Hey guys just a heads up. Today’s episode references a song with explicit language. If you have young children around you might want to put on some headphones.

Hi and welcome to the backlot a discussion with the entertainment industry’s top talent. I’m Aeriel Segard.

And I’m Eric Conner and in this episode we’re going to take a look at the absolutely insane action film Hardcore Henry and the world of stunts.

Normally our fearless editor Kristian would slice in a bunch of clips but they don’t really see much in Hardcore Henry.

No, they don’t have time to talk because it’s basically like a first-person shooter game like Halo or Call of Duty expanded. So the entire movie is shot from the main character’s eyes.

They needed stuntmen to do the filming as they parkour from building to building.

Jump from the exploding bus or car into a moving motorcycle.

It took a lot of parkour guys stunt men even actors to pull off this effect.

That’s right. And two of them Sergey Valyaev and Andrei Dementiev joined us at NYFA to discuss the making of Hardcore Henry.

I’m in the movie business about ten years. We’re starting from parkour. Shot our videos and suddenly one of my friends a Russian director he invites me to the movie to do all the stunts and acting. Actually I’m not a professional actor. Ten years ago. I only be a stuntman. And after that you know step by step. Feature film TV series a something like that.

To help us with our discussion is NYFA alum actor stunt man Adam Gomez.

Why thank you all for having me.

Dude thanks for coming by to the wonderful studio here in always sunny Burbank.

Of course I love to discuss stunts and this is right up my alley. All action.

He even climbed a wall to get in here.

I did.

So Adam talk to us a bit how you got your way into this world of stunts and how you’re able to still be here and tell the tale.

Yeah so I found my way right after I got into the military. I literally fell into it. I got invited by a friend who was working as a magician’s assistant at Six Flags New Jersey on the train right there the Batman in the stunt show fell and broke his back. As soon as I got off the train I was rushed by my friend right from the train station to the back lot of Six Flags. I learned the show on Thursday Friday I was Batman in the stunt show. And I was like This is what I want to do the rest of my life. And that’s kind of what I’ve been doing ever since for the last 14 years. But yeah as a stunt man I totally love these guys. One thing that’s admirable about what they did they were stuntmen doing things trying to break in. They got video famous which is how a lot of people want to get into it. There is that avenue. So I think it’s incredible what they did as a stunt man. I’m totally envious and they actually did it for the most part safely.

And as crazy as the stunt work actually was in the film. The team realized that only having one man shoulder this alone couldn’t happen. They needed several people to play Henry.

When we start the work on this movie. We actually understand that one man can’t shoot such insane scenes. We have too many shooting days maybe one hundred and 15 days of shooting all these insane scenes.

So sometimes we mix the scene Sergey starts the scene and I’m finishing the scene because I am human we need to rest.

So you can see that five seconds shot by Andrei. And then next five seconds shot by me. And then next five seconds shot by stuntman who just burning. Yeah some special stunts made by professional stuntman because the producers just don’t want to risk ourselves.

Right so there wasn’t just one guy as Henry it was lots of guys and part of the challenge then too is how do you make all the performances seem like it comes from that sort of same place you know and the collaboration between them wasn’t just about working together on the stunts it was also kind of crafting this performance together too.

When you’re doubling you have to pay attention to how they move if they have a limp. So I mean in this I didn’t not once in Hardcore Henry could I tell that it was a different person which is just you know hats off to those guys because they’re obviously paying attention to that in however many different you know between these two and the stunt people are doing it. I couldn’t tell the difference.

No not once it looked like the same person the entire time.

Yeah. And you’ve got a trained eye for this too so like if you can’t tell most of the audience won’t be able to tell.

Normally when it comes to doubling work. That’s one of the biggest things you can point out in film . And you feel like you’re with him the entire time and it is the same guy.

And that’s something too right they have to find ways then to mesh all the stuff so that the audience isn’t aware of all that magic and chicanery going on behind the scenes. Speaking of the guys talked about the inherent dangers of doing these fight scenes when you have multiple Go Pros attached to your head and how you couldn’t really fake it you can’t hide it. They discussed what it was like for them filming it.

We used only GoPro on this movie .

It’s 60 days usually. But we have a problem that we all know how to shoot a movie with one camera two cameras.

But when you try to make it on Go Pro. Everything’s changed.

Yeah everything. Everything when you read the script you read. Okay I understand everything. Let’s go to the shooting and when we go to the set. Everything like directing drama. Actor thing everything is ruined because Go Pros have a special.

Distortion. You can’t change the lenses.

Nothing working the script just doesn’t work and we were like oh my god what do we need to do. We’re on the set and nothing is working because you to be more closer. If you’re about to one metre from the actor on Go Pros it looks like you’re three metres.

When you shoot close objects on Go Pro you need to make your punches real.

Because you see this.

You see everything you see. Just everything.

You punch like this. You see this is not a real punch for the scene when Sergey hits me in the role of slip Dimitri I think it’s four punches and I’m just going hit me man hit me harder because it’s better to take one good punch than four or ten just like. I have a little bit for some reason I think I deserve it. Maybe.

They must have had a lot of conversation because they couldn’t always go back and check the footage because it was on Go Pros at times they couldn’t. Other times it was just well let’s shoot it with two or three cameras because we don’t know if one breaks we’re not going to be able to see the footage. So that in and of itself is something they had working against them that they obviously had to really prep and plan for because nowadays most the time if I have actors fighting I can be on the monitor and I can say OK well that hit missed this one you know made it. But for them they were kind of an that’s what they talked about. They really ended up hitting each other because you don’t want to waste an entire thing and they actually had to do some reshoots because you could easily see the misses. And they talked about that they actually were hitting the stunt men and as most stunt men were they were saying hit me harder harder which when I heard that I wasn’t shocked. There’s no depth of field. I mean normally if I have two actors fighting that can’t fight. You got to go with a longer lens you can have them father apart but on a GoPro you don’t have the luxury of hiding behind depth of field. So they really were making contact. There’s I really hope she was a stunt woman on the escalator scene it’s towards the beginning. He’s sliding down. She took what we call a Thumper. We say when a stunt coordinator calls you up he says hey I got one for you. It’s not complicated but it’s a thumper. That means it’s not a lot of moving parts but you’re going to hit the ground repeatedly. But yeah she definitely took a thumper on that one.

So is it truly better to take one good punch than five mediocre ones.

As a stunt coordinator I have to say no because there’s ways to tell a film story without hurting your actor as a stunt man our natural response is I think for a good stunt man is always yes sir may have another. And that’s what we’re paid for that’s literally our job is to take that hit act like it didn’t hurt. And then when it cuts and the stunt coordinator comes up says you guys OK. Your number one response is absolutely let me do 10 more. So I mean these guys are what they’re saying is you know what a true stuntman would say and I could easily be there on that with the producers being like Yeah I don’t want to hear that. But they obviously knew what they needed to get the shot and make it look realistic.

And the filmmakers admitted that hardcore Henry was a Russian production which afforded them a certain amount of freedom.

We used all real things real knife real guns.

Real explosions.

Yeah safety isn’t first In Russia you can do whatever you want.

Almost.

Almost.

Yeah we’ve got a couple more laws here it sounds like. But then also within a film school setting. We don’t want students going out there and putting themselves at risk. Putting their cast at risk. I mean for yourself as a coordinator what do you find yourself having to put the sort of kibosh on that. You tell filmmakers no.

A lot of it is just basic physics and common sense. Where’s momentum going to carry them how far is it going to carry them. So no your dolly track can’t be there because they’re diving right there and I have to have my mat there whenever I’m dealing with students. The first conversation I have because they tend to be on lower budgets is there’s a lot of departments in the film industry that you can stretch a dollar with ingenuity it’s a lot of things production design wardrobe locations these are places where if you have time and ingenuity you can stretch a dollar. Stunts is not one of these. Because whether your budget is low you know $1000 or $20 million physics doesn’t change. Gravity doesn’t change. These are things we still as stunt coordinators have to be safe about. So I urge them if it’s possible learn to create conflict and drama without using action because it’s one of the easiest things in the world is put a gun to somebody’s head. And now I have conflict. And if you don’t have the money for stunt doubles and no rehearsal stunts is one department you get what you pay for. There’s no way around it. Either you’re paying a lot of time they see my budget. They’re like That’s ten times what our budget is and I’m like exactly. And honestly I think some of the biggest accidents happen on the easiest stunts because whenever I’m doing like a full fire burn or if I’m doing a 40 foot high fall we’re paying attention we’re all locked in on what we’re doing we’re double checking double checking. I was doing a film. We finished the stunt scene. It was a fight scene I took a guy down then there was another thing it was just two actors arguing and they weren’t supposed to touch each other but one of the actors in the argument poked the other actor in the chest and he broke his finger on the mic pack. So a lot of the times it’s not the big car wrecks that happen because that’s what everyone’s locked in. It’s oh quick we’re losing the sunset. Let’s just go and do this. You know that’s when people get hurt.

Speaking of this you know it might not be surprising when we’re talking about Hardcore Henry that there was more than their fair share of injuries.

We have injuries in one scene. One of the stunt men hit me a little bit harder and broke my tooth. Yeah. And. Also I have a problem with the spine. I have six spines not broken but.

It’s herniated it’s called herniated. And if you’re wearing the heavy helmet. You can see almost nothing. You just have [Russian].

Like a horse. With the blinders you only see the front of you.

You can’t see your legs. You can just look forward that’s all.

And also we have a for playback we have a Teradek on our head and the sound so it’s pretty heavy.

So we have all of the things on our helmets while filming Hardcore.

Have you been in that position as a stunt man. Where you actually are kind of in some kind of contraption that makes movement really complicated or difficult.

There’s times where I’ve had to wear like prosthetic mask and one time I had to do a twelve foot high fall over a balcony into a real wood table and the mask I had was a wolf mask but the problem with that is when you don’t have the peripheral. You have to that’s where rehearsal comes in because and timing you have to be able to work with the people knowing when you’re there.

It’s all about trust too.

When I fall I have to go I had to go over and get my head around with them. I mean especially when and sometimes they’re even on wires but they can’t see things. So not only are you doing a very dangerous stunt but you’re doing it with limited vision. That definitely was one of the challenges they faced in this you know 90 minute action packed film.

So I was curious any notable injury stories you care to share.

Yeah I have my one I think unfortunately if you’re in the business long enough you will have the one main injury. I fractured my L4 I was doing a stunt show in Paris. The Wire I was on snapped it was a fluke accident. I fell 45 feet landed like a sack of potatoes broke my back stood up in about three seconds put my cowboy hat on ran around finished the scene which is like 10 more minutes of fighting and kicking and then it ends with me getting my head slammed into a stage coach and I get dragged off by the horses. That was about a six month recovery.

