Bobby Fingers Is YouTube’s Subversive, Brilliant Model Maker
Looking for 30-minutes of absurdist escapism? Look no further.
I love a rabbit hole. (No, that’s not a sex term, sadly; it’s a deep dive into something’s strangest and most wonderful corners.) And there ain’t no rabbit hole like a YouTube rabbit hole. It was about two hours into a portal of programming pleasures that I discovered Bobby Fingers: He’s an Irish prosthetics artist who previously worked on special effects in TV and film and makes some wonderfully weird stuff on his channel. I chatted with him a bit about his videos and took a closer look at his immense artistry…and delightfully twisted mind.
Bobby makes dioramas (which we’re partial to here at Wondercade) — “historical ones,” he calls them — of unsavory or embarrassing pop-culture moments. Remember when a goose flew into Fabio’s head on a roller coaster? Or when Michael Jackson’s hair caught fire filming a Pepsi commercial? Bobby does. (Those videos are here and here, respectively. One of my heroes, MythBusters star Adam Savage, appears in the former.) And not only is each video hysterical — they’re made with the talent and precision of an artist.
Take this one of Mel Gibson’s infamous 2006 arrest, in which Bobby sculpted a life-sized clay head, crafted with all the technical expertise of Michelangelo — down to individual wrinkles on Mel’s furrowed brow and individual tufts of hair. Then he had it scanned and 3D-printed to make a similarly realistic one-ninth scale model. (All his dioramas are to 1:9 scale.)
One of Bobby’s recent videos includes building a rowboat in the form of Jeff Bezos’s head. Yes. A rowboat of Jeff Bezos’s head. Wouldn’t an Amazon delivery truck have been better? Apparently not, explained Bobby. “I made the Jeff Bezos rowing boat to prove to my wife that I love her because she thought I had fallen out of love with her,” he told me. “She promised that if I ever felt unloved by her that she would make me a Gandhi hot-air balloon to prove her love for me. So I look forward to that.” So do we, Bobby!
Bobby’s videos include painting, sanding, styling, whittling, balancing textures and colors, whizzing through computer design software and more. All of it is narrated with extremely subversive humor and a soothing baritone voice, and set to chill music. He uses materials including dirt, polyester foam, silicone, resin, dehydrated mushrooms and horse “caca.” His word, not mine.
To make his model roller coaster for the Fabio video, he “sanded it by candlelight — as per my fate.” But it’s not just technical artistry; it’s comedy, too. He sent shirtless photos of himself to “20 publishers of erotic fiction, but none of them were interested,” which triggers an entire B-plot within the video of him bouncing from personal trainer to personal trainer to get Fabio-level fit enough to grace the cover of a romance novel. GENIUS! He also seals the finished dioramas and buries them somewhere in the middle of a field, hiding the actual coordinates somewhere in his video, or elsewhere. (And yes, people do find them!) We asked Bobby what cool projects he has coming up, but he responded, “I don’t like the idea of teasing strangers.” Respect!
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