Adam Savage and Fascination with the Dodo

I have this obsession with people's processes. It's my personal belief that art can be defined as the end product of a series of decisions. The person who makes those decisions is the artist. The decisions along the way are the creative process.

Everyone's creative process is different and the reasons are as numerous as there are people in the world. That's what makes art such a personal expression. And when you mix unique decisions with extraordinary thought and technique, then you have a master artist.

Adam Savage of Mythbusters is a master artist. If you have a free hour, I encourage you to watch all 12 parts of his speech at The Last Hope conference this past July in New York City. He talks about his obsessive nature and answers questions for 40 minutes.

He goes into his obsessive nature and how it drives his process of creating things. (He has a portable hand-held laser scanner that fits into a suitcase for Pete's sake.) Furthermore, in the Q&A he addresses requests to bust the WTC melting steel "myth"; a threat from American Express, Visa, Discover, et al to NOT explore the hackability of RFID technology (Part 10), and some equally AMAZING and hilarious slow motion footage from the episode about methods of sobering up.

Oh, one more thing. He reminds the crowd of the full phrase of a famous saying: Jack of all trades, master of none, though often better than a master of one.

Part 1 of 12
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Part 6 of 12 (I'm dying for him to do the Monster Cable vs. Wire Hanger myth.)
Part 7 of 12 (He has a great quote. Someone had denigrated the quality of 3D/CGI space ships in film and thanked him for his work on creating hand-made models for film. His response, "By the way with the CG vs. models while I totally agree do remember that there are a whole bunch of people out there who spent, you know, 25 years building models. And you're seeing the results of all their work. Whereas, the whole CG industry isn't 25 years old yet. And I really do see, because I have a lot of friends at Industrial Light and Magic that moved from models into building virtual models. That the quality of model making that's coming out of the virtual world is increasing rapidly as people get past the learning curve. And of course we all know that where the rubber will meet the road in the next 10 years both in CG and rapid prototyping is in the interface, is in people's ability to feel like they're really interfacing with the virtual object.")
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