And you finish the show after.

I did I have the video I landed. I don’t remember if it wasn’t for the video I would remember none of it. The adrenaline was going and I hit. I stood up I finished the show. I actually had to get the Cowboys back stage had to stop me from getting back on my horse because I was continuing with the show I’ve been doing for two years so my muscle memory was kicking in. And finally Chad who’s from New Mexico was like Gomez you should probably just sit this one out I think we got it. So that was you know my one main injury and that’s in Hardcore Henry they have a lot of wire work and wire work. Is it adds a level of safety but it’s not completely safe. If you’ll notice in one of my favorite scenes in Hardcore Henry is when they’re going up on the convoy on the motorcycle. It’s a great mix of real practical effects and CGI. I think it was a really good balance but you can see when he’s going from the trucks to the motorcycles those were on wires which adds a little bit of stability to the stunt. But it’s not guaranteed because the motorcycle can easily pop a tire go sideways. So you’ll see why and we’ll talk about wire work they do quite a bit in Hardcore Henry it is safer but by no means does that make that a safe thing to do. But I think they pulled that off really well. Like I said earlier something at some point is bound to go wrong and that’s just why we get to call ourselves Stunt men and women.

Thank you for that.

Well stunt women are actually the toughest because they don’t get to wear pads as much as the guys do.

When they have to do a stunt in a skirt.

Yeah exactly guys are always in tuxedos and jeans and leather jackets. And the women are running around in high heels and skirts and you know the shirts with no elbows. So there’s no elbow pads. So yeah the stunt women are actually the toughest out of the bunch.

Speaking of safety. I just I was thinking about Sergey and Andrei worked with this director before on a video called bad motherfucker. They had really no budget no safety harnesses and well essentially no rules.

The idea of this movie is raised from a music video for biting elbows. It’s a Russian indie rock band and the leading frontman of this band. It’s our director Ilya Naishuller he’s a musician and the director and talented guy bad motherfucker is actually the second video is the second part.

The first one is insane office escape and the song is called stampede stampede yeah when we start to shoot the bad motherfucker video we have no money we have no anything we just start shooting. And so when we come to the big movie.

Feature film. We have a budget.

We have wires so we have a budget for professional stuntmen.

And actually for bad motherfucker we have some little budget because this is the second part of the music video for a stampede. We don’t have any budget.

We have only free pizzas and free cheap suits from the star.

Yeah and I think the budget of. Bad Motherfucker is about two or three thousand dollars. Something like that. And we spend all this money only for explosion.

Yeah for the car explosion.

It does make me want to go out there and parkour.

It makes parkour look like the most fun way to spend an afternoon so Adam you ever have to do stuff that crazy and in a video.

I’ve been fortunate enough to get to do things that crazy it was good. I mean you have the basic things of just the ground pounding which I refer to anyway there’s some good Thumper’s in there. They do have a good use of sound effects because it’s when you combine those it makes the hits look a little harder than they are. But the good thing is they mixed it up so you have the hand-to-hand stuff and then you have the car work which is great. They’re really smart in knowing when to cut for instance when he kicks out the windshield. So they had to obviously cut there to prep that window and then have somebody behind him to drive it. So they made really good choices about how to get from one stunt to another.

So flawlessly it seemed even.

Yeah great. I mean there’s not only were the stunts amazing but again this was a team effort. You know the editor obviously editing and fight choreography have to go hand in hand because I’ve personally seen a lot of times where the fight looks amazing and then when it comes to editing it kind of is butchered and I’ve seen vice versa. This was great use of wire work. When he gets The Ascender up to the roof and then you see him fall he’s actually on a Descender so he’s not free falling but it seems like he’s free falling when he grabs the blue thing. So they put the again. They used the right stunt and the right camera movement to really really tie it all together. Yeah it seemed like they had a lot of fun doing this and they got to do it in a lot of fun places which is great. Having the time traveling device it allowed them to go to the mountains and fight in the snow and then go to you know the airplanes and be able to do some parkour on jets which we can’t really do here in the States but that’s the lesson you should take away from this is they say just strap on a GoPro and go for it you know. So it worked for them. Filmmaking is all about collaboration. If you talk about some of the best filmmakers they tend to work with the same type of crew over and over and with this I think is the right juxtoposition between these parkour guys who really love doing it and then this more musically inclined director. And they’re you know when they came together they gave birth to the music videos which ultimately became Hardcore Henry which is kind of one long action music video.

Right. You were talking before about how like kind of the small stunts sometimes are the ones that hurt you the most because you’re like in some ways the least prepared for it. But there’s a stunt in the film where a tank is coming at Henry. And again it’s his point of view. He’s on the ground crawling backwards as a tank comes at him and in some ways it doesn’t necessarily compare to the other stunts seem like. That big of a deal.

Yeah it didn’t look so terrifying to watch but you had to go back and watch it after you hear that he was so terrified of it. That it’s scary for him.

The tank is one of the scariest thing that’s happened in my life. It’s like my nightmare.

It was scary.

Because only safety that I have on this scene. It’s a rope on my back and three guys who. Take this rope and they’re stuntmen also. And I’m looking at these guys. The stunt guys and they all like OK. Let’s go so I’m lying waiting just pull you out. That’s all you see all the hands if you have some safety. You see this because you see all. In the shot.

And we don’t use.

We don’t use any safety. Just only for eyes the glass for eyes. That’s all.

You have a tank coming at you and the only thing between you and safety is a rope pulled by a couple of guys so we’re talking like what for you. What do you see as kind of the most dangerous things they did.

I mean the tank thing is definitely you’re hoping those guys are paying attention and busy chattering you hope you know they got enough sleep they you know didn’t go out drinking vodka all night. Because in that scene his life is literally in their hands. If the tank barely lands on you. That’s life threatening. But I think one of the things firework is always very dangerous. I’ve done some full body fire burns.

You have to have safety people right.

Lots of safety people lots of safety cues. But then again you’re paying attention. One of the hardest stunts I think there is and if you notice they have in Hardcore Henry. But it’s very minute is horse work. Because it’s one thing to fight with a human that speaks with your language it’s another thing to work on wire work that’s mechanical. But horses are twelve thirteen hundred pounds of muscle and their first instinct is to buck kick and run. And if you notice they do put a horse in there. But it’s very quickly he gets on it and he gets off it and they continue with all the other action.

Have you ever worked with a horse.

I have. I’ve done horse work and that’s really challenging because again horses are like humans they have different personalities they have good days bad days but you just never know because if they want to go this way or that way there’s no stopping them. You hope if you have the budget you get on a trained horse but it’s not always the case. Sometimes you just show up and hope. The scariest thing for me in stunts is when I’m coordinating and I’m behind the camera because I’m always worried about their safety. I’m double checking everything did I double check the ground did I tell them enough were my instructions clear but it’s also not only the stunts it’s the production life because like they said on this they were filming 115 days. And now I’m assuming this was exactly union to the going over twelve hour days. That is a long time to be exhausting yourself and that’s when complacency sets in is you’re three weeks into it. We’re all doing it we’re tired we’re on a six day shoot on location. We don’t sleep well in hotels. You add all that up and it’s very easy that you know that accidents happen at that point.

One thing that Sergey and Andrei discussed in the making of Hardcore Henry was that actually and this surprised the heck out of me that they improv’ed some of that work. Sometimes we improv in the shot. Ilya just saying. Do whatever you want. Hit this guy hit this guy. But. Look wherever you want to just. Feel your body. How. You’re moving into the scene. But we have a script this is a original story and when our character also riding on the horse it’s also original story in the script.

We have a original idea with the horse Henry should go on the Horse down to the ground in the bunker and ride on the horse and shooting to the mad dogs.

And the guy on the helicopter also chasing the gallery and shooting from a bazooka and we’re riding on the horse and it’s a lot of explosions but because we have a lot of days of shooting when we editing all this movie.

Almost three hours almost three hours of action. It’s too much for the movie. And Ilya just a cut scenes.

I think cut half of the movie. So somewhere is Hardcore 2.

Have you ever been in a situation where you show up on set. You think you’re going to do one thing. It wasn’t going to work out. And now you have to improv it .

That happens more often than not normally. Whenever I do get the chance to have a rehearsal I don’t the director was like OK exactly what’s going to happen. I’m like well we’ll basically block it out and 60 percent we’ll use it because when we get on set. Now the DP is like well I can’t shoot that way I have to shoot this way so you have to change the fight scene we have to be over here lighting. So it always kind of changing. You really want to stay away from improv-ing. I mean that might be one reason that they had to shoot for 115 days. Because as far as getting what you need safely and effectively you don’t want to be making up everything on the spot. That’s when accidents like they said Somebody got their tooth chipped in. Stunt men were hurt that’s when those things happened. So I highly suggest against improv-ing but it always happens to where something has to change and you just have to be willing to adapt. And if you have talented stuntmen it’s easy to go from a right punch to a left punch to a left kick to throw to this table instead of that wall. You know when have a good team it makes that transition smoother. But yeah I would stay try and stay away from improv-ing when it comes to the bigger stunts.

Before we wrap all of this up what kind of advice would you give to students if they wanted to put stunts in their scenes or any any safety tips last minute things that you want them to know about stunts.

The best thing they can do is contact a legitimate experienced stunt coordinator right away before they cast before they get locations before they pick wardrobe. The common mistakes they tend to make. Things like wardrobe they don’t think about oh if I want to have my actual actors fall into an alley. If I give them long sleeves and long pants they can put pads on and then they can really do it so the best thing can do is contact a coordinator and go through with what they can do and a coordinator will help them be like OK well you can cheat this or you can actually do this stunt and this is how you do it. But as a stunt man. There’s a part that like Hardcore Henry guys that is just go for it. But there is consequences to just going for it. And that includes legal fines but even jail time. So my advice is just be smart about it and contact a professional and then see how you can create your vision.

There’s a lot of really great behind the scenes videos about the making of Hardcore Henry. So you can enjoy the madness yourself of what these guys did to make Hardcore Henry happen.

We want to thank Andrei and Sergey for joining us and Adam Gomez for co-piloting this episode.

Thank you very much for having me it was a pleasure.

And thanks for putting life and limbs on the line repeatedly as a stunt man and for making sure filmmakers including our students are that much safer when when putting stunts in their movies.

Well thank you. I love my job and I love seeing the students create their vision safely.

Safely.

Safely.

Let’s call that the moral of the story. Thank you so much for listening. This episode was based on the Q&A moderated by Ekatarina Terakhovich and myself.

Edited and mixed by Kristian Hayden. Our creative director is David Andrew Nelson who also produced this episode with Kristian Hayden and Eric Conner executive produced by Jean Sherlock Dan Mackler and Tova Laiter.

