One of Adam's favorite movies is Rounders, and he shares the story of his journey to replicate the poker chips as seen in the film. Recently, Adam was inspired to make a carrying case for these chips--his imagining of what a case from the character Teddy KGB's underground poker game would look like. The prop is still in progress, and Adam could use suggestions for the finishing graphics of the case!
Adam shares one of his new favorite things in the cave: a highly-detailed anatomical model that's reminescent of the iconic "visible man" model kits of Adam's youth. But these figures are also representative of today's technology, being fully 3d-printed with striking detail, fidelity, and translucent parts. Find these remarkable figures here!
We go literally hands-on with the HaptX haptic glove to test its integration with an incredibly dexterous telepresence robot by Shadow Robot Company. Using these VR hand controllers, we're able to not only manipulate intricate objects like a rubix cube, but feel the objects we're grasping in a natural and intuitive way! We chat with the makers of this tech to learn how far telepresence robotics have come and what's next.
We check out Skydio 2, the new autonomous drone that is the successor to one of our favorite products of last year. It's smaller, faster, and more powerful of a self-flying camera drone than the R1, but also somehow costs less. We head to Skydio's headquarters to take a look under hood of Skydio 2 and learn how the company designed this amazing drone!
From Lost Boys to Ray Harryhausen, producer Justin Ismael digs deep into the worlds from our pop culture past to create collectibles that most modern toy companies aren't interested in making. Justin shares a few of his new projects and tells us the story of how he learned that the original poster for Robocop was based on a painting and not a photo--and then turned it into a poster!
Toy collectors and figure photographers have long appreciated the figures from 1000Toys, specifically the groundbreaking Synthetic Human design that pushed the toy industry forward with its articulation. We catch up with the team at 1000Toys to learn about what's next for Synthetic Human and how its design is now being applied to licenced figures like Hellboy, Master Chief, and Iron Giant!
We're always on the lookout for original creative designs, and the figures of Bryan Lie (aka IMCPLX) are striking not only for the character work, but the attention to detail in these sixth-scale figures' clothing. We chat with Bryan about how he uses these figures to experiment with forward-thinking fashion designs.
Toys and collectibles don't come out of nowhere. The engineering, design, and product development for some of our favorite figures comes from BigShot Toyworks, who work with companies like Sideshow and Mondo to turn sketches into prototypes. We chat with Klim of BigShot Toys to see how he's taking that production experience to develop a new line of figures to stand out on collectors' shelves.
We visit Pixar Animation Studios to chat with director Edwin Chang about the process of writing and directing the upcoming short film "Wind". We learn about how Pixar's SparkShorts program allows fresh directors to experiment with bold storytelling techniques and inventive workflows to make Pixar's equivalent of an indie film. Wind will be released on Disney+ on December 13th!