah yeah sometimes it's I remember I did art
1:22:03
at school and college and Union stuff and you probably a test this as well I remember art college and school like all
1:22:10
you all your Posh kids are come in with their massive like tins of pencils it so all the bees
1:22:18
all the way to like the hes and stuff like that and you'd have like cuz you know you lived on a counsil you had a HB
1:22:24
and they like yes well Daddy's got me this and it means I'm an expert I was like he just got it was it was one of
1:22:30
the things with the with the model making course when we did it there was a there was an actual minimum list of tools that you had to have and in terms
1:22:36
of physical model making then it's a different you know because you are actually working with a lot of straight
1:22:42
edges so it was all things like a proper engineer square and a proper scalpel and a proper you know two two sheets of A4
1:22:49
of this about a th000 quids worth of tools before you even started the course you when you say proper SCA you mean Swan Morton yeah yeah Swan Mor rather
1:22:55
than exact toes they just because theyve just that little bit wobbly you haven't got as
1:23:01
much control as you have with a swan Morton which is why surgeons don't use an exact to it's amazing isn't it how
1:23:07
how recognizable swamp Mor oh yeah yeah and again it's it's it's good quality industrial design that's been refined
1:23:13
and for a specific purpose and actually 90% of the tools and jigs that
1:23:19
we use in in model making are things that you make you make a tool to suit the job rather than you know or you'll
1:23:25
adapt an existing tool yeah because again somebody's already done the design work to do a thing but but there will be
1:23:31
tools that we repurpose to do other things and and again for cost not cost
1:23:36
cutting time cutting purposes you know um so one of the things I still use on
1:23:42
maybe not a daily basis but certainly on a weekly basis is a a power fire black and DEA power fire which came out in mid
1:23:47
80s and we were using them to to grind down fiberglass molds and stuff because because they were so much faster than
1:23:54
with a with a hand again it's a tool that does the job that you would do by hand but faster and more efficiently so
1:23:59
yeah that makes sense M um when painting your last project what is your preferred drink not including paint water unless
1:24:06
it is um generally speaking so this week I've been painting or trying to paint
1:24:12
some paint a lot of this stuff haven't you um so what's I've painted all the scenery here I haven't painted any of
1:24:18
the Miniatures the I I just don't get time to paint Miniatures anymore it's the old thing about if you you know if
1:24:24
you do something as a hobby don't do it for a living cuz you just and I don't I mean I've I tried this weekend to now
1:24:33
you're telling me I tried this weekend to uh to get some painting done on some of the the darkness prototypes and um
1:24:40
I've just partly cuz I haven't painted Miniatures in 20 years really um and partly because I'm just under pressure
1:24:46
of time and kind of feeling it it's like H they just I'm just not happy with how the paint job's gone so generally
1:24:52
speaking for Miniatures I I've got 10 or 12 Freelancers I use on a regular basis
1:24:57
not least cuz I've got 3,000 products in the catalog so even with the best will in the world I'm never going to paint
1:25:03
them all yeah is so uh yeah but scenery because again that's kind of what I do
1:25:08
nuts and bolts day today before I did fenis fulltime um that's you know airbrush and and dry brush and and way
1:25:15
you go we just did a a job for the BBC um for cbbs which should be coming out
1:25:20
next month um and just out the blue they got in touch and said oh we need some stuff for um we need some scenery and
1:25:26
some Miniatures for a kids TV show where they're playing a board game uh so we've used some some bad squido stuff and and
1:25:33
a lot of my stuff and it was like stupidly quick deadline like all film and TV work always is so it was just
1:25:39
right get the airbrush out and use existing products and you know whatever um yeah so that'll that'll hopefully be
1:25:45
a nice little shop window so what was the drink though sorry yes so what was the drink generally speaking um if it's
1:25:52
if during the day uh I before I've had to take the dog out for his second walk or third walk of the day it would be a
1:25:58
cup of tea yeah um if it's if he's had his second or third work for the day then it'll be a beer or a a very large
1:26:05
gin sometimes I think you can legally walk a dog drunk yeah but it's driving to where I'm going to walk the is yeah
1:26:12
cuz I'm I'm out in the sticks a bit so it's a drive to take him so random dude 13's asking at what age did your f um
1:26:19
did you first sculpt and thought yep that's what I wanted do going forward um so yeah it would be well I guess how old
