Original subtitles

GIUFFRIA: This is a world that exists in the future.

-It's got so much history. -People with a 1,000 eyes.

[ Gunshot ]

TIPPETT: I'm worried about the destruction of our dream.

It's alive! [ Laughs ]

CAMPBELL: 100 years ago, Robert Ripley went on a quest

to the farthest reaches of the globe

in search of the extraordinary and unusual.

Today, the adventure continues,

searching for the world's most bizarre,

astonishing secrets...

...on "Ripley's Believe It or Not!"

Living life on the cutting edge takes a lot of courage

and a little bit of crazy, and when the world

says you can't, these folks only up their game.

I'm Bruce Campbell.

Get ready to meet the builders of the impossible.

CAMPBELL: Every so often LEGO creates a model

that doesn't come in a box.

A project so elaborate, it's hard to believe it's real.

[ Engine revs ]

Their latest endeavor, a full scale replica...

...of the Bugatti Chiron,

one of the fastest cars in the world.

But there's only one catch,

this LEGO has to drive.

Believe it or not.

Aurelien Rouffiange grew up in Lille, France.

CAMPBELL: But, as with most kids,

play time gave way to academic pursuits.

Aurelien ended up at a design institute

in the north of France, and after graduation,

he dreamed of working for LEGO.

CAMPBELL: LEGO was founded in 1932

by Danish carpenter, Ole Kirk Christiansen.

The name roughly translating to "play well."

In 2015, LEGO became the world's largest toy company,

selling 700 billion bricks per year

in over 60 different colors,

enough to circle the world five times over.

Aurelien spent several years in the toy design division,

but the joy of working at LEGO never faded.

He was especially fascinated

with the company's giant constructions.

CAMPBELL: In 2017, after six years on the job,

Aurelien got an incredible offer,

designing one of these special projects himself.

People have made all kinds of LEGO creations,

from a 118 foot tower to a full sized house,

complete with working shower and toilet

but nothing like this.

A full size replica of a Bugatti Chiron

that actually drives.

CAMPBELL: A real Chiron can reach a top speed

of 261 miles per hour.

To achieve this velocity, Bugatti spent years

crafting the Chiron in a wind tunnel...

...with some of the brightest engineers in the world

and the finest materials.

CAMPBELL: Beneath, the body is made up of regular LEGOs

but to create the car's aerodynamic surface,

LEGO's team developed triangular structures

that could bend and shape.

They even created a specialized screw driver

made of LEGO pieces to fasten the triangles into place.

It took them 10 months to develop the model,

four months working on the exterior,

another four for the interior and chassis development,

and finally another two months to make sure

everything would fit together.

CAMPBELL: A single LEGO brick can bear up to 950 pounds

of force, making these blocks an oddly excellent choice

for building a working car.

The steering wheel, the air foil, every hinge

and interior feature made of LEGOs.

CAMPBELL: But there's one final requirement

the team has yet to achieve.

CAMPBELL: The pieces are all in place,

meticulously stacked and connected one by one.

Months of planning and building now being put to the test.

[ Engine revs ]

[ Cheering ]

-That was fantastic. -Yeah, it was.

Yeah and it actually was gaining a lot more speed

as we went along.

You stand 10 meters back between the LEGO Chiron

and the real Chiron, you really would struggle

to tell the difference.

I mean, seriously, it's that good.

CAMPBELL: LEGO has inspired legions of engineers and architects.

Designers like Elon Musk are now looking at

scaled up, LEGO-like designs

to construct affordable housing and infrastructure.

It takes a lot of imagination to transform

more than a ton of plastic pieces into a dream

but not all designs come from a happy place.

Sometimes it's pain that inspires

the grooviest creations of all.

My name is Mimi Choi. I am a professional make up artist

who is known for my illusion make up.

CAMPBELL: Mimi has reached the pinnacle of her profession

by bringing her nightmares to life.

Believe it or not.

Mimi Choi is redefining reality,

one self portrait at a time.

Mimi actually likes to paint in the middle of the night.

I feel most inspired when everyone's sleeping

and when the world is quiet.

I feel like nobody's watching me

and I can be completely myself.

CAMPBELL: Using her face as a palette,

she taps into a deep well of inspiration

that comes from a terrifying place.

Fear really empowers me in my creative process.

I've had this sleeping paralysis that hindered my life

when I was young.