Special thanks to Robert Cosnahan Sajja Johnson and the staff and crew who made this possible. To learn more about our programs check us out at nyfa.edu. See you next time.

Hi and welcome to the backlot a discussion with the entertainment industries top talent. I’m Eric Conner senior instructor.

And I’m Aerial Segard acting alum and coordinator here at the New York Film Academy.

And in this episode we explore the improvisatory world of Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood stars of the comedic high wire act. Whose Line Is It Anyway.

Every once in a while if one of us busts and starts giggling it’s like my favorite thing in the world and I’m usually the one that busts first.

Yeah I don’t find anyone I work with funny. That. Makes it a lot easier.

Now I’ve tried doing improv and let me tell you the thought of doing it in front of a full house. Night after night is terrifying. But as Mr. Sherwood explained they found improvisation to be simpler than working with even the shortest of scripts.

I’m terrible at auditioning for scripted stuff but that’s why I mostly liked going out on either hosting auditions or commercial auditions right because it was really about throwing in your own stuff. When I go out. I am the worst person to talk about auditioning as far as going reading a script memorizing lines and then going into fluorescent lit room and trying to pretend like I am in a bunker during a war. It’s so does not work for me. That’s why I’ve never been able to really do well at that. I sort of fell into improv. I was working in TV production. I went to school for acting but when I first got out here one of the jobs I fell into was TV production. And a guy I was working with said there’s this cool improv class you might want to check out. And I had never really done improv seen it but it was like someone handed me the instrument I was meant to play you know here. Here’s the oboe. You know you’ve been trying to play tuba your whole life right.

Both stars had been working for years but made their name on the improv based Whose Line Is It Anyway. First on the stage and then on the television show host in the United States by Drew Carey.

Welcome to Whose Line is it Anyway The Show where everything is made up and the points don’t matter. That’s right the points are as worthless as the phrase campaign finance reform.

They just felt much more comfortable going in front of an audience without a net.

Speaking as the actor that I am which is I’m not a really great serious actor. As a Swiss Army knife I have fish Scaler and sledgehammer you know like those are my acting styles and like whenever whenever I’m cast in like a movie or a TV show I tend to be the slightly over the top. Like in Jane white as sick and twisted. I played like this perverse old street guy. So I didn’t have to tamp it down. They kind of hired me for being ridiculous and knowing I was going to go to 11 instead. I think that my skill set and the industry have sort of I would say pigeonholed me maybe I’ll break over into the other side and I’ll be doing legitimate dramatic roles like Tom Hanks someday. But you know the likeness of that happening at this point.

It’s also hard because and this will shock people that I tend to be more subtle when I’m auditioning for television and things like that. And they always I always get called in for the big characters and I don’t feel it’s not what I feel comfortable doing. I mean it’s hard to tell that from some of the stuff I’ve done on Whose Line. But I tend to go the other way and I always. My rule is I’ll only go as big as I feel comfortable doing and then when it gets beyond that then it’s not good for anyone. It’s not you know it doesn’t really service the character. I can’t get them what they want so we’re just wasting everybody’s time.

I’m the other direction I’ll only go as subtle as I feel comfortable with it.

We’ve yet to see that.

I’ve just made a mess out of so many auditions because I think it’s a confidence thing as well. I’m so incredibly confident making people laugh and making things up. But then when I’m handed a script that has even just the least bit of dramatic content or I have to be sort of sincere. I just have a hard time doing it. And the editor inside my own brain goes You’re a funny bastard and right now you’re doing something that’s not in your wheelhouse. You know it’s like you’re a master at this but yet you’re trying to do some other art form really. I mean. I think I learned pretty quickly out here that that was my strength so I might as well really hold on to it so I actually am always in awe of people that are great at drama. And you know and being truly vulnerable that’s always something that sort of eluded me and I think it alludes a lot of comedic people because the comedy is your armor. You know you are sort of baring yourself while you’re making people laugh. But it’s you’re baring yourself in a way that’s completely different than the people that are acting like a Jake Gyllenhaal who’s like ripping himself open and going here I am.

Even when they try to store a bit ahead of time having a joke in the chamber so to speak only takes them so far when in the middle of an improv game.

The newscasters. I would always before the show come up with some really bad pun because I love puns and usually that was planned although every once in a while I would forget and then it’d be oh crap. I have to come up with and luckily I have a large storage of bad jokes so I would just sort of come out.

Welcome to the six o’clock news I’m burn nightly.

Olly Oxenfree.

Chester flatbottom.

Chester moistmuffin.

Chester Snapdragon McFisticuff.

Our top story today a national study shows that balding men make the best lovers.

We’ll be back soon to the wildlife movie Bertha the dyslexic ephalent.

We’ll be back to our nature documentary hood the circumcised cobra in just a second.

Our top story from the Middle East. Benjamin Netanyahu today changed his name to Benjamin Netan-yahoo.

But everything else all the other guys they never knew what their character was until Drew gave it to them or Clive in the English one. The reason this was such a great gig was because there was really no work involved. We would show up maybe two hours before we taped we’d sort of go through a camera rehearsal so we knew what games we were playing for the night. So Drew would say OK we’re going to do greatest hits. So we would sit. Everybody would sit their position as center. That was it. Then they say OK stop and then we go back and so we never improvised. If we did improvise if there was a new game we would use suggestions we’d gotten from previous shows. And then it was just eating and waiting for the show to start. And then when we do the show and then we were done.

And as far as for Wayne and I the musical prep we would have a music rehearsal where Laura and the band would play us all the different types of genres that if they did Rolling Stones they were gonna play sort of a knock off and they let us hear it. And the producers would just give us a random suggestion that had nothing to do with what was going on that night. But just so that we could hear the cadence and the measure so that we would hear them and go oh they’re going to do sort of a knock off of jumping jack flash if we get rolling stones that night right. So we would in that musical rehearsal we would hear that we’d hear what their take on an REM song was this and that and we would hear and try like 20 styles and then three of them would be thrown at us that night during the show.

The singing guys were really underrated and everybody everybody thought it was rigged and there were times where I thought they probably then I thought no way I just give him the title. So no but to come up with you get the title you have to come up with rhymes you have to make it sound good and it has to be funny all split second. And these guys were the best I’d ever ever seen.

The Romantic Italian ballad pile driver.

When you show a girl that you love. Take her head and climb high above hold her still and that is that . Show her you love her when you met. Just go uhh. It’s a pile driver of love.

Miss Marilyn Monroe. And of course her great hit gallstones are a girl’s worst friend.

Now you must understand from your head to your brain. Oh in my side I’ve got an awful pain. Oh I shoot it out my rear end because gallstones are a girl’s worst friend. Understand I won’t be alone. I’m trying to pass a stone. Gallstones are a girl’s worst friend. Worst friend. Worst friend. Did I do that.

For me it was always a surprise. What that title was for me that was one of my favorite games. First of all because I got to sit down which was good. And it was just Ryan and I sort of bantering and goofing around and then passing it on to those guys and watching them do something incredible.

Hey Colin.

Yes Ryan.

What comes to mind when I say the word sting.

The guy who sang for the police. Hey. When he retires will he changed his name to stung.

You know I laughed at first but would he.

I don’t know.

What comes to mind when I say kielbasa and accordions.

Broccoli. And enough gas to light a small country.

Colin you’ve got five more years till you hit 65. In Canadian.

That’s right.

Nothing better than the sound of metal.

Oh you’re talking heavy metal.

I’m just talkin metal. I could be heavy could be light could be aluminum could be lead is lead a metal. I don’t know wuwuwuwuwuwuwu.

You just rapped there did you know that.

I told you I’m a child of the streets. Sometimes I just wonder why I talk to you.

Because if you didn’t you wouldn’t be talking to anyone.

That’s right I’d still get better answers.

So for me. The bantering part was the part I was mostly concentrating on and it’s like. And then I could see Drew is sort of looking at his watch and it’s like oh yeah song. So then it would be just toss and sometimes they were good titles and sometimes you would say something go oh oh that with that sucked.

As the person that had to do the song I know they always fall into one of three categories. If they were in the groove the song title would be a joke in and of itself which is kind of what they were always aspiring to do. That if song of a plumber plunger suck this you know I mean whatever they were going for. Right. That was their dream title. One that was funny and in the point.

We used to listen to the 70s funk hit. Check under the hood.

One of my favorite Dixieland racing car songs is axle grease rag.

That big lambada hit two laps to go.

One of my 80s rock n roll favorites has to be my gown has no back.

That mambo hit. This is going to hurt a little.

Simply titled.

And then sometimes if they were just sort of blathering on then they would kind of do it Fletch style. Who could forget that wonderful title honey the toilets clogged and I don’t have anything but your earrings. Great thanks for truncating it down into a little thing.

It’s a doo-wop hit and its title is.

Oh the anticipation is incredible. I bet it’s going to be so hilarious.

Have I told you how much I love working with you.

Mr. Mochrie and Mr. Sherwood do their best to resist tailoring their material to where they’re performing.

Choosing instead to follow the idea that funny is funny everywhere.

If a reference of where I’m at pops into mind that feels germane to whatever we’re doing at that moment I’ll throw it out but I don’t. Walking with a satchel full of care my English jokes here are my Alabama jokes. I never do that. You know at most we’ll be doing something and like something stupid goes bad and then you’ll say Well you very rarely see that in Alabama and that gets a local joke out of them and it has nothing to do with Alabama. You know it’s like if you make a local reference just for the sake of making it to the local people they’re going to laugh but that joke would’ve also worked if you said it in Minnesota you know

We just had we had five shows in India.

Last summer.

Big yeah big Whose Line fans and bizarre. And we were a little worried about it. We thought you know they are one of the largest English speaking countries in the world just by the fact that there’s a billion people but we also thought well it’s a totally different culture will they get our stuff. The first suggestion we got fart so we thought were good.

We looked at each other like we’re home. No problem.

So we never change anything. We just did. You know we don’t do political we don’t do we just do goofy and I think goofy is universal.

We do goofy situational character occupation type things as opposed to oh let’s do Britney Spears blah blah blah Lindsay Lohan reference or George Bush slam. We don’t do any of that stuff.

It’s probably a good thing because they told us after which I think they should have told us before and they said you know oh by the way don’t say anything bad or funny about Gandhi or they’ll kill you. Well that would have been good before the show.

Just a little Xerox sheet right before.

Performers are taught to listen to their co-stars. Acting is.

Reacting. See I listen. And when you don’t have a script it’s crucial that your costars keep the scene from crashing.

And burning in improv. You need more than a co-star. You need a.

Dance partner who can finish your.