1:26:26
would we have been I was 12 when we first got D day so we'd have bought our
1:26:32
our first c36 skellies about that point and probably not I was probably already
1:26:37
we were definitely already converting air fix um fer and stuff like that and
1:26:42
doing head swaps and making them into little science fiction diaramas and stuff so yeah 10 or 11 I guess yeah yeah
1:26:49
cool that's good uh what's your favorite uh this is from Paul Cook uh what are your favorite Miniatures or scenery
1:26:55
pieces in your range o me that's good I mean one out 3,000 to go yeah well I
1:27:01
mean current obviously like with any project whatever you're working on currently is your absolute favorite
1:27:07
thing and I do the amount of PE creatives we've spoken to it's what you're obsessed with at the time yeah um
1:27:13
and you're always certainly in our trade and it's it's a bit of a cliche but you're always only ever as good as the
1:27:18
last job you did so you put everything you put 120% into every job you do so
1:27:25
what you're working on at the time is the thing that you're most in love with you're most obsessed with you've been doing all the research on all the
1:27:31
sketches all the uh the brief with the sculpture and whatever so yeah at the minute it's the Ducks I'm absolutely in
1:27:36
love with them I just think kev's done a brilliant job with them um the in terms
1:27:41
of translating from my Concepts and and concepts of another illustrator we've work with um that said I just I still
1:27:49
enjoy just making stuff and and part of the downside to doing a lot of my own
1:27:55
manufacturer and production is that I don't get time to just sit and make stuff cuz that's what I'm trying to do I'm trying to make a thing not to stand
1:28:01
at a bench and make 50 copies of a thing yeah although I can do that and I'm you know I'm I've been casting for 30 years
1:28:08
so I know what I'm doing in terms of resing and molds and everything else it's not what I want to do all day long I want to actually make the master and
1:28:15
the pattern and the the original kind of nicely leads into the second question which was from Tony Shannon what what part of the process do you find the most
1:28:20
satisfying concept design sculpting figuring out so I again especially having come from a world where I thought
1:28:26
I was going to be an illustrator I tend not to concept sketch anymore I do I do
1:28:31
big kind of Pinterest mood Boards of stuff um I I'm a big fan of steering
1:28:37
well away from AI I'm absolutely like an enemy of of the whole AI thing so rather
1:28:44
than and I know other people yeah um I know a lot of people who who use it as a
1:28:50
tool to get Concepts and whatever but it's I would I'd rather sit down with a cup of tea and a packet of biscuits and
1:28:55
go through I've I've got huge amounts of Pinterest stuff but
1:29:00
I've also got so every time a film comes out every time a video game comes out I buy the book of The Art of the thing
1:29:06
yeah so I've got a massive library of you know you you pick a video game or a video a film of the last 40 years and
1:29:12
I've got the art book for it and I'll sit there with all the books out and go through and just absorb ideas but in
1:29:18
terms of sketching and designing I I sketch and design in 3D I put stuff together and see what works and when it
1:29:23
works I'll glue it in place and then I'll I'll I've got more you know the
1:29:28
walls of this room if they were filled with cabinets would be my bits boxes I've got tens of thousands of bits of
1:29:35
kits and whatever and you just sit and go through until you find the exact part you want and sometimes you might want 20
1:29:41
copies of that and I might have 20 copies in all those drawers but it's easier to make a mold and cast it 20 times whatever classic Model building
1:29:47
like they did on Star Wars where they would just and we've done it on we did it on Red Dwarf where we just we we went out and bought 5,000 quids worth of
1:29:54
model kits and just threw them at a model and sprayed it red and was red dwar oh you worked on Red Dwarf yeah um
1:30:01
you built red Warf you it starbugs Bic starbug yeah yeah so we it was basically
1:30:08
the studio I was at the time um we were doing a lot of subcontract work for BBC and the production company at the time
1:30:14
just basically came down on a Friday and said we need a spaceship by Monday so it was literally raid every model shop in
1:30:20
that part of London byy every single model kit off the shelves and just SC
1:30:26
Salvage them for bits scavenge the best bits make it onto a rough we got a rough outline of what the thing was and then
1:30:34
just spray red and that was Red Dwarf yeah so and then it's you know it's refined and whatever but that's that's essentially what model making always
1:30:39
used to be is that kit bashing basically that's where kit bashing originally that many times we like had a t34 uh and I