Sleep paralysis is where your mind is awake

and you're trapped in your sleeping body,

and I've experienced it since I was four years old,

and I think I have a pretty severe case.

CAMPBELL: All mammals sleep in stages.

A good night of sleep means you're moving nicely

from stage to stage, waking up feeling rested.

Sleep paralysis happens when your body

fails to move through these stages,

finding itself in a frightening state of limbo.

CHOI: While I'm going through sleep paralysis,

I hallucinate things in a room,

so when I was young, I was very confused

because I would see things happening to me in the room.

So when I wake up, I don't know if it actually

really happened to me or if it's just a dream.

During my hallucinations, I see things like people

with a billion hands trying to grab my neck.

People with 1,000 eyes.

I see people splitting into 10 and coming back into one a lot.

That's why I do a lot of multiples in my illusion makeup

because I actually see those things a lot in my sleep.

CAMPBELL: But Mimi eventually found a way to tame her monsters.

CHOI: I would take out my favorite box of crayons

and my sketchbook and just doodle.

The teachers always would tell my parents

that I'm creative, that I like to draw strange things.

CAMPBELL: Over time, her creations went from paper

to her own nails and finally to her face.

As soon as I started holding the brushes

and doing makeup on the face, I felt like

a part of my brain kind of opened up.

My favorites have to be the optical illusions,

the holes in her face, things like that,

that really screws with people's minds.

CHOI: Illusion make up is very different from beauty makeup

where your focus is to beautify a person.

It allows me to transform myself and people

into anything they want.

I could turn myself into a leopard, an animal, into food.

I can turn myself into 1,000 chopped pieces

or into blurry face just using paint.

CAMPBELL: And that was just the beginning.

I was inspired by motion photography.

People running and then a photographer captures it

and it seems like they have 10 hands, 10 eyes, and 10 lips.

CAMPBELL: But perhaps Mimi's greatest influence

comes from tromper l'oeil, French for fool the eye,

a painting technique that's tricked people for centuries.

Mimi spent hours at her makeup table

turning her face into an illusion.

YANG: When she was done, I don't know if she did it

on purpose but she came into the room, woke me up.

I was still really groggy at that time.

He woke up and he just stood up and looked at me.

He's like, "What's going on?"

And he looked really scared.

If I'm doing armed security for somebody,

I need to be able to move around, draw my weapon.

[ Cheering ]

You know there's a possibility that you're gonna get hurt.

I've spent my fair share of time in a makeup chair,

but I've never met anyone who can do what Mimi Choi does.

One night during a bout of sleep paralysis,

Mimi was inspired to set out to create something different

to say the least.

CHOI: Andrew was sleeping at that point.

It freaked me out quite a bit to see her with four eyes.

[ Camera shutters ]

CHOI: When I first posted illusion eye makeup

to my Instagram, I remember, people went crazy.

Her Instagram following exploded.

CHOI: I think it was quite trippy to most people.

They had no idea what it was.

Was it Photoshop? Was it makeup?

And that was one of the first looks that went viral,

and people started recreating it from all over the world.

CAMPBELL: A single post sparked a frenzy,

driving Mimi's Instagram numbers into the millions.

By making over her face into a nightmare,

she'd also turned herself into an Internet star.

[ Cheering ]

Makeup has the power to transform somebody's life.

You never know where it's gonna lead you,

where it's gonna take you.

If I'm inspired by a dream or emotions,

I usually just go with the vision in my head

and paint directly on the face.

I don't think I'm haunted.

It's coming from my mind.

I get to create art that is unique that nobody

has seen before because it's from Mimi Choi's head.

I feel like makeup heals me.

Whenever I paint something inspired by what I see,

I don't ever dream about it anymore.

Over time, Mimi learned how to tame her monsters,

but just a few miles away, another designer

is letting his run wild.

My name's Jonathan Tippett.

I am an engineer and an inventor and an entrepreneur

and my friends refer to me as a mad scientist.

[ Chuckles ]

CAMPBELL: 45-year-old Jonathan Tippett has spent more

than 15 years trying to turn a dream into a reality.

The very early inspiration for Prosthesis

came from dinosaur legs I saw at Burning Man in 2003.

I saw these pieces made out of car parts

and I thought, "Well, that's cool."

Imagine if you could sit on top of those legs and ride them

and wouldn't it be fun if you could control them yourself?

Like, if it wasn't just automated.

And then I thought, "Well, I'm an engineer,"

and that was sort of the inception of the idea

of like a large scale, human piloted walking machine.

