**The Art of Collaboration: My Experiences with Peter Rubin and the Film Industry**

My interactions with Peter Rubin on Terminator 3 and Space Cowboys were deeply satisfying, not just because I had the opportunity to work with him, but also because I knew that as an art director or production designer, he trusted me enough to give me more stuff to do. This trust comes from knowing that you can deliver high-quality results under tight deadlines. When Peter gave me more work to do, it was like a dream come true. I got to stretch my wings and be creative in ways that I never thought possible.

**Overflow Work: How to Attract Film Studios**

Uncouth Jay asked an interesting question about outsourcing prop departments to local makers. He wanted to know what kind of things might prop departments look to outsource to nearby shops like mine. In film, this kind of work often comes with a tight timeline, so if you want to be ready for it, you need to be prepared to execute something in a day or a few hours. I would tell Jay that if he wants to get overflow work from this movie studio, he should be ready to do just that. He can offer to execute large pieces of metal laid down or machined down at short notice.

However, it's worth noting that when these studios call you with tight timelines, they're essentially paying for the privilege of getting your work done quickly. This means that you'll need to charge a premium for your services to make up for the loss of time. If Jay wants to show off his skills and get more work from the studio, I would recommend creating something that they already know what it should look like – a product or service that they can replicate easily.

For example, if Jay makes an art piece, he doesn't need to reveal how long it took him or who designed it. But if he creates something like a quarter-scale car engine block, people will recognize it instantly and know that he got it right. This way, he can demonstrate his capabilities without having to explain the details of his process.

**Alternative Revenue Streams**

I've had my fair share of experiences with alternative revenue streams in my workshop, particularly when working on projects for organizations like the Los Alamos Labs. One such experience was when I loaded a piece of specialty equipment into the labs and met an early satellite reconnaissance expert who had worked on the team that built the camera that photographed the Bay of Pigs.

The expert told me that when the CIA builds something, they don't have their own shop; instead, they contract it out to local makers. I was amazed by this revelation and realized that there were plenty of opportunities for small businesses like mine to get involved in high-profile projects. The expert even warned me about the risks of working with government agencies, telling me that my phones had been tapped for 20 years.

This experience taught me the importance of being aware of alternative revenue streams within reason. As a maker, I can offer services and products that meet the needs of large organizations, often at lower costs than they would find elsewhere. By building relationships with these organizations and offering high-quality work, I can create new opportunities for myself and my business.

**Supporting the Community**

If you'd like to support us further, you can become a Tested member by clicking on the link below. As a tested member, you'll get access to all sorts of perks, including advanced word and behind-the-scenes photos of our projects. You'll also get to ask direct questions during my live streams, and we have some members-only videos, including the Adam Realtime series of unedited shots of me working in the shop.

