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