1:30:47
just wanted a Sci-Fi tank and I just had loads of Workshop bits and just stuck loads of random stuff in there painted it orange to match all my uh jump suited
1:30:54
Builder helmet James B B is there's my Tesla tank now it was literally the second project we got at College the the
1:31:01
very first project we got day one they gave us a passage from the Bible of the description of Noah's Arc and we had to
1:31:07
build Noah's AR based on just what was in the Bible so it was so many cubits long and it was and we had to figure out what a cubit was and and all that kind
1:31:14
of stuff and project two second week was a spaceship but made out of entirely
1:31:19
household items of rubbish so it was just kit bashing but out of bits of big razors and shower caps and God knows
1:31:25
what else you know again getting your brain into that problem solving thing of of making a thing out of nothing yeah so
1:31:32
going back to the AI thing actually quickly um I found it it has a use I talk about concept and stuff like that
1:31:38
one of the things I found it's really useful for sometimes when I'm doing like my photography I use my monitor and I
1:31:43
like build a bit of scenery and I use the Monitor and you scrolling through like Google trying to find the perfect like backdrop like I want some mountains
1:31:49
I want some like conif for trees but I want old cast in the corner yeah I could just type that in it's been yeah don't
1:31:55
get me wrong in terms of useful of it but I just thought um there's a lot of artists concept artists out there that
1:32:01
it's you know rightly the Fe and I think it's going to affect nobody seems to quite have by me
1:32:08
cottoned onto it yet but it the same thing is going to happen with the 3D modeling Community because AI sooner or
1:32:14
later AI is going to Generate random stls and suddenly you know everybody who's doing a patreon every month so for
1:32:22
30 new goblins there's going to be no need because you can get them for free off an A so it is going to kill a lot of
1:32:28
creative generated nurgle Warriors and there was the odd little weird bit like some of the weapons looked a bit odd but
1:32:34
they actual they look like nurgle schools and they're all filled in with color as well oh really yeah it was like
1:32:40
yeah I mean you know don't get me wrong it's it's certainly is it's a very useful tool I can absolutely see why but
1:32:45
just from an ethical point of view um it's especially somebody who makes they living that and making things out
1:32:52
it's you is directly in the same way that CG did for phys model going back to
1:32:59
about um models on Star Wars when CG first started being a thing lots of
1:33:04
people in my industry got out of it all together because it's like it's under cut by 80% and you can't compete yeah
1:33:11
and you just can't compete with it and it's now gone full circle again back to thing and it will be the same with you
1:33:16
know it will it will Rip the guts out of the market and and impoverish a lot of people and everything along the way but
1:33:22
it it's not going to last forever it's not going to be I I used the AI Tools in Photoshop for the first time uh
1:33:28
yesterday and like the tutorial for it they give you this landscape and and you
1:33:34
draw a circle around something and then this little box pops up you like generate fill remove the house and then
1:33:40
it's like cool and you're like right remove these forr rocks and oh you've got this really cool dramatic thing and
1:33:45
I'm like right okay fine fine fine fine fine where's my wedding picture here it is uh delete that no smoking sign yeah
1:33:53
done there's there's a piece of software I use well it's a website called remove BG um and that's and it's been around
1:34:00
for four or five years but it's it's basically a magic one cropping thing but it's a one click crop and for something
1:34:06
like a Kickstarter it's absolute godsend when you're a oneman band rather than sitting there and you know so well not
1:34:12
so many apps but I got a few apps in my I didn't realize I could do that cuz I I was tediously like cutting through like for shots on one stuff like that and
1:34:19
then um I think it was s just removed background don't think I have that that I do always it's done it sometimes it
1:34:24
can be a bit we you sometimes have to yeah yeah some things away that you want it to take but again that's the that's
1:34:30
the classic example of Technology making a shortcut for something that's tedious and replicatable by machine but it's
1:34:37
when it's it's going that step further and taking out the creative process that's the issue obviously fully agree
1:34:42
fully agree uh Dave Jones or maybe Dave Jones maybe he's in his locker we need to get him out U if you could resculpt
1:34:49
any iconic existing miniature which one would it be then what would you do I'd like to so it's one of the things
