The Extreme DIY-ers

You never know what you can build until you put your mind to it. In this reel, we meet the production designer behind the iconic “Friends” apartment, an 18-year-old who built his own prosthetic arm out of Lego blocks, an architect who constructs life-size military tanks that shoot confetti and adults who create cardboard fighting costumes and weapons and battle it out in Boxwars.

[Music] John schaffner designed the most famous New York City apartment of all time except it only had three walls and no ceiling and it wasn't actually in New York john shafte designed a set of friends John is a production designer and John has worked on a lot of show I've done 44 series and sixty eight pilots Darmon Greg the drew Carey Show Two and a Half Men Big Bang Theory and most notably friends if when I get assigned a new show I do what is called a sketch model in white paper and you hold it up and you close one eye and you squint and you can see just what the camera is gonna see when we were presenting friends I presented a white model and the producer looked at it and said well now what are we gonna do about color what do you want to do and I said I think we should paint the sad purple everybody was really anxious about nobody likes change until I painted the little model purple color is really important in terms of establishing the show identity when you switch to friends you saw that it was purple and you stay tuned one of the responsibilities of a production designer is to look into the future if you can we put a door all the way up this hallway and we really didn't say where it went to I said why don't we just wait and see where the story is taken so all of a sudden years into the show we've never seen this door open they do an entire episode about this was Monica's messy closet oh my god I definitely think that the coffeehouse on friends sort of influence our culture where people like to meet and hang around thank you and now of course 25 years later there's the coffee house on every corner and I'm surprised how many of them have overstuffed chairs in the pilot at the moment when Rachel walks through the door and the wedding dress is a pivotal moment we made a decision to put the door up here on a diagonal she bucks POW through those doors and straight to the camera and everybody had to like physically turn and look this is everybody this is Chandler and Phoebe and Joey and you remember my brother Ross sure who knew that that was gonna be the beginning of 10 years of a number one show on television audiences relate to sitcoms because once you get to know the characters you become invested in their story so it's easy to turn on and watch an episode of friends it's a comfort coming back to visit with these characters and be with them for that half-hour I'm so lucky I got to design friends when I was a kid I always played with Legos I built cars planes motorbikes now I built an arm [Music] meet David Aguilar my name is David Aguilar I am from Andorra and I'm 18 years old when David was born his right arm hadn't fully developed this is the my right arm growing up it was quite annoying because I received a lot of commentaries like oh you don't have a hand or something like that and while some would see this as a disadvantage David is just a regular kid he likes EDM he goes by the name hand solo get it he has an embarrassing dad he goes to school this is my school and he can open doors with his Lego arm so cool growing up he was obsessed with Lego so much so he wanted to make it a part of him literally I build my first prosthetic arm when I was 9 years old and I build it I run my hand it started and being a boat unfortunately the Lego bricks weren't strong enough and it wasn't for another nine years - he would try again this is mk1 this is LEGO Technic it's like the sophisticated part of Lego I can do push-ups with this thing so it's quite strong when I first build the arm and it was fully functional I went to the mirror and I was like oh that model the mk1 only took five days to build of course like any good adventure he got straight to work on an upgrade and this is mk2 it has a battery that works like a biceps and it has this fishing cable that ties up in here when I fix this to my shoulder I can do this and the arm closes I can stop in the middle and move it by myself when I first brought this they were all really amazed because how can somebody create a hand out of Legos I was a normal guy and when I build a yarn everyone was like you're awesome you're you're really smart they told me they are really proud to be to be my friends it's amazing [Music] party is just an illustration but we were written because finish the passion original report a question arose a capitalist economy in Hazzard Sylvia cool you have to check to straighten his vision as mentioned something about mother the conquer deep in the suburbs of Moscow in a town called Nova selkie Sergei and his comrades tirelessly work on a pretty unique hobby through years of experimenting and prototyping they've taught themselves how to build life-size tanks out of a garage all in the name of celebrating Russian history muscles - 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Wallach good a person as a human human cumulative because I'd bounce to Chicago good shortens to do stunts in style design is [Music] can you smell is innocent under international wired Muslim because I assumed it included Anita mushroom Naga Naga become another candidate meets them the probability of vehicle agriculture business machinery Jerry's fault Jerry's the most technically at the Dublin repair and through paternity screencast box wars really feels like a medieval battle the only difference is this with cardboard [Music] there's rules to box wars but they're very limited there's no winners we like to say that if you're in a box Wars where you've already lost I'm Ross I'm one of the supreme overlords of box Wars box Wars is a collective of people that love to get together create cardboard creations and then destroy them in an epic battle it's more about competitiveness in being creative the only materials that you can use cardboard adhesives like tape hot glue whatever you can find in packaging that's the stuff that we like to use to build our suits every single battle has a new engineering challenge like building a giant aircraft carrier or building a monster truck that actually rolls or a train which has to carry in a whole bunch of policemen we encourage people to come down to our events and build as elaborate costumes as they can possibly make once they've build the props then we all gather at a park and then we battle everyone comes in and clashes and destroys everything stuff that we spent weeks on designing it's all gone in seconds it just started off really small but then all the sudden it blew up there's generally around about 50 to 100 people in the actual battle and then it can be hundreds and hundreds of spectators we've got chapters that have started up all around the world we've had groups in Japan in Europe in America in Canada it seems so childish but it's fantastic that a concept like this crosses cultural and language barriers Vauxhall's is based around comedy that's the whole point of box wars we're losers what we're doing is quite pathetic we shall have real jobs but here we are building stuff out of cardboard if you laugh at us that's exactly what we want [Music]