These videos are weirdly meditative, and I think they're worth checking out. They offer a unique glimpse into my creative process and the kind of work that goes on behind the scenes in my workshop. So if you'd like to support us further, please consider becoming a tested member – we appreciate your loyalty!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enlee marsh has a wonderful question how did you learn to build models from concept art this is a terrific question would you see in the bathroom if one of those nilo wrote us jamiro yeah building models from concept art that is a very specific thing now i'm assuming you are meaning the terms um to which i learned how to do it which was on the job which means that an art director like peter rubin or alex laurent or doug chang handed me a drawing yeah and i used to work for nilo rodis jamiro worked for lucasfilm doing project project and prop and vehicle design since empire and i worked with nilo on home alone three a masterpiece um and so this is the kind of this is what we mean by concept art this is the kind of stuff that nilo or joe johnston would turn around back in the early days of star wars and then model makers like steve golly and lauren peterson would interpret that and the trick is the trick to making something from concept art on the job is not to get lost in the weeds and not to lose sight of the forest for the trees by that i mean you could look at this and you could make a copy of it and lay it out as an elevation and slavishly replicate it perfectly in this orientation but i would submit that that's not quite doing the job because this is a that's a 2d approach to a 2d piece of artwork but this is a 2d representation of a 3d thing so my job as a model maker with a piece of concept art like this is to interpret the art director is telling me a whole bunch of the art director is telling me more information than is in this drawing in the topological details he's shading and calling out and then their orientation to each other he's telling me about all of the aesthetics of this vehicle including the parts i can't see so my job as a model maker is to art direct the rest of what i can see here so that it feels like what i can see and when i do that and show it to the art director and i've gotten it right they're like good job but they also might look at it and see okay here you know we need a little thing over here and um yeah it's a process but it's not just about copying what's here in the drawing it's about interpreting what's here in the drawing and feeding that interpretation back through what's possible and what looks right and it may be i mean i've built things in a drawing that i realized didn't quite look right once you saw them in 3d space and i had them i modified them like that that's totally part of what your job is and this is i mean this is one of the things i love about the film industry right because everybody the job of production designer doesn't end with the production designer just as the same way as the job of storytelling doesn't end with a begin and end with the director each of them is the the apex of the pyramid that they're managing but everyone below them is also an art director and a production designer and a storyteller and a director and when it's cracking on all cylinders when it's crackling along on all cylinders everybody is bringing their their aesthetic interpretation to help push the story forward i asked guillermo del toro once he had just given me a tour through the art department of pacific rim and i was looking at all of these people and i'm like how do you keep all of these people aligned towards a singular goal when there's like 70 of them and he said you have to give everyone total autonomy within a tiny bandwidth which is one of the great management descriptions i have ever heard that is exactly right ownership over what you're doing but bound it and your job as a model maker is to understand what those boundaries really are and sometimes you have to push past them or sometimes you need to bring the art director in and say this didn't work the way you drew it i need some guidance as to how here's three options tell me which one is working the way you'd like it to work building from concept art and working with an art director production designer who is uh game to play is one of the great pleasures of making for a living seriously like on episodes one and two doug chang would come through uh every few days and sort of see how you were doing and then give you some more things to try and give you some other things to execute so much fun um my my my interactions with peter rubin on terminator 3 and on on space cowboys were so deeply satisfying when an art director or production designer knows that they can trust you they give you more stuff to do and you get a lot more you get a lot more freedom to kind of like stretch your wings it's the best um let's see here uncouth jay asks an interesting question uh they say we have a movie studio being built nearby what kind of things might prop departments look to outsource to local makers i have wood and metal lathes and ancillary machinery and tools that's an interesting question so i'm assuming by your question it is implied that you would like to get overflow work from this movie studio and you would like to be executing that overflow work in your nearby shop i would tell you that in film that kind of work would frequently come with a very very tight timeline so if you wanted to be that kind of job shop you should be ready to execute something in a day or a few hours because that's where a film studio would be looking to get something done if they're starting to reach out but it is a very reasonable thing to go to the folks that are working in the studio and say hey nearby i've got a shop where if you need some large piece of metal laid down or machined down i can do it that's a terrific thing to offer but i will tell you that when they call you i'm getting guessed that for the most part they're going to call you with timelines that are egregious which means that they know they're going to have to spend like when you're an art when you are working on a project and you're calling someone and saying i need something in a day you are telling them you are ready to pay double at least because when you need something on a very tight timeline you're gonna have to pay for that um if you were going to show them some portion of your work to show them what you can do on your machines my recommendation would be to make something that they already know what it should look like that tells them that you can replicate that tells them that you can make something to their specs right so if you make some art piece well they don't know how long that took you they don't know who designed it they don't know how you interpreted what drawing but if you make something like uh you know quarter-scale car engine block i'm not saying that that's what you should make but like people know what that should look like and if you make one and it does look like that well they know that you got it right uh interesting question that's i i i like looking at alternative revenue streams especially when you have a shop and you can use it years and years and years ago i loaded a piece of specialty equipment into the los alamos labs up on the mesa in new mexico and and uh as such i was working with an early satellite reconnaissance expert who had if i remember correctly he had worked on the team that built the camera that photographed the bay of pigs yeah yeah this guy had seen some things and i asked him we were driving to the location one day and i was like hey when the cia because he had had inroads with the various three-lettered agencies i said hey when the cia builds like a camera into a pack of cigarettes do they have their own shop and he was like nope i'm just realizing i never told this story publicly before yeah he said no they don't and i said who do they contract tony said they find some guy with a little garage shop they contract it out and i was like i've got a little garage shop and he literally literally i'm not exaggerating any of this dialogue at all you're me i'm sitting in the passenger seat he's driving and he literally like oh he stops and he turns to me and he's like you don't want to work for the spook son and i'm like okay he's like i worked for them in the 60s and they tapped my phones for like 20 years like they keep tabs i guess i understand that he was like yeah you don't want that and i agree i don't want that so alternative revenue streams within reason thank you so much for watching if you'd like to support us even further you can by becoming a tested member details are of course below but it includes all sorts of perks and we're building them all the time you get advanced word and behind the scenes photos of some of our projects questions you get to ask direct questions during my live streams and we have some members only