1:34:57
I'm and I guess with the new kind of are not new because they've been around for a couple of years now but the the sort
1:35:02
of big scale McFarland stuff and whatever I just again because of what we've done traditionally for a lot of
1:35:08
years I just like big models and I just don't think there's enough um big you
1:35:14
know proper kind of coffee table versions of of some of those kind of iconic Miniatures so Joe my brother did
1:35:21
um um KH the betrayer he he did him at one quarter scale a few years ago so
1:35:28
he's he's kind of this sort of size uh all traditionally sculpted you know just Millie Putt and and green stuff and
1:35:33
whatever and it's just I mean it's a proper show stoper model and it was based on I can't remember he did the
1:35:38
original artwork when he was first introduced the character I think yeah you could be right yeah probably are um
1:35:45
and yeah that so I just think in the same way that you know going back to what Jeff said about big models you know
1:35:52
they they just look more real and more you can cram more detail in part of the
1:35:58
the issue I have with a lot of modern Miniatures is that everybody's trying and it's partly it's down to the tools
1:36:04
because on digital you can zoom into the nth degree and keep adding another layer of detail it's like when you come to
1:36:09
actually paint it it's just especially you get older and your eyes get worse and everything else you know the weird thing about larger Scale Models which
1:36:15
I've discovered is um cuz I I have like large scale stuff as well that I like if
1:36:21
I'm do like backdrops if I'm doing like helmets and stuff like that I don't like sit there painting them I just spray it black because the light does all what
1:36:27
you expected to do you don't have to sit there teas like picking out I mean you might want to put like some markings and some battle damage on it but it's a flat
1:36:34
black with like the odd scuff and maybe like a decal on it yeah and it looks real in I think for me so on on large
1:36:42
size stuff like when we've done life-size dinosaurs for instance for Museum work and film work what I like
1:36:48
about and it's part of what I teach when I teach this sort of stuff if you go back to um the way your Rembrandts and
1:36:55
your picassos and whatever paint stuff they don't get a pot of Flesh Pink out
1:37:00
and paint it will be layers of thin glazes to build up all those translucent
1:37:06
of color and on big scale stuff you can do that for real you can actually build up those translucencies and get you know
1:37:13
proper three-dimensional skin Effects by hair brushing and by all that kind of stuff um you you've just got more scope
1:37:19
for the illusion of life I think on bigger stuff so yeah and short answer
1:37:25
don't know really but that was that was that was a favorite definitely K was just a cool design uh we'll come to this
1:37:31
one from Adam Langford in a minute read that one I think we'll have to sit down and enjoy the ride as I read that one
1:37:37
having a big fight in a car park yeah yeah we'll find out uh Keith uh wind
1:37:42
Quist uh most memorable game system hobby experience go probably goes back to that
1:37:49
original c36 fancy tribe skeleton um so when we that very first time we played D
1:37:56
and D there was uh it it hadn't been long since Jason and the Argonauts was
1:38:02
on tell so that whole sequence where the skeletons comeing out the ground and whatever so we were there were three
1:38:07
four of us playing d and d and and one of the first rooms we went into mob-handed as a group of adventurers
1:38:12
there was one skeleton in there and because we'd all just seen Jason the Argonauts we just nope not doing that we
1:38:18
just basically left the dungeon and went home and M was like it's only one it D you can kill it now not going I've seen
1:38:24
it on Jason see I I find that really interesting like some some games have skeletons is the hardest thing in the
1:38:29
world and other games have there the weakest thing in the world and you and you being like a Dungeons and Dragons
1:38:35
fan and like Games Workshop fan like skeletons for Games Workshop really easy to kill skeletons for like Skyrim
1:38:41
something like that a little bit harder to kill so every now and again you get like a new computer game come out or a new game it's just like cool it's a
1:38:47
skeleton ddiy yeah it's not ends up being like the hardest thing every I'm I'm a big fan of so at the minute I'm
1:38:53
playing a lot of um an RPG called Dragon ban which was three leagues last but one
1:38:59
big Kickstarter um and it's a ramp and reissue of a a a classic 1980s RPG so
1:39:06
it's kind of D and D but with a bit more of a cinematic um manic Twist on it you
1:39:13
know and it it's very much pushing that kind of narrative and that cinematic thing and it's it's all about doing those big cinematic fights where you
1:39:21