Sandwich. Thoughts.

That’s better.

I think you just need to sort of develop your improv skills like a martial art. You kind of use the other person’s energy against them so if they’re all over the place. You can use that to make yourself look good because you are the counterpoint to that. I think the auditioners will see that you’re adapting and that person may be all over the place and yelling and screaming and saying too much and then you just stand there and sort of the outside cool observer who just says one thing at the end of that like oh someone needs a Ritalin you know and you get a huge laugh and that guy was really trying. And the guys that are casting look at you and go okay that guy stayed in the moment stayed out of that guys way didn’t jump in and go. Me me me me me and then got a great laugh because he was listening and present.

I mean improv is such an ensemble art form you have to work together. And there is I hate to use the word competition because it has a negative connotation. It’s not even going for the bigger laugh or he gets a bigger laugh. It’s like being the best it’s going well I’ll set him up for this one he better get it because I know exactly where I would go if I was doing it. And you’re ultimately you want the scene to be the best scene it can be. And that means having to work together. But you know you do like to get your laugh on your lines. You do. When you come up with a great line you feel like. I’m always amazed that actually it worked out. And everybody when we were doing our scenes we all had our different functions in a scene. You know Greg would often be the kind of the smart assy as did you a time I was usually the woman or something.

The scene is Ryan arrives at his ski lodge a day early to discover his wife Colin in the arms of amorous ski instructor Wayne.

Ryan is Rhett Butler Colin is Scarlett O’Hara. You know that’s how it goes in the relationship.

Ryan is Noah and Collin is.

His wife.

Mrs. Noah yeah. Colin knows his role in every scene.

The beauty of improv is there would be you know you think oh I’ll do this and then I would think oh this is the character I’ve just come up with. It doesn’t seem to be working but I would have to stay with it because then it became my challenge was to make the audience like me as this character. So I would try to just stick with it and work within what. You know these guys were giving me what the scene was and it usually worked out.

I also think there’s a certain level of commitment your brain is also constantly going down a path with four or five forks and if you start to go out and that’s not where you instantly back up and go down something that might work as funny you know you’re constantly taking the pulse of the laughter of the audience and you’re not going to just completely barrel through ahead on something that you that you know is not working and you know as you get to become a good improviser I think you learn the tricks to instantly make a u turn or commented on yourself. Sort of the comedy equivalent. Well that didn’t work you know then that gets a laugh and then you go off in some other direction. I never feel competition at any of our live shows Vegas shows whatever. The only competition I felt on whose line was with myself. I had to be as good as I possibly could be or I might not get another season like that was the only competition I ever carried into the actual show was sing for your supper sing for your supper sing for your supper.

I think for me the only time I am nervous where the fear creeps in is like five minutes before the show when you know I’m backstage thinking OK I’ll we have all these people who want to see a show and we don’t have one. It really depends on what they give us. It depends on how on we are. And then once you’re out there it’s just giving yourself over and living in the moment and doing all the things you don’t do in life it’s you know you’re listening to your partner you’re taking their ideas and you’re building on them you’re accepting. It’s like a happy place. So there and there’s really no time for fear because you’re just constantly think you’re bombarded with so many things not only from yourself but from the person you’re working with and the audience that there’s no chance to enjoy the fear. I think fear creeps in. If you don’t do it for a while there are many great improvisers who I worked with the Second City the cast of SC TV who won’t improvise now because they’re.

You see them at the Gilda’s Club charity events in Toronto and they come up to us and they’re like oh I don’t know how you guys do this anymore. I could never do and I’m like you’re one of my idols from SC TV you know Joe Flaherty is looking at us like how do you guys do that. I’m like I do this with my eyebrow because of you Joe. You know it’s just like that.

It really is a muscle that gets flabby really quickly. If you don’t you don’t work it it dies.

To get complimented by SC TV’s Joe Flaherty.

Aka the dad from Freaks and Geeks.

I had a friend that used to smoke. You know what he’s doing now. He’s dead.

Is like being blessed by the pope of comedy.

And the more Mr. Mochrie and Sherwood performed the more their fanbase and their reputation grew.

Even if each show was a new adventure they only get better every time.

Every time you do something funny you sort of learn a new way and especially since we’re improvising we’re consciously pushing ourselves into the unknown of finding new ways and we like to challenge ourselves and we never improvise better than when we do something in our show like get a really hard suggestion or change a game up so that it’s we haven’t played it that way before when we step into the darkness. That’s when we come back after the show and feel like we didn’t get anywhere near any vibe that we did in a previous show and we were scared and when we improvised scared together. It opens up just that other extra notch of creativity as an improviser.

The last two months I think we’ve probably been as funny as we’ve ever been.

And this is the eight years of trial and error changing games getting better.

Every game we came up with ways of making every game so that we were off balance and not comfortable and we find that’s when we work best when we don’t feel when we don’t have a comfort zone. I don’t suggest that for everyone but really it works for us.

And that’s about that’s about changing a game so that it has a couple of different angles and it’s also about constantly changing the ask for s that you get from the audience because if you ask for something a certain way. After about 10 or 15 times you’ll start to get the same three things so we constantly shake it up so that we don’t never fall in that groove.

One unexpected reason they’re able to keep their improv performances so fresh is basically amnesia.

They admit that each show feels like the first time since they pretty much forget what they did last time.

Sort of the beauty and the curse of the show is once it’s done it’s done. It’s sort of gone. It’s only because you know I flip through the channels and I see a whose line and don’t remember anything and yet I’m doing it so I obviously was involved but it’s just. The only one I remember semi clearly is the Richard Simmons one.

Called living scenery. This is for Ryan Collin and Wayne. And Richard Simmons everybody Richard Simmons.

And that was only because of the audience reaction because it. Stopped the show.

Ryan and Colin are going to act out a scene and during the scene they have to use a number of props however since they don’t have any real props to work tonight.

I’ll be the props. I’ll be all the props for these men.

I don’t actually remember the improvising or what I did but I remember that moment of just seeing people jumping up and down in the audience. And going. This is cool but I don’t remember any of that scene.

I never remember anything that happened after a taping. I just remember whether I feel good and thought oh that was a good show. We got lots of laughs and then if I stumble across an episode of Whose Line. And I see that I’m on it and I start watching it. I don’t even have any recollection of what I said because I was in the moment during that thing. There were no scripted lines so I have no expectation of what I said at that moment because if I was put in that scene now again I would have different responses so I can’t memorize every little. Just like you can’t remember every conversation you’ve ever had in your life. That’s kind of the way it is with with doing improv because it’s stream of consciousness flowing out of your brain free thinking like you live every moment of your day. It wasn’t preplanned recorded and rehearsed repetitively beforehand. So I watch the show as much like a person who’s never seen it before. I find myself holding my breath and then relieved when I did something funny. Oh good it worked. Yeah. Good for him yeah. He made them laugh.

Mostly I mean most of the great memories are just from working on the show and it was a great group of people and for me it was bizarre to be part of that of the ABC machine because I’d never had that. And all of a sudden we were going to these big parties with people I’ve watched on television and people I’ve seen in movies who I really admired and they were coming up and talking to me. It was really surreal. We were in Pasadena and they have this thing called the upfronts where all the shows come together and there was a party that night. And I was with my wife and we’re walking down the stairs and all of a sudden surrounded by photographers who pushed my wife out of the way and Kim Delaney who was in NYPD Blue at that time was pushed with me. And all these pictures were being snapped. And I turned around I said well I guess we’re going out now and I’ve never seen such fear in a woman’s face before. It was like Oh wow. And it was it was just bizarre. There were moments like that all the time where we went to a Disney Adventure.

California Adventure when it first opened they had a couple days of sneak previews.

And you get there and they say OK you’re going down the red carpet your wrangler is goofy and goofy comes out for the whole night you’re with goofy who can’t talk to you when he’s in the thing. So he has to use sign language to tell you where to go and. You’re just standing there going. This is not a real life. This is. Insane. So yeah those are the memories I have walking the red carpet with Goofy.

This ever evolving comedic work sometimes results in the performers breaking character which they don’t mind at all.

In fact. They welcome it.

We live for those moments. We wait for those. I mean those are the best moments in the world. I mean I think part of the reason I wanted to. Do comedy was when I was a kid. I watched the Carol Burnett Show and Tim Conway and Harvey Korman would do sketches on this show and it was Tim Conway’s mission to make Harvey Korman bust up at least once a show and he said so he would just relentlessly pick at him with his little character till he started to laugh and then when he started to break he would just keep hitting at him and that is my favorite childhood memory of watching TV comedy. And so I lived for those I we don’t do it very often but every once in a while if one of us busts and starts giggling it’s like my favorite thing in the world and I’m usually the one that busts first.

Yeah I don’t find anyone I work with funny. So that makes it a lot easier. It’s also I mean you know we’re in sort of the same state as the audience. Everything is a surprise to us so there are some times where we. Break on whose line it was always like I’d been giving a medal of honor when I made someone on that show break up just because they’re all jaded and have seen everything. So there was always that moment. So when that happened that made my resolve even harder not to breakup and to see if I could make them look worse. Which you’re not really supposed to do.

It’s the killer instinct. No but make worse in that when someone’s laughing on stage it’s all gold for the camera like that is free. Awesome moments for the audience and everyone watching so.

And there were some times where I broke up Ryan that really had nothing to do with what I just said. There was one where I said Tapioca and he lost it. He just lost it.

Hey Colin what comes to mind when I say Ricky Ricardo and great cigars.

Oh tapioca.

Really. Why’s that.

Wasn’t that his big song. Tapioca. Tapioca.

No Colin I’m talking about. I’m talking about Cuba Colin.

Cuba. It’s a small island.

It is. Why don’t you tell the people about it

Afterwards. I said why did you laugh when I said Tapioca he said you sounded like Colonel Klink. So it was really I don’t know what my point was there but I tried. There are some times. There were a couple of times we did a scene called The Cat and that was because it was a mission impossible.

Gentlemen today’s mission is of the greatest importance.

And we’d gotten into a little trouble in the beginning and I find when that happens you’re a little on edge and you’re almost got the giggles anyway yeah it’s punchy. And then it started just to build from there.

We’re going to need some. Detergent.

Detergent. Detergent. The cat .

It’s taking too long. The cat. No that’s no good.

Fabric softener.

Well you can’t have static cling. The bernuse will stick to his thing. The cat.

It fell in the water again. Wait a minute the cat.

The cat’s wet now.

And luckily Ryan started breaking and that sort of calmed me down.

The sneckerfark of Imar will be here.

We’ve got to dry.

The cat.

The cat. Stop it with the cat.