videos including the adam realtime series of unbroken unedited shots of me working here in the shop they are weirdly meditative thank you guys so much i'll see you on the next onelee marsh has a wonderful question how did you learn to build models from concept art this is a terrific question would you see in the bathroom if one of those nilo wrote us jamiro yeah building models from concept art that is a very specific thing now i'm assuming you are meaning the terms um to which i learned how to do it which was on the job which means that an art director like peter rubin or alex laurent or doug chang handed me a drawing yeah and i used to work for nilo rodis jamiro worked for lucasfilm doing project project and prop and vehicle design since empire and i worked with nilo on home alone three a masterpiece um and so this is the kind of this is what we mean by concept art this is the kind of stuff that nilo or joe johnston would turn around back in the early days of star wars and then model makers like steve golly and lauren peterson would interpret that and the trick is the trick to making something from concept art on the job is not to get lost in the weeds and not to lose sight of the forest for the trees by that i mean you could look at this and you could make a copy of it and lay it out as an elevation and slavishly replicate it perfectly in this orientation but i would submit that that's not quite doing the job because this is a that's a 2d approach to a 2d piece of artwork but this is a 2d representation of a 3d thing so my job as a model maker with a piece of concept art like this is to interpret the art director is telling me a whole bunch of the art director is telling me more information than is in this drawing in the topological details he's shading and calling out and then their orientation to each other he's telling me about all of the aesthetics of this vehicle including the parts i can't see so my job as a model maker is to art direct the rest of what i can see here so that it feels like what i can see and when i do that and show it to the art director and i've gotten it right they're like good job but they also might look at it and see okay here you know we need a little thing over here and um yeah it's a process but it's not just about copying what's here in the drawing it's about interpreting what's here in the drawing and feeding that interpretation back through what's possible and what looks right and it may be i mean i've built things in a drawing that i realized didn't quite look right once you saw them in 3d space and i had them i modified them like that that's totally part of what your job is and this is i mean this is one of the things i love about the film industry right because everybody the job of production designer doesn't end with the production designer just as the same way as the job of storytelling doesn't end with a begin and end with the director each of them is the the apex of the pyramid that they're managing but everyone below them is also an art director and a production designer and a storyteller and a director and when it's cracking on all cylinders when it's crackling along on all cylinders everybody is bringing their their aesthetic interpretation to help push the story forward i asked guillermo del toro once he had just given me a tour through the art department of pacific rim and i was looking at all of these people and i'm like how do you keep all of these people aligned towards a singular goal when there's like 70 of them and he said you have to give everyone total autonomy within a tiny bandwidth which is one of the great management descriptions i have ever heard that is exactly right ownership over what you're doing but bound it and your job as a model maker is to understand what those boundaries really are and sometimes you have to push past them or sometimes you need to bring the art director in and say this didn't work the way you drew it i need some guidance as to how here's three options tell me which one is working the way you'd like it to work building from concept art and working with an art director production designer who is uh game to play is one of the great pleasures of making for a living seriously like on episodes one and two doug chang would come through uh every few days and sort of see how you were doing and then give you some more things to try and give you some other things to execute so much fun um my my my interactions with peter rubin on terminator 3 and on on space cowboys were so deeply satisfying when an art director or production designer knows that they can trust you they give you more stuff to do and you get a lot more you get a lot more freedom to kind of like stretch your wings it's the best um let's see here uncouth jay asks an interesting question uh they say we have a movie studio being built nearby what kind of things might prop departments look to outsource to local makers i have wood and metal lathes and ancillary machinery and tools that's an interesting question so i'm assuming by your question it is implied that you would like to get overflow work from this movie studio and you would like to be executing that overflow work in your nearby shop i would tell you that in film that kind of work would frequently come with a very very tight timeline so if you wanted to be that kind of job shop you should be ready to execute something in a day or a few hours because that's where a film studio would be looking to get something done if they're starting to reach out but it is a very reasonable thing to go to the folks that are working in the studio and say hey nearby i've got a shop where if you need some large piece of metal laid down or machined down i can do it that's a terrific thing to offer but i will tell you that when they call you i'm getting guessed that for the most part they're going to call you with timelines that are egregious which means that they know they're going to have to spend like when you're an art when you are working on a project and you're calling someone and saying i need something in a day you are telling them you are ready to pay double at least because when you need something on a very tight timeline you're gonna have to pay for that um if you were going to show them some portion of your work to show them what you can do on your machines my recommendation would be to make something that they already know what it should look like that tells them that you can replicate that tells them that you can make something to their specs right so if you make some art piece well they don't know how long that took you they don't know who designed it they don't know how you interpreted what drawing but if you make something like uh you know quarter-scale car engine block i'm not saying that that's what you should make but like people know what that should look like and if you make one and it does look like that well they know that you got it right uh interesting question that's i i i like looking at alternative revenue streams especially when you have a shop and you can use it years and years and years ago i loaded a piece of specialty equipment into the los alamos labs up on the mesa in new mexico and and uh as such i was working with an early satellite reconnaissance expert who had if i remember correctly he had worked on the team that built the camera that photographed the bay of pigs yeah yeah this guy had seen some things and i asked him we were driving to the location one day and i was like hey when the cia because he had had inroads with the various three-lettered agencies i said hey when the cia builds like a camera into a pack of cigarettes do they have their own shop and he was like nope i'm just realizing i never told this story publicly before yeah he said no they don't and i said who do they contract tony said they find some guy with a little garage shop they contract it out and i was like i've got a little garage shop and he literally literally i'm not exaggerating any of this dialogue at all you're me i'm sitting in the passenger seat he's driving and he literally like oh he stops and he turns to me and he's like you don't want to work for the spook son and i'm like okay he's like i worked for them in the 60s and they tapped my phones for like 20 years like they keep tabs i guess i understand that he was like yeah you don't want that and i agree i don't want that so alternative revenue streams within reason thank you so much for watching if you'd like to support us even further you can by becoming a tested member details are of course below but it includes all sorts of perks and we're building them all the time you get advanced word and behind the scenes photos of some of our projects questions you get to ask direct questions during my live streams and we have some members only videos including the adam realtime series of unbroken unedited shots of me working here in the shop they are weirdly meditative thank you guys so much i'll see you on the next one\n"