know every every fight could be your last one thing rather than your your typical D and D now it's like you know
1:39:26
it's it's kind of more like world Warcraft where you've got three million hit points and you know yeah um so yeah
1:39:31
and I'm big fan of that kind of I like I always try to get myself killed in D and D right Adam Langford okay we'll s in
1:39:38
for this one so you're enjoying and change it for your preferred drink of choice you're enjoying a cup of tea uh
1:39:45
in the Warhammer World Car Park a gang of absolute thugs turned up in the gang are pachy Louise Duncan P Jeff one of
1:39:51
them will be assigned as your bodyguard with a shield and one will be your warrior with a stabber baguette the
1:39:56
other three will try to kill you who are you picking God okay um who is your
1:40:02
bodyguard with a shield having worked as a as a doorman on nightclubs um I don't
1:40:07
know so just on size alone Jeff I'm going to have to say
1:40:15
the shield plus size with somebody like Jeff is's going to beat there's plenty of blockage going on there with a
1:40:21
stabber baguette sugs is a good stabber definitely she's fast and she'd get in
1:40:26
there and stab quite n Pat Duncan and pachy trying to kill you okay yeah we
1:40:32
can do that I mean yeah i' probably go all right we could probably walk forward
1:40:37
with a shield with just sugs his arm I'm for
1:40:44
that that's proper live role playing oh we
1:40:49
die extras we're just extras maybe Duncan's like the end of level boss yeah
1:40:55
yeah maybe just turns up and like fights with like two brushes yeah maybe well um as always
1:41:03
that was random and silly love you patrons you are amazing um anything else you want to throw us before we we end
1:41:09
the the the chat I don't think so really other than come along you know I'm guessing that maybe 80% of you guys have
1:41:15
probably never even heard of fenus even though I've been running this full time since 2008 it was new to me when I first
1:41:21
met your at's thing I I've heard the name fenis games but I'm not sure if that was just cuz I was like oh it's I
1:41:28
used to sell a lot of bases to people in the studio back in the day before you were stopped at being allowed to to buy
1:41:34
stuff externally um so yeah I mean yeah been around for a long time and and as a PBM company for another 10 years before
1:41:41
that so um yeah and I mean you know lots of customers and certainly from Big kickstarters obviously that that kind of
1:41:47
made our name as well but yeah no I mean basically just going have a look at the website you will find something you like whether it's bases or scenery lot stuff
1:41:54
we've got a lot of import ranges from America for companies who are in the UK and EU distributor for uh and on top of
1:42:01
that we've we've literally just this last two weeks uh resolved the whole shipping to the EU issue so I can get
1:42:07
around that without anybody having to pay vat and import duties which is a major thing cuz I lost I lost like 50%
1:42:13
of my business when brexit happened because all andly they've stopped they've
1:42:19
stopped but yeah suddenly we can go yeah we can ship it to you and you're not going to pay a penny more than anybody else so so
1:42:26
I want to get the word out about that I need those customers back I mean yeah as a sort of I guess anyone that's watching
1:42:33
like you know there's lots of scenery there lots of basin options uh you got loads of uh laser cut Woods laser cut
1:42:39
we've got 3D printed stuff we've got bits of all sorts of stuff something for everyone even like you know like me who likes conand there false adom statute
1:42:46
and yeah and some conin as well we got different in fact I've got another new range picked up just from a company
1:42:52
called Forge of Doom in uh Spain and they've got a whole range of Conan type
1:42:58
stuff which you like so yeah for that that that should be on the website next month hopefully yeah brilliant well cool
1:43:05
I'll be keep an eye on that looking at all the weird world weird world yeah
1:43:11
little cute animals with Spears oh not so cute prop a bit like SGS they're
1:43:16
small and stabby most she's the same height as me well I
1:43:21
would say she's small it's funny it's yeah people give off an impression I suppose of of size and uh combat
1:43:29
ability W she's vicious well thank you very much for thanks for on and uh well kickstar still
1:43:37
goes well I mean you're doing all right about sounds yeah yeah yeah it's going good it's it's doing better than we'd hoped uh finishes tomorrow so it'll be
1:43:42
it'll be over and done by the time you guys see this but um but there will be you can do um what do they call it um
1:43:48
late pledge stuff will be on the website for for a few weeks afterwards as well so yeah check it out for it thank you
1:43:54
very much thank you very much we'll see you soon take care and I love you all thanks everybody byebye