So I used him as my I guess scapegoat I guess so yeah I find I just try to concentrate harder. Sometimes it works. You can get. You can certainly get away with it in comedy more than you can in drama. I’m just saying from personal experience when you’re laughing and Hamlet’s dead. It’s hard to come back from that.

To me. I don’t find anything terribly embarrassing because like one episode of Whose Line I went to sit back in my chair up in the back and they were really close to the back of the stage. And I fell off the back stage. I’m not but that got a huge laugh from the audience so that’s not embarrassing to me. That’s just another laugh. You know that as a comedic person that’s just like oh that one was free I didn’t have to work at that.

Doing that show doing the show embarrassment and shame were kind of left backstage and it’s not till after when you’re watching something and go wow. Well I used Richard Simmons as a jet ski to fellate me. That’s odd.

Our shame gland has pretty much atrophied. So like what is embarrassing to us when we’re willing to get up as adults on national television pretend to be monkeys and fling poo at each other. There’s not a whole lot that can happen. Even if we sneeze in an actual booger came like that kind of thing might be the most embarrassing. You know. But.

If it gets a laugh.

There’s very few things. I mean our life is about kind of making an embarrassing scenario into something funny.

Their work in improv attracted a number of legendary comics to guest star.

Including another one of their heroes and a master of improv himself. Robin Williams.

Let’s go on to a game called scenes from a hat. What Robin Williams is thinking right now.

I have a career. What the hell am I doing.

As great as Robin Williams was even he found keeping up with the performers a very tall order.

I didn’t actually perform in that show but we played with him a bunch times live down in Santa Monica on Herald nights at the upfront theatre and I got to play with him. And it’s the thrill and joy of working with him regardless of you know he again he’s coming into a team that’s all been playing together. You know so there’s a comfort level and to his credit what he did he was an improvising monologist. So he did years decades of working by himself. And you know free associating and all the voices and characters were just in his head. So you know it’s kind of like the world maybe the world’s greatest tennis player that doesn’t know how to play doubles you know. So it’s almost a completely different artform.

And he totally raised. I think everybody’s game he had so much energy that we went oh jeez we have to match this at least. So we were after I had never been so exhausted after a taping just because he gives a hundred and fifty percent. So you have to give at least that to sort of keep up so everyone had their A game on that night because of him because it was like we don’t want to be left behind. Also we want to make sure he has a good time and we get some good improv out of it. So he really did raise raise the bar for us.

The comedic duo might not get easily fazed onstage but offstage Mr. Mochrie and Mr. Sherwood are far from the extroverts they might appear to be.

So the guys behind.

Ah ah. At ease at ease.

Are actually shy. Now that’s surprising.

I think we’re both pretty shy in our real lives. And I think my my shyness sort of exponentially grew the more I had an outlet for the performing. I think when I was in school and a kid I was far more out going and extroverted trying to make people laugh all the time. And then as I grew up and sort of had you know a place to do it on stage then I became more shy.

I was always painfully shy and it wasn’t till. A friend of mine dared me to go out for the school play. And I got my first laugh and it was like. The play was the death and life of sneaky Fitch a musical Western. No nobody would ever remember. But it really wasn’t until the success of whose line that I basically had to just because we were having interviews and meeting so many people had to sort of figure out a way of getting over that. I mean this is my worst thing right now. It’s horrible.

He could be in front of five thousand seat house making it up and making laughs and he’s more comfortable than he is just in a intimate setting like this having to talk. I’m more uncomfortable at a dinner with people I don’t know. Like a four top at dinner than I am in front of 10,000 people.

He doesn’t use cutlery.

I’m more in my element when I am bungee jumping intellectually out of an airplane and trying to make people laugh.

We’re more in control on on stage you know we’re with people we want to be with and who we trust and we know it usually works out in the end and life doesn’t give that guarantee. When my wife watches whose line she calls that guy the other because it’s nothing like me. It’s you know in gatherings with friends of course you know I’m a little more open but I don’t have to be on and when I’m with people I don’t know I tend to be quiet which is why I disappoint so many people when they meet me.

I am the only person in the world that gets to see the two sides of Colin because your wife really does see that. I mean I get to see the lunatic because we’re on stage and the audience gets to see that they don’t get to see the shy.

The real me.

I mean he’s like. He’s like he’s like Chauncey Gardiner and being there. He’s like that shy.

Good reference. Thanks.

The introspective improv superstars reminded our students that one’s career and life is not just about the destination but about the journey.

What advice would you give yourselves now when you’re in acting school.

Oh that’s an excellent question.

And that’s a good that’s good. Any more good questions. I would tell myself not to stop living at the expense of. What I wanted to do. I I was going to say I loved theater school but yes I loved parts of it. There are parts that were hell and then there was a part where it was your life. Those were the only people you saw you were working like 12 hours a day putting up productions doing things. And I always have trouble with people who make acting their lifestyle rather than their job. It’s a great job and I love doing it. I love it because you have so many different experiences you can know one day you’re a pirate next day you’re snack fairy you can be anything. You also have to also keep in contact with the outside world and meet see real people because when you meet actors and actresses they don’t always react in real ways. I mean everything is like really dramatic or not dramatic. But I’ve always tried just to get outside and you know we don’t have an entourage when we go on tour. It’s us and some other guy and we get no respect. We have we we wanted to write a coffee table book called. You’re not the f**king Rolling Stones because that’s what someone said to us when we basically when we go somewhere all we want are microphones and two wooden stools. That’s it.

And if we’ve come straight from an airplane like just a deli platter with like slices of bread and ham and cheese you know not asking for Cristal. And.

So I don’t even know if I answered the question but.

Don’t make it only your life like.

Yeah don’t make always be open to everything because when you just focus on one thing you lose so many other things that can be important to the one thing you’re focusing on.

And I think my sort of advice would be attached to that is do this with a 100 percent committed but only do it as long as it’s truly enriching you and nourishing your life because no matter what it is whether you want to be the world’s best barista actor painter or whatever. If that pursuit is making you more miserable than it’s making you feel like you’re alive like if you can handle the defeats and the rejection and enjoy the journey no matter how many times you get knocked down. Awesome. And if while you’re waiting to become a movie star or a TV star you enrich yourself and are fulfilled by doing local theater or production or just your fulfilled by going out and hitting commercial auditions because at least you’re getting to perform or playing with an improv group or whatever as long as it’s nourishing you if your entire happiness is predicated on the day you get that job that big network TV series and you’re not going to really be happy till then. Then you’ve placed all of the happiness of your life on the destination and not on the journey. And it is such a rip off to your life and you’d be better off becoming an accountant like you really would. You’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of sticking the carrot in front of you and you’re just always chasing it. The odds of you getting it are so intensely against you that if you don’t literally enjoy the journey there you know make the journey of being an actor as exciting. Through all the failures you know a rough kayak ride enjoy the fact that are going to get knocked against the rocks dumped out of your boat and get back and you’re going to be freezing and you have to tent on the side and wait it out and all of that because that’s what being an actor is. It’s lots of failure and challenge and you have to not let that failure make you miserable because I just know I had known so many of my contemporaries that did not make it but are still pursuing it and it’s just like they are 50 year old guys still going on auditions to be like the action hero cop whatever their agent can get them in on and I’m like you’re only going to be doing commercials from now on. You may if you’re lucky get the the sidekick quirky guy on the network sitcom but they’re always going to try and cast someone who’s been doing that for years before they cast you. Jason Alexander is going to get the call and then when he says no this other guy is going to get it and Joel Murray’s going to get it and so on down the line before you even have a chance. So the hierarchy as you get up in age it’s always going to be a popularity contest.

What.

So I’m saying that when you’re young when you’re young the air of discovery is always alive and happens and the older you get the air of discovery and the window of that happening unless you get cast as a great character part in an independent film that blows up and then people start calling for you and then you have a renaissance in your career. So I’m just saying savor that journey. You know if you were in music you have to enjoy making the albums and touring and all that and the photo shoots as much as you love just singing in the shower. Otherwise you’re cheating yourself. You can look at anyone you can look at people that are super famous and rich that are miserable in any aspect of business. And they have cheated themselves and they’ve lost sight. And.

That’s why we’ve stayed at this level. The worst day you have as an actor will never be the worst day of your life. So remember that.

Pretty solid advice from two guys who can effortlessly craft entire scenes around the word fart.

We want to thank Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood for sharing how they excel as performers without a script. You might even be able to catch Colin and Brad’s live two-man show scared scriptless.

Try to say that five times fast and we want to thank all of you for listening. That’s Aeriel.

Segard and he’s Eric.

Conner and this episode was based on the Q&A moderated by Chris Devane to watch the full interview or to see our other Q&As check out our youtube channel at YouTube.com/NewYorkFilmAcademy.

This episode was written by Eric Conner. Edited and mixed by Kristian Hayden our creative director is David Andrew Nelson who also produced this episode with Kristian Hayden.

And me executive produced by Tova Laiter Jean Sherlock and Dan Mackler. Special thanks to our events department Sajja Johnson and the staff and crew who made this possible.

To learn more about our programs check us out at NYFA.edu. Be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen.

See you next time.

 

Eric: Hi. Welcome to the backlot. I’m Eric Conner and today we got a really special guest, the fabulous Craig Caton-Largent. Now, Craig started his career doing practical effects including puppetry. And if you’ve seen any movies you’ve seen at least one of his films he’s worked on everything from Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Ghostbusters, Predator. He’s done it all. He also switched over though he’s one of the guys who was able to go from animatronics and puppetry into more CG work and has recently worked on How to Train Your Dragon 2 amongst many other animated films. So after working on dozens and dozens of films, he came to New York Film Academy about four years ago as an instructor in our animation department and about two years ago he became department chair. And ever since the department’s only grown gotten stronger and better and we are a better school for having him here. So ladies and gentlemen. The fabulous Craig Caton-Largent.

Craig Caton Largent: Thanks for having me on your show. It’s a really cool.

Eric: No problem I’m glad you ventured down to Burbank studios to be with me today. So his career spans I mean it’s decade now. Right. You started in.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah 39 years ago. Yeah.

Eric: So you’re hitting 40 years.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah, I’m going coming up on 40 – this next April will be 40 years yeah.

Eric: So if we cut to 40 years ago the slightly younger version of yourself would he imagine you did all this.

Craig Caton Largent: Oh no way. No, not even. I would. It would be like in my dreams to like like have achieved what I got to. Yeah, I was just hoping to work on a couple movies and become like a regular makeup artist for a TV series or movies or something like that and never in my wildest dreams thought I would end up working on some of the most iconic creatures in the 80s and 90s.

Eric: So your first professional gig was what then. What project.

Craig Caton Largent: The very first. Well, the first one that people would recognize would be Metalstorm the destruction of Jared Synn in 3D. 