CAMPBELL: Born from a childhood spent racing

remote control cars and watching sci-fi movies,

Jonathan had a dream.

A decade and a half later, his vision has given birth

to an 8,000 pound mechanical monster.

Yeah, that's right!

CAMPBELL: Only trouble is, Tippett's baby still hasn't learned to walk.

Okay, so where we at Sammy?

Now, Jonathan and his team are determined

to finally put this beast into motion.

But if it fails, it could tear both man

and machine apart.

Believe it or not.

Jonathan's workshop in picturesque British Columbia,

the industrial birthplace of his mechanical masterpiece.

But his creations weren't always so complex.

Me and a group of friends built a machine

called the Mondo Spider, which was a 2,000 pound,

all electric articulated eight-legged walking machine

that you sort of sit in and operate it like a tank.

Don't step on my blue suede shoes, baby.

CAMPBELL: Mondo Spider gave way to a Mondo Snake.

TIPPETT: We learned everything that it takes

to produce a crazy project like this.

CAMPBELL: By 2010, Jonathan was dead focused

on his biggest mechanized project to date.

TIPPETT: We call it Prosthesis.

The core of what makes a mech a mech

is that it's entirely human controlled.

Robotics revolves around imbuing machines with autonomy,

which is the opposite of what we're trying to do.

We're trying to give humans an amplified capacity.

The exoskeleton amplifies the pilot's movements.

CAMPBELL: The team work non-stop for seven years

designing and redesigning, fabricating, modifying.

This machine really came from a grassroots start up.

TIPPETT: We probably put about tens of thousands of man hours

into building this thing.

CAMPBELL: What Jonathan wants in the end is a new sport,

a racing league populated by competing mechs.

But there's still a long way

to make his first mech fully functional.

At that point, the machine wasn't even moving.

If we can get this working smoothly.

It's been operational for over a year,

but it's been sluggish and it's been stiff.

Yeah, no, this is definitely cowboy engineering.

Yeah.

We've been trying to implement these upgrades on the control.

We need to get the machine moving

and reacting faster to the pilot.

CAMPBELL: It takes another two years to finish

the new control system, and even now,

there are no guarantees.

Sometimes you just gotta turn it on

and see what happens. [ Laughs ]

Suit up.

CARTER: Today's gonna be the first time

that we were actually able to turn the machine on

since those upgrades have taken place.

CAMPBELL: Even a simple test is enormously dangerous.

The mech has 200 horsepower thighs

and hydraulics that apply 12,000 pounds of force per leg.

If the mad scientist loses control of his creation,

things could get real ugly really fast.

Jonathan Tippett has spent years building a working mech,

a high horsepower monster that he's gonna test drive

for the very first time.

He's either going to succeed

or we're gonna cut to a commercial.

He's almost thrown himself out of it once,

but we've fixed that repair so.

TIPPETT: I'm worried about the destruction of our dream

by destroying the machine.

When you unleash the machine like that

and you hand the control over from the computers

to the human, I mean, there's 200 horsepower in that thing

and if you let it get out of control,

it could destroy itself pretty quick.

Okay, here we go.

We're gonna try and fire this sucker up.

This is sort of like unleashing the beast.

[ Laughs ]

We've been waiting a long time and hope it goes well.

This new control system, when John turns the machine on

for the first time, he's gonna have his finger

on the trigger, ready to shut it down right away

because if it starts to go, it could just rip itself apart.

If we destroy it, we're sunk.

CARTER: Just keep your finger on the trigger.

[ Machine whirring ]

Oh, it's alive dude. It's alive! [ Laughs ]

TIPPETT: It's so reactive.

It is so punchy, and I could feel the momentum.

[ Machine whirring ]

CAMPBELL: Prosthesis amplifies Jonathan's moves

as if it were an extension of his own body.

[ Machine whirring ]

It's like, it's amazing dude.

CAMPBELL: But, will it pass the critical test?

Can it walk?

For the first time ever, Prosthesis ambles along

at almost four miles an hour, about as fast

as a very brisk human being.

It really felt like I was one with the machine.

I know now we can make this thing run.

CAMPBELL: And once that happens...

...the possibilities are endless.

I could see somebody being rescued by a giant exoskeleton

moving rubble out of the way.

It amplifies what a human wants to do.

For Jonathan Tippett, his staff, and his mechs,

the sky is the limit.

