magical woodworking technique using a circular saw

Did you make those ones that are in that scene? The ones with the wings? Yeah, you did those. Yeah, that was us. This is Jitterbug Boy. It's a shop I established almost 15 years ago here in Toronto. And what we do is we make footwear exclusively for the arts. So our main clients tend to be films, TV, a fair bit of circus, a little bit of theatre here and there, and then, you know, the occasional offer of ballet. Everything is made here in Parkdale completely by hand for shows literally all over the world. Sometimes it'll be a designer with very set ideas of, OK, we want it to be exactly, you know, this, this, and this. Other designers will be much more vague, and those tend to be more of the fun projects because it means I get to put a bit of my own thumbprint on it. It's always kind of a bit of a balance of three factors. The designer who wants a certain aesthetic. There's an actor who will always want to be comfortable. And then there's the technical of, we've got to have these really nice dress shoes made for this actor. And, oh, yeah, he's got to hang on the outside of a plane, make it work, and we need it in three weeks. And that's actually an actual instance. I don't even think we had three weeks for it, though. I've been working in theatre since I was a kid and done, like, carpentry and metalwork and, you know, lighting and sound and costumes, props, a little bit of everything. And the more I got into shoes, it's like, oh, it's... Here's the cutting element from when I was doing costumes. Here's very much a props element. Here's a bit of metalwork, a bit of woodwork, all combined into one thing. And, yeah, it just kind of got me interested. And then that got the ball rolling. Almost everybody who came in here didn't have any shoemaking experience. But the one common thing with all 18 or 19 people you see kicking around in here is everyone's creative and everyone's good with their hands. I have not purchased a pair of shoes in about 14 years. So, yeah, every pair of shoes that I wear have been made here. We probably do about 50 or 60 films a year now, so it kind of becomes a little bit less. It's still kind of cool, but I remember the first few times, it was like, wow, that's us. That is what we did in this room. You know, often you get the opposite as well. You'll work really, really long hours trying to figure out something, finally get it to work, go see the film 18 months later and they don't even make it into frame. And you're going, oh, man! But, you know, that's part of the gig. Dream project, anything that you would just love to do that you haven't been able to? We used to keep a list of... It was literally something we came up with at a bar one day of going, OK, here's my list of actors that I want to make shoes for someday, enlisted 10 people or whatever. It's like, we've scratched all those guys off and probably gone through 3 lists since then. My absolute, probably, career-topper, if not my absolute lifetime highlight, was we were working on The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. So we were just doing some of the kind of cowboy-type stuff for that. And then phone rings, and it's the assistant designer from that, and she's like, we have this project we're hoping you have time for, it's really last minute, but Tom Waits was just in here and we're hoping you have time to make a pair of boots for him. It's like, yeah. I was like, I'm a huge Tom Waits fan. The business is named after a Tom Waits song. And it's like, yeah, we can do that. And so we did it, and a year later, seeing Tom Waits in this beautiful film wearing boots that we made for him, it's like, I could literally never make another pair of shoes for the rest of my life and die content right now. So yeah, I would say that that's probably the highlight.