Eric: In 3D

Craig Caton Largent: yeah it was a Charlie Band a movie.

Eric: What work did you do on that.

Craig Caton Largent: There was a the main work that I did on it were there these sandworms that come out of the ground and have like this fight. And he blows them up with his laser. So that was one of the first puppets I ever built and also the first puppeteering gig that I got to do too. We built a big like it looked like a boxing ring and then we filled it with vermiculite and then we had holes in the bottom of it to stick our hands through and put the puppets up through the vermiculite.

Eric: So you’re working the puppets but you’re also basically building puppets right.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah that was I found out really early. If you were the guy that built the puppets you were usually the guy that puppeteered them. So it wasn’t the people who sculpted them and it wasn’t the people who were making the molds it was the guys who were doing the actual mechanics of the puppets because they kind of figured that if you were doing the mechanics that you already knew how to knew to move the puppet and how to puppeteer it since you were doing that that part as well.

Eric: So it’s almost like you would custom fit it to you.

Craig Caton Largent: Absolutely. For me, though it was. I always had this philosophy of what I wanted to call puppeteer friendly puppets. So I wanted to I wanted to build puppets that would actually do the job for you. So you all you had to do is put your hand or control the puppet and it would literally almost perform for you. So that part of its performance was actually in its design. And so that was important to me because early on I would make these puppets that were so hard to control and so hard to manage that. That by the time I was done puppeteering them on set I would my hands would be a wreck and I would just go. That was a horrible performance because I wasn’t able to control the puppet.

Eric: Kind of like trial and error too.

Craig Caton Largent: Oh yeah there was there was a lot of that in the early days where you realized you’d gotten to set and you made a horrible mistake.

Eric: Do you have anyone in particular you remember?

Craig Caton Largent: Well, there was there was a puppet that I had built in four days. It was a very quick show. The name of this movie was Sorority Babes and the Slimeball Bowl-a-rama. We shot in a bowling alley down near San Diego at a nighttime and. And so I had two weeks and five thousand dollars to make a full on fully articulated speaking main character for a movie. And so I did that but it was like you know 24/7 like sculpting for four days in a row and mold making and running this foam and then I actually I built the puppet but they really didn’t have time to build the controls for it. So when I showed up it was one of those situations where you realized that maybe I should have rethought this.

Eric: What was it supposed to look like?

Craig Caton Largent: So it kind of kind of had a body like imagine a body very similar to gremlins but then the mouth I just replaced with like the muzzle from Audrey II from The Little Shop of Horrors.

— Feed me Seymore. —

Craig Caton Largent: The reason I did that because because Audrey II is an amazingly articulated plant. I mean the lip syncs and the stuff that they did were amazing.

— Look you’re a plant. An inanimate object. Does this look inanimate to you punk? If I can talk and I can move who’s to say I can’t do anything I want?! —

Craig Caton Largent: And also the secret behind that how they did that was most of the dialogue scenes with Audrey II were shot at 18 frames a second. And slow and so that way it gets speeded up and looks like she’s nailing all of the syllables and all that stuff just hitting all of them. And actually the Slimer ghost on Ghostbusters we did the same thing. A lot of the footage of the slimer ghost was shot at 18 frames a second. So that way when you see it in the film you just got that little more frenetic frantic feel to him because he’s just slightly speeded up. It was actually a really popular technique back in those days because we would we would change film speeds for for shooting miniatures and stuff in order to get the right scale for miniatures. And so it wasn’t for for the camera people who were doing it. It wasn’t that big of a leap for them because they were already used to it like oh we wanted to go this fast we’ll shoot at 18. And the Monster Makers are like sure let’s do that. So yeah.

Eric: Well even like fight scenes chase scenes I mean so much of that was manipulated by camera speed. Yeah you know so that it just makes everything look more dangerous than it is. What are some other ones that you could think of where you know you put all this time energy effort in and all sudden, here’s the moment?

Craig Caton Largent:  There was this one effect that we did on this movie called Fright Night. It was it was a hand transformation. So it was a it was we’re a human hand transforms into a werewolf paw and I decided to do it reverse and film it in reverse and so what we did is I had built this werewolf paw with all these like muscles and tendons and then covered all that with a gelatin covering of a human hand and then we melted it and it took like three months to to engineer this werewolf paw and it’s literally – the first time we shot it, it just didn’t work at all. It just failed. So three months later here I am doing another one. So it’s like the six month gag. Right. So six months later we we film it and it never worked as good as I wanted it to. But the second take is the one you see in the movie and it happens so fast it just kind of like – Blink hand. Oh OK.

Eric: And then you see the film and you’re like I worked on that for how many hours.

Craig Caton Largent: Hours and weeks and months.

Eric: And for yourself then do you and especially like when you work on something that’s cut out of the film does it bruise your ego? Or is just like, well I got paid I did my job?

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah. Back in the early days like there was like it was like what we thought was a really great shot and they got cut out of the movie. We were kind of like oh well that’s their loss they missed it. But but nowadays like like I I just finished working on an animated feature where we did 31 shots. None of them are being used. And then they decided to go a different route. And but we got paid. And yes you just can’t. After so many years you just don’t worry about the babies getting thrown out with the bathwater.

Eric: It’s like if you treat these things too precious then you’re going to be constantly frustrated.

Craig Caton Largent: Right. Exactly. You need to be really judicious and almost inhuman at some point.

Eric: Right so it’s so I mean I think what’s hysterical is like kind of hearing about. I mean I guess we’ll call it the human factor. I remember 2010.

Craig Caton Largent:  There was that one. Yeah we can talk about that.

Eric: That’s a great story to share, so 2010 the sequel to 2001 if you remember in 2001 the starbaby I’ll just.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah. So there is in the end there’s a Starchild and we won’t go into the plotline about it. But again in 2010 the star child makes an appearance. And one of the common materials that we were building puppets at the time and still is as we were using foam latex but when you have you make these foam latex pieces from molds and wherever those mold pieces come together you have a seam. And it was almost impossible to get rid of this on the foam latex so we decided to skip using foam latex and move to using gelatin and it was really easy to get rid of the seam because all you needed was like a hot washcloth and it was dissolved. We took him to set and we filmed him and we decided to break for lunch and the still photographer asked if if he could take a couple of pictures and we said sure. And he asked if we could leave the light on it was these great big hot movie lights and so he did. He took his pictures and then he left for lunch and he forgot to turn off the light. What happened was these lights had caused the left side of the star child’s face to melt. So imagine a baby with a stroke you know with the whole left side of the face sagging down and you know something’s drastically wrong. So the photographer he was also the first one back and he sees this and he panics and he he spins around and he smashes face into a pole. And knocks himself unconscious and literally like a minute later we come walking into this and we see this dead guy on the ground and this stroked out Starchild and, what happened here?! But yeah I was I was a big whoopsie.

Eric: I mean other times you could think of were like I mean it’s a little bit different but like in Terminator 2 with the famed.

Craig Caton Largent: Oh the puppeteering thing.

Eric: Yeah Terminator 2 one of the most iconic moments in the whole film.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah. So there’s. We’re talking about donut head.

Eric:Yeah donut head.

Craig Caton Largent:  So so in Terminator 2 there’s this puppet we called him donut head and it’s the the T 1000. And Linda Hamilton shoots his face with a shotgun and and all of a sudden his right eye is nothing but this giant hole all the way through his head. And so I had I had made this puppet. It was basically a big hand puppet so my hand was up in his head controlling his head. And then we had another puppeteer who was controlling both his shoulders just to bring to get the shoulders to come to life. And then on top of that we also had the actor Robert Patrick. We were using his real left arm to cover up the puppets face so we would do this reveal. So we were all smashed together as close as could be and we do this reveal. But the gag was there is a rotating collision beacon light that needs to show up. Through the hole of this puppet behind him and trying to wrangle this puppet into this position while you’re fighting against two other puppeteers is almost impossible to get it into just the exact micrometer position. We succeeded on take four and in true James Cameron fashion he said that was perfect. Let’s do it again and we couldn’t do it again to save our lives in fact it got so bad that James Cameron was wondering if I even knew what I was doing. At points though he gets up and he’s like four inches away from my face literally it’s like we’re on an old soap opera or something and he’s screaming at me. “Do you know what you did wrong? Do you know what you blankity blank blank blank did wrong?” And I go.” Yeah I didn’t get the eye in the eye light and the collision beacon.” and he went from like raving monster to like totally calm guy just looked at me in the face and said, “okay well don’t do it again or I’ll kill you.” Well we didn’t did it again and we had to break for lunch. Next thing you know there’s James Cameron walking next to me and he’s saying hey you know I really gave it to you back there but don’t worry this is going to be like one of the signature shots in the movie and it’s going to be on the cover of Cinefex. And absolutely true to to James. It made the cover of Cinefex which totally made my day. James Cameron he’s true to his word.

Eric: Except for the part about killing you.

Craig Caton Largent: Well there is that we all had t shirts made saying that we know we’re going to heaven because we worked on a James Cameron movie.

Eric: Speaking of James Cameron who went from like these low budget like Roger Corman. In case the name doesn’t ring a bell Roger Corman is like the ultimate low budget producer. He’s produced 500 or so films.

Craig Caton Largent: At least yeah.

Eric: Maybe even more. But Roger Corman gave Cameron his start and Joe Dante I think Coppola might have worked with him at one point with Jonathan Demme I believe went through Corman Nicholson.

Craig Caton Largent: He taught people how to make movies on a shoestring budget and he can make a viable you know 90 minute movie for ninety thousand dollars and would make money off of it.

Eric: And it would be like sci-fi or horror so like genre that actually might cost a buck or two to get across the visuals.

Craig Caton Largent: And he also showed people how like like he holds the record of number of setups like in a single day. I think he has like 88 camera setups in a day or something like that. And I remember on Jurassic Park we got 44 one day and we were like yeah we were, we were really jazzed that we gotten like halfway to Corman the thing about Jurassic Park is we over planned everything on that movie. I mean like every single shot like we did storyboards we did a little stop motion animatics we did paper cut outs that we ran around with on set and did timing with. And we we did hand puppets and we we put it all together and then we had this amazing shot by shot blueprint to make the movie. But because it was so planned people don’t know this but we finished 15 days ahead of schedule and 20 million dollars under its budget.

Eric: Unbelievable. I think too what’s so interesting about Jurassic Park I mean besides everything is like that was the transformation that was sort of the moment even though we had computer technology before.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah it’s where we moved it’s were they proved the audience once in a while we could seamlessly blend between the two.

Eric: And I know for yourself this was also a transformative moment for your career too.

