M5 Industries

We can't give tours, and are not open to the public. Kind of an insurance problem, as you can imagine if you have seen the show. We have a long history of doing visual effects for movies and commercials, in fact have done almost a thousand of them over the last 20 years. By we, I mean myself and numerous artisans in the San Francisco area that I have worked with or who have worked for me at M5 or Colossal Pictures when it was still around. This kind of work has always been done here on a free lance basis, and most of the craftspeople and my company, M5, are spin offs of the momentum created by the Star Wars legacy out of Lucasfilm at San Rafael. To be straight, I never worked on any of them, but there have been hundreds of people over the last decades in the bay area that have, and the model shop at ILM, M5, Colossal pictures and other shops around here shared this resource and help provide their livelihood. At this point, while M5 is still here, we are pretty well dominated by Mythbusters of the Discovery Channel. We aren't doing special effects any more. If we have inquiries, we forward them to Kerner Optical, which used to be the ILM modelshop. They do great work, and many of their staff are who we would have had do projects for us. M5 is still doing some outside work, but it is mostly R&D. Pet projects I can't resist taking on, as it were. We have been involved in developing electric vehicles, various lifesaving devices, and consulting on work in particular that falls outside the normal categories or would be considered problematic. I like a good problem to solve. Mythbusters.....well, we are still quite happily producing the show. In fact it just keeps getting better. We all still have all our limbs- maybe a few more scars than we had when we started, but I think all of us on the show wouldn't do anything else if we had a choice. We just flat out have a lot of fun. Plus we have learned things that you can't imagine from doing this work.