Adam Savage's One Day Builds: Chinatown Stunt Knife (Corridor Crew FX Challenge!)

Hello kitty, Adam Savage, here in my cave, with a fun

challenge

. I worked in special effects for many years. I'm a big lover of the history of special effects, both practical and not, and practical effects refer specifically to the physical effects that occur. For the most part, there are outliers and exceptions to that, but for the most part, practical effects versus other types like compositing and blue screen, etc., practical refers to something that happens on set, it's hard to overcome the practical effects if you can afford to use them. the frame truth when you put everything in a movie into a single frame instead of compositing it will always be better overall.

I mean, I've been lucky enough to talk to a lot of wonderful directors like john favreau and guillermo del toro and peter jackson and all of them to the end love and prefer that they can have practical effects on set, that's another aspect of the practical environment like the that we constantly sell a diet of movie special effects in which elements from all over come together like the final fight scene of Avengers Infinity War where you know the actors are filming in multiple parts of the world and they are bringing everything together for this final battle, but today we cover my favorite practical effect, my my. favorite maybe those are strong words to say it's my favorite we're talking about

chinatown

knife

chinatown

it's a 70's movie starring jack nicholson faye dunaway it's an amazing movie one of my all time favorites uh yeah and I'm a lover of the writer Raymond Chandler.

To say I love Raymond Chandler is actually an understatement. He is really very important to my makeup and Chinatown is perhaps the most Chandleresque movie ever made. I've always hoped Tarantino would be the director. a Chandler type movie, Chinatown, oh if you haven't seen it, you're in for a treat, it's strange and surprising, and it involves this scene, so Chinatown in general covers the plot of uh of water Rights in Southern California. A very relevant plot point. Today, and in the course of the investigation, our hero Jay Giddy, played by Jack Nicholson, the lead detective is following some clues that seem to indicate that there is water shenanigans on his way to Los Angeles and he is investigating this. a warehouse or something when he is attacked by two characters, one is this giant ogre called mulva hill, who is basically some kind of bagman, a muscular man, um and mulva hill, a big grain of sand standing next to him, They are these little Frenchmen, actually the director Roman Polanski Polanski is wearing a suit and says hello kitty cat and approaches Jack Nicholson and asks him if after his scene you know what happens to kittens who stick their noses where they don't It's up to them and he puts a switchblade on Jack Nicholson's nose and then he goes through the side of Jack Nicholson's nose and the blood splatters on Nicholson's face and I saw this movie for the first time when I was 17, I bought it, I bought it on VHS in the video store and I'm watching it and I got to that scene and I was like a holy cow, the effect was crazy, it was incredible, the whole gsm crow is incredible and I remember stopping the movie and rewinding and you know the best that you could frame it, which was impossible with older video recorders. but frame by frame because it was so convincing and so incredibly shocking so today kids we're going to replicate the china

knife

and then we're going to replicate the whole Chinatown knife blood splatter effect but let's take my time because this It's part of a

challenge

with our friends on the hallway team.

I'm going to do this as a practical effect and they're going to do it as a digital effect and we'll see which one takes longer, honestly. I have no idea, um, it's not enough to just build the handy knife jaw with a tip that sticks out of the way, etc. or the blood splatters, like I want to solve it, solve the problem of making this look cool here and that's when I'll do it. I consider that I am done, let's begin. It's always great when it's a cooking show. This is. I think that's pretty much everything I'll need to make this effect.

And before we start the stopwatch, I want to talk about that. Well, so I went to get the knife and it's there. It's a tricky business finding the right knife for Chinatown. The reason is that this is very, very close, super close to the real Chinatown knife and it is a switchblade. It has a guard that moves out of the way, which is necessary. the original is a little big and the problem is that it is actually a risutto estelento milano this is real this is an Italian stiletto heel and the thing is that the real knife was not a real Italian stiletto heel it was an imitation and it turns out that there were cheap imitations of these for decades that you could get on any knife table at a flea market forever and Hollywood answered the call and like every prop master, every prop house has these imitations and this imitation was what was used to make the night in Chinatown, however, finding a cheap imitation 25 years later is difficult because most of them have probably fallen to pieces, so all I could find was the real Italian knife.

I have a problem with this one and the problem is that I mean, maybe it's hard to see that, but the sheet has some scratches, it has very visible writing that is so deep that I can't get rid of it and that's not accurate to the film and yet, even though this handle has the correct brass button. and the right little stirrup saddle on the back here I'm not satisfied, it's not that I didn't love this knife so I bought this one which is also an Italian stiletto it's more manageable it's smaller and this is one of these cases where, you know, if I find the right stiletto, the right imitation, I can redo this, but for now, for the feel, the fit and the finish of what I want, this will be my sword, I think I will find it.

It's funny that post facto you have to go back to the expensive stuff that everyone avoided wearing in the past because there were cheap knockoffs available and now the cheap knockoffs are not available because they don't last because they were cheap knockoffs, yeah that's it. why I find that satisfactory the other aspect of why I choose this is the original knife sold at bonhams a few years ago and that is where I was able to learn some of the facts I needed to know about this knife and While it looked a lot more like this knife than to this one, this one is actually the right length, the actual movie knife was nine inches long and this one is too, so that's another reason to use this now that this knife has gone all the way. like uh like three quarters of an inch on jack nicholson's nose and then they just moved it to the side so how did they do that?