Craig Caton Largent: Absolutely yeah because that’s where I made the switch from doing the practical stuff over to the digital world.

Eric: Did you still find yourself kind of doing animatronics and puppetry or really did you kind of go all in on animation or was it somewhere in between?

Craig Caton Largent: It was it was an interesting blend for a while because I was still getting calls all the time to do puppets and animatronics. And so as much as I possibly could I would still take those jobs on because I still enjoyed doing them and still do. It got eventually got less and less because I was you know being known for digital stuff and getting more involved with that.

Eric: I mean seems like after Jurassic Park like the budgets went up like what did you take from the low budget world over to the high budget world? You know like what tricks or lessons or?

Craig Caton Largent: Oh yeah well you know like you know necessity being the mother of invention. So there were there were times like like I was I was working on a fairly you’re going to laugh because it was Star Trek 4 and I’m gonna say it was a low budget movie because.

Eric: The Voyage Home?

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah the saving the whales.Yeah the one set in modern day San Francisco. In terms of of the what we did for creatures and stuff it was actually an incredibly low budget movie. Their thoughts were that its star trek. We have a guaranteed audience whether we have monsters or not they’re going to come see this movie. But there were there was a couple of these aliens and I had to make a couple of them and I wanted them to have the same paint jobs and I didn’t want to have to sit there and painstakingly try to duplicate each paint job. So I made these these vacuform shells that would fit over the heads and then I cut holes in them and use those as like friskets or templates for my airbrush. So all I had to do was like slap them up against the rubber mask and spray them with my spray paint and then pull them out an instant pattern. And I didn’t have to sit there for like four or five hours. You know like duplicating each one of them. Then one of the guys I was working with named Shannon Shea he went from there he went over to Stan Winston’s to work on this movie called Alien Nation. And they were forced with like you know you know Mandy Patinkin is going to go through like five of these appliances every week and we need to make those patterns consistent. So Shannon goes I have an idea from Craig we did this. And so they incorporated that idea into this much bigger movie and that was one of the reasons they were able to make the movie work.

Eric: So John Carpenter you worked with him on Big Trouble in Little China, And They Live right?

Craig Caton Largent:  And They Live yeah actually want to know what we did on they live as we had been working on this movie The Return of the Living Dead Part II and in the early days of the Living Dead Part 2 we sculpted a zombie monster appliance a day. So after that we had like over a hundred different zombie masks and stuff that we could choose from. And when they live came out they just went through the living dead collection and said we like that one and we like that one and.

Eric: For the alien faces?

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah yeah. And they were modified a little bit and that was they were reuses it wasn’t really a hard show to do. And it’s one of those shows where you think back like, “What did I do on that show? I know I was on it.”

Eric: It seems like every movie I do from this time frame you’ve worked on. You’re one of those guys your IMDb page only tells like part of the story really.

Craig Caton Largent: Oh yeah there’s there’s like I there’s not even half of the movies I worked on are on IMDb. You know there were like little movies where I I just like for like for instance there is a movie called Darkman.

Eric: Of course directed by Sam Raimi. Starring Liam Neeson.

Craig Caton Largent: And it’s just a tiny little deal but they needed a close up of a helicopter instrument panel when the helicopter goes haywire. And they couldn’t do it with a real helicopter you can’t just sit there now make the instruments go crazy. There you go. Cut check gate move on. So I made a miniature helicopter instrument panel for a Bell 206 and it’s only in like three or four seconds like, “oh look the guages are going crazy! OK cut.” You know and so you know you spend like three or four days making something like this. And it’s for three or four frames and then you forget about it and you move on. There was a while in the 80s where I was I was pretty good friends with a lot of the makeup artists who were doing television shows but they were so busy doing the actors and stuff like that that they didn’t have time to do the occasional cuts and bruises and scrapes and the type of stuff that would occur from time to time. And one of these shows was Airwolf and in one episode they just had this guy – they needed to put scrapes and cuts and bruises on his face and then they’re going to put them on the nose of the helicopter and shoot him. And then things moved on and then like maybe two years ago you know Airwolf was like what thirty five years ago. Right? The early 80s. Yeah. So there it is on television on TV Land and I’m watching this episode and I see this guy’s on the nose a helicopter and I see a close up and I’m looking at his face. “Hey you know that’s actually a pretty decent makeup on there. Oh dammit I did that!” and you suddenly realize, “oh that was one of mine.” And you like for some reason I didn’t see interview with a vampire. I worked with worked on Interview With A Vampire. I didn’t see the movie for six years after it came out. And I went I guess I should watch this movie. I went oh the stuff I did on actually worked OK.

Eric: The make up effects in that are pretty great actually and I mean because also that movie like you can’t get away with like you know.

Craig Caton Largent: And we we that was in the early days where we were abusing C.G. in movies like you know why do something that would cost us $15 practically when we can spend $150,000 to do it in CG land and we did a lot of that back in those days before we started coming to our senses.

Eric: I mean I always have this like fondness and respect for the low budget filmmakers because they find solutions. You know.

Craig Caton Largent: Oh yeah you had to be really clever back in those days. One of the cool clever things that we did for the Interview With A Vampire is that there’s this big Southern mansion. It’s like this famous southern mansion with like these giant pillars in the front that has to burn down. Obviously we burned we couldn’t burn down the real one right. But what we did is all we did was we built we built a replica of this building and we painted all black. It was just the shapes. No details. And then we lined it up with a roto mask box we lined it up with the background plate that we shot of the building. So it superimposed the the building and then we lit that on fire. So even like if it’s fire from behind the pillars it ask it’s working as its own mask. So and it’s you know and all you have to do is marry the two pieces of film together and you have an instant fire scene and it looks great. And it did look great and we did everything. You know we’re all by the book. We had fire marshals there because when you do big burns like this you have to have the you know the fire engines and fire marshals there and we lit on fire. And then we could not put it out and it was maybe 15 feet away from the building which was completely covered in black duvetyne. So all of a sudden it went from being this cool effect to a really quick emergency. So yeah the the more fire engine showed up and they put it out and they were going to fine us like ten thousand dollars for this little episode but we pointed out that the whole thing had been approved by their fire marshal and given the stamp approval and like if it’s approved then it should have been good. So we got out of that.

Eric: So if you had lets say one creation you have in terms of like you have the most pride for you know and then also on the flip side.

Craig Caton Largent: The least.

Eric: Well at least like one where you’re like, “Ah. Why did they keep that?”

Craig Caton Largent: Might be the stuff.

–The stuff coming soon for you from New World Pictures.–

Eric: Is that one of the ones that you sort of shake your head at still. And if you don’t know the stuff is a horror movie that it’s like.

Craig Caton Largent: It’s like The Blob. It was like these people discover this stuff in a cave and they think it would be a good yogurt substitute just deal go go with us here yeah. What they don’t know that it’s actually this giant primordial parasite. And once you eat it it takes over your body and you become like a collective hive mind. There are some of the gags we did on that. Yeah because like we were trying to do like an exploding head like they did on Scanners, right? And we knew on Scanners that that when they built the head that like the gelatin that they made the head from was like less than a quarter of an inch thick because it turns out gelatin is really strong! And but we knew this but the director said he wanted like this giant meaty chunks of gelatin splattering about and. And. And so he convinced us wrongly he convinced us to make the gelatin about an inch and a half thick and we had hired one of the most prominent explosive pyro guys in the business his name was Joe Viskocil. He blew up the death star for star wars. That was his big fame. And he’s loading the explosives into this fake head and I’m going. Yeah. How much is that. I’ll never forget he says I’m using 16 times the amount of explosives I used on the death star.

Eric: To blow up this one one head.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah and we’re going cool it’s going to blow up good. And it didn’t. All it did is it got really big like a balloon head for a few frames and then it collapsed on itself. So we couldn’t use that take because they needed an explosion so we took that head and we scored it and then we took these giant two by fours scissors mechanism and we stuck like the short end of the scissors into the head to make it go apart. We broke the two by fours we could even get the gelatin head to come apart and so we abandon those effects for some other ones later.

Eric: The indestructable head. Yeah so on the on the flip side of let’s say the stuff is there one particular puppet effects shot that you just look at with with like pride like, “I can’t believe we pulled that off.”

Craig Caton Largent: There is there is one single shot that I’m most proud of all the shots that I did. It’s in the kitchen scene of Jurassic Park and the Raptors are chasing the kids into the freezer and then the Raptor goes into the freezer and there’s this really great shot of the raptor smashing against this back wall. This this cabinet filled with food and stuff like that. And you see this raptor smashing into this wall. He really looks like he’s just demolishing it that’s because I actually did. They wanted this great shot. And I just thought I found a way where I could just as the Raptors head started to make contact with the cabinet. I slammed my shoulder into the cabinet as hard as I could. I mean it’s it’s like apocalyptic it’s like you really feel like a 600 pound raptor just slammed into this wall.

Eric: Like the part where he slide like he loses his footing.

Craig Caton Largent: It’s just this quick shot you can’t see is the raptor hits it and he turns the head and they cut and it ‘s a really quick shot. But when we did the shot everyone went, “whaaaat?” And Spielberg’s like, “we got that in one.” And it just worked really really well and there’s a lot of really great iconic shots in that movie like the window porthole that I’m really proud of where I copied the movie Alien and stuff. That’s one of my favorite shots. But this particular shot. Every time I see it it just works because it did I smashed into that thing so good and so that’s like my favorite shot of all time I think now. When I was doing the Raptors on Jurassic Park I used Kermit the Frogs voice for the raptors the whole time so it was like so you can imagine the Raptor sitting there going into the kitchen. “All right everybody it’s the raptor and I’m getting ready to come into the kitchen grr alright I’m now in the kitchen” I just kind of like gravitated towards Kermit the Frog voice. It wasn’t like a conscious thing.

Eric: Well in some ways you’re doing the hand right.

Craig Caton Largent: So you’re like hey everybody and it kind of goes when you move your hand you just have to do Kermit with it. “Now everybody welcome to a really big show.” Imagine if I used Yoda’s voice, “my raptor I help you not. But okay. My favorite. I think my favorite movie of all time and the work that I’m really the most proud of might be tremors because Tremors was probably the last pre CG movie.

Eric: Yeah like pure puppetry.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah like we did every puppet trick in the book. We did reverse shots we did marionettes. We did cable controlled puppets. Everything you can imagine we did hand puppets. Everything under the sun was there.

Eric: The part when I don’t remember if it was Kevin Bacon or Fred Ward who punched one of the puppets was that you by chance?