In Spain, a very different kind of team

is also reaching for the stars,

but their creation is made of flesh and bone.

[ Cheering ]

My name is Daniel Olivella.

I've been part of the Castellers de Vilafranca since 1998.

CAMPBELL: The Castellers de Vilafranca

are one of 100 teams in the northwest Spanish region

of Catalonia who compete in human tower building.

It's such a great feeling of community.

There is no other thing I've done in my life closer to that.

CAMPBELL: Now, the Castellers are attempting

their steepest challenge yet.

One wrong move and men, women, and children

could pay the ultimate price.

Today is a big day in little Vilafranca.

The final tower building contest of the season,

and the town's population has swelled from 39,000

to close to 75,000.

OLIVELLA: Today it's like any other sport.

You practice and then you go play the big game on Sunday.

CAMPBELL: The Castellers may be the hometown favorites

but what they're planning, the so-called five of nine,

skirts the edge of possibility.

Five people wide and nine people high,

it's one of the heaviest towers in the sport...

One the Castellers have never achieved in competition.

400 team members fighting gravity, pain, and fear.

Believe it or not.

Catalans have been building human towers

for hundreds of years.

OLIVELLA: It's got so much history, so many years

of our grandparents doing it, our parents doing it

that you want to keep the tradition.

CAMPBELL: Townspeople of all ages participate.

With kids as young as five competing

alongside their parents and grandparents.

Towers are scored based on their height and difficulty.

And a score only counts if everyone makes it up

and down without falling.

That's why it's important to go up quick

and come down quick.

CAMPBELL: It can take several hundred people

to build a solid foundation.

From there, you just keep adding on levels,

hoping the shoulders beneath you don't give out.

OLIVELLA: If you look at the last four layers

of most of the towers, it's girls and young ladies.

CAMPBELL: Only the lightest and nimblest team members

make up the top tier.

Typically, this means recruiting the town's youngest children.

CAMPBELL: 10-year-old Anais is one of Vilafranca's MVPs.

She's been ascending to the top since she was six.

CAMPBELL: The tower isn't considered complete

until the child on top raises their arm.

Then, the danger really ramps up.

This year alone, several children from Vilafranca

have been badly injured in falls.

By the time the children are climbing down,

the people at the bottom are reaching their breaking point.

A 5 of 9 weighs around 8,000 pounds,

exerting enormous pressure on the base.

The builds typically take more than 10 minutes,

and by that time, joints are aching

and muscles are starting to fail.

OLIVELLA: The important part, it's know how to stay quiet

and suffer a little bit while the tower is built.

It hurts, it hurts a lot.

CAMPBELL: It takes 520 pounds to crush a human skull.

A collapse at this magnitude could be disastrous.

Each team gets 5 chances, and is judged on 3 towers.

Today, the Castellers have already fallen twice.

Their confidence is shattered.

Can they make a comeback

or will they crumble under the pressure?

Anyone who's ever played Jenga knows that the higher you build,

the greater your chances of a massive crash.

The same principles apply to the Castellers de Vilafranca

as they attempt to build a 40-foot human tower.

Now, in Hollywood, we climb our way to the top,

but not like this.

It's the moment of truth...

As the kids climb higher, the tower starts losing stability.

It's a mad rush to get to the bottom

without being crushed.

Incredibly, the children all walk away unscathed.

Only one man is taken to the hospital with minor injuries,

but there's no stopping the Castellers de Vilafranca.

The team decides to try one last tower, the 4 of 10.

It's an even riskier move,

something they've rarely even attempted in practice,

but it's their only hope of winning the competition.

This time around, everyone is rattled.

People are scared, especially the children

because it's more dangerous.

CAMPBELL: But they have to keep their nerves in check.

The Castellers de Vilafranca made

the largest and most difficult tower.

If everyone makes it down safely, they'll be the winners.

[ Cheering ]

Victory!

Six centuries and counting and castellering remains

one of Spain's most enduring traditions.

As building supplies go,

human bodies aren't the most reliable.

Even the strongest among us

are vulnerable to outside forces,

and sometimes there's only

a slim margin between life and death.

Lots of companies stand behind their products.

But how many stand in front of them

with a .38 caliber bullet headed their way?

The Caballero family has so much faith

in their new bulletproof tank tops,

they're willing to put their lives on the line to prove it.

Believe it or not.

Living in Columbia in South America in the 1980s

with all the drugs and cartels,

the Caballero family was in fear for their lives.