In a single shot you see it, in a single shot you see the blade enter and then rotate and it is not just one. photo, how do you do that right? In the auction catalog image you can see that there is a separation here and a separate tip has been applied. And the cut is actually an angled cut between the tip and the blade. An angled cut makes the join between the two very difficult to see which is kind of clever and then at the auction we never see behind the knife, unfortunately I approached the auction house and asked for photos but that's one way unlikely so I have to guess how how they did it, I read it, the prop master who built the knife is named logan frazee f-r-a-z-e-e frazee, forgive me if I'm cutting it off, I'm sure you'll tell me in the comments.

Logan Prezi did the effect for Rowan Polanski. uh it's an extremely simple effect uh and I think it implies that he says it has a hinged blade tip. I could make some kind of swivel that attaches to the back of this thing somehow, but I think it's simpler, I think it's much simpler. It's more of a spring thing, um, and even though it's a very flexible spring, I think this is precisely the amount of tension that I want because I don't want the actor who I think might be me or I don't want anyone to do it.

I feel some danger from this so obviously we're going to dull the knife but we want to choose so watch for the blade to go up the tip and move to the side it has to get out of the way and actually in a frame . from Chinatown I can see it. I took some screenshots. This is a good part of the story too. We're filming a computer screen with my phone and no, I don't know, nowhere in this equation is there an actual camera. So here. There is the knife inside Jack Nicholson's nose and that is Mulva Hill holding him from behind and then here the knife moves forward and now you can see two sports, two blood stains on Jack's face, one on Jack's eyebrow and another on the cheek, it's probably impossible. to see on camera but I can see here the tip of the knife moving like this so I can see it moving out of the way yeah here's the knife from below here's the knife look at this look at this right there there that's the split between the tip and the knife and you can see that they are very well combined and you can see a little bit of things down here.

Look, this could be on a pivot, but it doesn't look like it, I'm going to use the spring. support people, let's go for the simple solution. I'm going to guess that logan frize for z made the simple solution call. I'm going to use both knives to achieve this effect. This will be the base knife. This will be this part. I know you don't see the protector here, but you do see it in the film and here is the hole for the rivet that holds the protector in place, so I had a protector that just disappeared over the years again because it's a cheap knockoff.

I'm going to cut off the tip of this knife and then marry it to this one. I think you understand. I think we all understand everything now. Oh, right, the second part of this equation is blood. it's not enough for me it's not enough for me to just build this knife the knife is just part of the effect the whole effect is knife plus blood and for the blood I'm going to use a little bit a tried and true method of ear irrigator squeeze the bulb this is one of tom savini's favorites if all the reading about tom that I did in my youth is true um there is a famous story about tom savini directing a um leading a special effects class wait and at the opening of the class tom savini uh He rolled up his sleeve and pulled out a razor blade and cut his arm for class and was like, oh, and what he turned out to have was a pear full of blood stuck to the back of a razor blade and he just squeezed the pear. and squeeze out the blood.

I didn't want to do that on camera because I didn't feel like cutting my wrists in any realistic way for youtube, color me crazy. I think the knife works on the same principle, so I go. To do it with a pear in hand now, how can I get the blood all the way to the end with this with a small tigon tube? So I'm going to connect the tigon tube. I'm going to attach that tube to the knife and I'm going to experiment with giving it some direction so that it doesn't just spray upwards, it wants to spray towards the face, it wants to leave a lot of blood on the face, so I'm going to try to give it that ability.

To do so, for the purposes of this challenge, the timer starts the moment I start building and doesn't end until I feel like I have an effect I'm happy with. The blood in this equation is actually a famous blood, yes, you knew that. It couldn't just be my normal blood. This blood was given to me by team leader Tristan and his wonderful team who did all the blood effects for Alien Covenant when we were in Sydney, Australia, doing some coverage of that film for Sony. uh, Tristan and his team were kind enough to show me how they made people vomit blood.

They built this little shower head that goes in your mouth. They gave me one. They were amazing and this is also the same team that did all the breakdown effects. In The Matrix I specifically told you that the fight between Neo and Agent Smith in the subway, where they throw each other against the walls, is one of my favorite escapades of all time, uh, fighting effects, those practical effects that they did breaking walls in the Matrix Chef kissed some of the best work ever done. That same team, the Separatist effects team, made thousands and thousands and thousands of gallons of blood for Alien Covenant because Ridley said we needed thousands of gallons and they couldn't buy it, so they made it and they had a special formula, good blood always It has not only red coloring, but a little bit of green and a little bit of blue, plus normally you want something like cornstarch to make it a little more opaque and it's corn syrup, but it's not all corn syrup, it's corn syrup , so it's like you know it's not toxic to the taste, uh, because you know you get blood in your mouth when you're making a movie, uh, no, it's um, but it's also like watery, it's the right consistency, this it's good. looking at blood, it's been here for a decade since I covered that movie, okay, maybe not that long, but it's been here since I covered that movie, uh, in advance, yeah, here's Adam, have fun and I think it's Tristan Uh, I hope.

I'm understanding that name well. I'm going to get this old part of my brain back. If I get your name wrong, please accept my apologies. We have blood, we have a knife, we have aI'll see next time.