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah yeah yeah there’s. There’s. There’s one shot that I’m really proud of where we took one of these really expensive tentacle mechanisms we made and we buried him in the ground and then I forget the name of the person he’s driving the bulldozer right. And he’s coming down the road. And this thing’s sticking out of the ground and the teeth of the bulldozer look like it just mows this thing over right. Well it never even touched it. So I’m sitting there with the controls right at the last second. And it’s a great shot it works really well.

Eric: Yeah that’s what of like. I don’t know. We went over a whole bunch of films but that’s one that’s really especially if you like the genre. It does it so well.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah And when you start looking at the background story of the writers and everybody involved in the movie it just becomes that that even more enchanting and great for you because if you’ve seen tremors I’m going to ruin the ending for you.

Eric: Sorry guys.

Craig Caton Largent: In the end of the movie Kevin Bacon runs towards this cliff and he stops at the last minute and the worm keeps going over the cliff.

–Can you fly you sucker?!–

Craig Caton Largent: So where have we seen this gag before we’ve seen it in a dozen Roadrunner-Coyote movies? And the reason we see it there is the two writers are Tremors. Brent Maddock and Steve Wilson they used to be writers for Chuck Jones on the Roadrunner cartoons and that’s why you’ll see all the same gags like they do the fishing with dynamite gag. Wiley Coyote does that with a fishing pole with the roadrunner right and it gets stuck in the cactus and gets thrown back. So that was all that was you know there was all it was all.

Eric: I had no idea I had one question for you actually about. Because it’s like we’re talking so much about you know sort of animatronics and puppets. How did it prepare you then for your eventual shift in animation?

Craig Caton Largent: The thing that actually I need to even go back before puppets to do this. The thing that prepared me to do puppets was I actually went to school and I became an X-ray technologist. And so I had this great knowledge of how human anatomy worked. I knew exactly how Bones worked against each other because you know you’re taking x rays of them all the all the day long. And so I took that that working physiology knowledge with me into puppet making and all of a sudden when I start making like shoulder joints and you’re having a really hard time getting shoulders to act natural like human shoulders you start thinking hey what if I start making these little poly foam strips like the muscle strips of a shoulder and seeing if it works that way and sure enough it does it. So that carries over to that but then when we go over to into the C.G. world we’re trying to figure out how do we make these puppets move around? And for the longest period of time – so in CG world the puppets they have little skeleton joints and you reach and you grab like an arm bone and then you rotate it to move to animate the arm of this C.G. character. And it became really hard to do because you’re trying to reach in between the skin basically of the character and pick this bone. Sometimes you would get the skin and it’d be really frustrating. So we had this meeting one day and my supervisors said, “Hey Craig you’re from the puppet world. You know how do you control puppets like this? – Well we use cables or we could do like Kermit the Frog where we would use like a rod puppet to control the wrist.” And when I said that this Irish guy named Greg Maguire just belts out this “that’s brilliant!” And he runs off. Right. And about 15 minutes later Greg comes back with this C.G. arm and hand mechanism that has these three little cones under the wrist and each one of these cones is controlling a different aspect of the arm one one cone is controlling the translation and one cones controlling the rotation. The other cone is controlling the scale. Then right then and there this other really brilliant mind a guy named Mark Swain says, “wouldn’t it be better of all those controls were on one?” And Greg goes, “that’s brilliant!” And he runs off. They both run off and they come back 15 minutes later and then they have all the controls on one cone. And that’s how controls got made for the C.G. industry. If you look on any C.G. character now you’re going to see these little spline controls around the wrist and the heads and stuff and we invented that it all came from that meaning and that day of like how you know going back to what we were saying earlier you know necessity being the mother of invention how do we do this.

Eric: So now you’ve been working with New York Film Academy like four years.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah about four years now.

Eric: And were you was the first teaching you did like here or did you teach before like has this been.

Craig Caton Largent: I had done a little bit of teaching other places but not formal teaching like I did here and my very first class was teaching digital environments. I did my whole lesson plan. And I looked at the clock and only 20 minutes had gone by and I still had like two hours left for the class like I covered all my material and I’m just looking at my students are looking at me like I’m a crazy man.

Eric: Dense material that you’re covering too I’m sure.

Craig Caton Largent: And I was going like a mile a minute you know two hours and 45 minutes of materials in under 20 minutes. So I just look up and they’re like deers in the headlights like, “what?!”

Eric: What did we just witness??

Craig Caton Largent: So yeah that was where I had to slow things down a bit.

Eric: So now that you’ve been the department chair for almost two years and you’ve taught here for a few years like what’s the shape of the program now at the school in terms of what students are taught what the expectations are when they finish the program.

Craig Caton Largent: Well we retooled pretty much the whole whole program. There were there were some things that I felt were were old fashioned and we didn’t really need to do just kind of getting things little more modernized and stuff. But the great thing was that the team that I got that my instructors and stuff I couldn’t get better instructors they were absolutely fantastic so. So I walked in to like this this wonderful team that that I was learning from them which was great but we’ve enjoyed a tremendous amount of growth in our first year. Yeah we’ve we’ve grown over 242 percent. I also think that as we’ve gone along these last four years also that the instructors have become a lot better as well we’ve all matured and figured out better ways to teach this stuff. And that is easily reflected when you look at the quality of our students work now compared to the stuff that you were seeing like four years ago. It’s it’s like night and day with what they’re doing.

Eric: So a student comes here what are some of the specific skills that they’re going to pick up. And also what might be something they’ll learn that might be surprising to them that they’ll learn.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah actually one of the things that constantly surprises my new students is that we don’t actually start out in digital we actually start out in traditional. So we start out with our traditional drawing class with a really great traditional artist and we also start out with a traditional sculpting class where you sculpt stuff in clay. And what this does is it helps give the student it grounds them in the physical world in terms of like in for instance like sculpting it allows them they actually get a real 3D spatial sense in the world before doing it digitally and then in as far as drawing it helps hone their drawing skills and their color. Stuff like that.

Eric: Gives them a real world base.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah yeah. And I think that’s really the best way to go because a lot of this stuff is going to start out with a pencil sketch anyway before it goes into the CG world. That and one of the things that I was actually thinking of getting rid of but it turned out was one of the most popular subjects ever. We teach a class in stop motion in a traditional stop motion animation and I thought that it was kind of a dead field. I was completely wrong. Very much alive and popular and so I decided to keep that class and I’m actually trying to build on it and make it an even more robust and more professional like class that offers even more. So the stop motion stayed and that was because every open house the perspective students would come over and they’d say and I would say yeah we do stop motion they’d go, “you teach stop motion?!” And all of a sudden their eyes light up and you’re like yeah we’re not getting rid of that class maybe we’ll add another one.

Eric: Do they then get into coding like what’s the next steps?

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah actually that’s another interesting thing. Before I became chair a lot of the students were complaining about how hard the coding class was and that was right about the time that I took over that class and was teaching it myself. And then they actually got rid of it. And so the first thing I did when I became chair was I I actually re-instituted that program because you’ll not see a single job out there for CG people where it says you know Python coding skills a plus. Yeah.

Eric: But then also too the craft shifts like technology shifts. So I mean with that in mind like in terms of teaching then how do you teach for a medium that more than any of the other crafts arts that we teach here at the school feels like it’s probably the one that shifts it fastest.

Craig Caton Largent: It’s constantly evolving and there are every day we’re there are new tools out there and stuff like that and so basically I go home and I just I just start looking at I look at tutorials online and constantly seeing what’s the newest greatest thing out there and if we should try to leverage off of that because I know practically everybody in the business a lot of it. It’s calling them up and saying hey you what are you how’s your pipeline different than it was a couple of years ago. And what are you doing differently now. And they’re more than happy to talk about it because they actually want us to train people that can do their jobs. And you know and not just be.

Eric: They don’t have to reteach them.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah there’s there’s there’s a huge amount of reteaching that has to happen anyway because of the proprietary software that they use in these big big places. But that being said if our if our students come in with the knowledge base that they have it makes it much easier.

Eric: So it’s like you keep your ear to the train track.

Craig Caton Largent: You have to. Yeah you really have to. Yeah because even the stuff that was cutting edge four years ago when we started yeah that’s old now like a couple of years ago I can’t remember Hollow Man came out right. So there is a movie Hollow Man and and then around the same time there was a Spider-man movie where Thomas Haden Church becomes Sandman. They spend millions and millions of dollars on these sand simulations right back in those days.

Eric: And it looked gorgeous.

Craig Caton Largent: And it’s really gorgeous right. My students do that as a tutorial. That’s how far things have gone. So from from like five or six years ago or eight years ago whenever that was like the cutting edge thing yeah. It’s now a tutorial for students. We teach like a really rounded set of stuff for both for animation and for visual effects depending on whatever part of the world that you want to head to for your career. I feel that the students that are leaving our school are actually better trained than I am because I have like for instance we have one of the greatest nuke instructors nuke is a program that we use for compositing and we have an amazing instructor here. He’s one of the world’s best and when they’re finished with his class they know more than I do about this. So we’re actually putting out people better trained than we are. And that’s that’s really great.

Eric: In some ways that’s the hope too.

Craig Caton Largent: It’s really neat. Yeah. And it’s been really rewarding on a on a personal level just to to have like these students of yours that graduate from your program and then all of a sudden next thing you know you’re hearing they’re they’re working on Alien Covenant and they’re working on Justice League and the new Harry Potter movie and the new the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie which all of those movies I mentioned have students that came from our program working on those. So for like the last maybe the last year and a half, just about every major movie that’s come out has had work that some of our students have been on and that’s tremendously rewarding. It’s like it’s like seeing yourself kind of live on through them. And that that that’s really cool.

Eric: That’s what you hope they come out of here and they work and they I always say you know at our open houses the goal is not to be a great art student, the goal is to be a trained professional. The goal is to get a job. You know. I think we covered it all. So thank you so much. Beyond being a great teacher a great animator great effects guy you’re also just a great dude. And it’s been so much fun getting to know you over the last few years.

Craig Caton Largent: Yeah I it’s been one of the best experiences of my life. Coming here to teach for one reason it is because I’ve been able to take all of the disciplines I’ve learned over the years and put them all together. And then the other thing is just working with other tremendously talented people and hanging around people with you know people like yourself. That was fun as usual.

Eric: Well thank you to Craig Caton-Largent for joining us here and thanks to all you guys for listening.

This episode was edited and mixed by Kristian Hayden. Our creative director is David Andrew Nelson who also produced this episode with Kristian Hayden and myself. Executive produced by Tova Laiter, Jean Sherlock, and Dan Mackler. To learn more about our programs, check us out at nyfa.edu. If you’d like to see some of our Q&As with the entertainment industries biggest names, check out our youtube channel at YouTube.com/NewYorkFilmAcademy. Be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts or wherever you may listen. See you next time.