But rather than leave the country,

the family embarked on an unlikely mission

to develop fashionable, bulletproof clothes.

They call it MC Armor.

25 years ago, the product was like 14 pounds.

CAMPBELL: That kind of excessive weight

has plagued armor smiths throughout the centuries.

The first bulletproof armors were made of iron and steel

and could weigh as much as 55 pounds.

That's like carrying 2 cinder blocks around your torso.

[ Gunshot ]

And as guns became more powerful,

bullets could easily slice through most metal armors.

[ Gunshot ]

In 1866, Koreans fending off French invaders

countered with a new kind of bulletproof armor,

a vest made of cotton folded 30 times over.

100 years later, building on that same basic principle,

bulletproof armor took a major leap forward

thanks to a brand new kind of plastic called Kevlar.

A distant relative of nylon, Kevlar is made

of long, thin fibers tightly woven into a mat.

It's 5 times stronger than steel.

-Nice to meet you. -Nice to meet you.

CAMPBELL: Former Marine and bodyguard, Jake Milkovich

has come to MC Armor looking for something discreet

to wear on VIP protection details.

MILKOVICH: Alright, the kind of work we're doing,

I'm doing a lot of overseas work,

you're there to do a job,

and that job is keep a client safe and protected.

Doesn't matter what the threat is,

your job is to be equipped to handle and deal with it.

I'd really like to see this in action,

any way we can do that?

For me to feel protected,

I'd like to see them stand up against

the very common handgun rounds.

-Ready? -Yeah.

CAMPBELL: Jake is firing a 9 millimeter handgun

from just 10 feet away.

[ Gunshots ]

Kevlar is good at stopping bullets

because it takes so much energy

to separate its tightly-woven fibers.

As the projectile makes contact,

the fabric steals the bullet's energy,

stopping its progress, spreading its force around your body.

It doesn't feel good,

but it's a lot better than a hole in your chest.

MC Armor's Kevlar shield stopped all three bullets.

No penetration. -Awesome, very cool.

CAMPBELL: A bulletproof blazer is impressive enough,

but MC armor is slimming Kevlar down even more

with a new 3-pound bulletproof tank top.

But will it stand up to the test?

During the American Civil War, salesmen would hawk

so-called bulletproof vests to both sides.

It was up to the soldier to test

their newly purchased armor themselves.

The Caballero family doesn't leave the testing up to clients,

they shoot each other.

I need to show that I trust in my product.

Uno, dos...

[ Gunshot ]

[ Applause ]

So, as you can see, my husband just shot me,

and this is a bullet as a mushroom.

Everything's perfect, the tank top stopped the bullet.

[ Gunshot ]

Cutting edge technology

can make our lives safer and cooler.

Now sci-fi is becoming reality, from bulletproof to bionic.

At first glance, Angel Giuffria

may look like your average 30 year old.

At second glance...

uh, not so much.

I never thought, "Well, you're just like everybody else."

Because I'm not!

CAMPBELL: That's because she comes to play

with an arm that's better and stronger

than anything Mother Nature could create.

GIUFFRIA: I never had a hand, I'm not replacing anything.

CAMPBELL: There was a time when a woman with one arm

would hide from public view.

Today, prosthetic limbs are the stuff of superheroes.

Angel was born March 28, 1989,

with only half a left arm and not a lot of options.

CHRYS: They were telling me that I would have

to put a harness on our little girl

that was controlled by a pulley that opened up a hook.

CAMPBELL: But Angel's mother fought for something better,

a new kind of limb that was just being tested.

GIUFFRIA: It was all my mom.

You know, she saw, actually, a program on TV

about the first myoelectric hands for children

being brought to the United States.

Because of my awesome mom, I was able to be fit

with a myoelectric prosthesis,

which means a muscle-operated prosthesis.

There are sensors that are placed within my socket,

the part that sits on my residual limb,

and when I move the muscles in my residual limb,

it allows me to control the hand.

CHRYS: The first time they put that arm on her,

and she reached over and picked up a toy,

everybody was crying. [ Laughs ]

It was amazing. It was really amazing.

CAMPBELL: The earliest evidence of prosthetics

dates back 3,000 years to a mummy

found wearing a toe made of leather and wood.

For centuries after that,

devices remained crude with limited functionality.

But in the last 20 years, as Angel has grown up,

so too has prosthetic technology.

Today, prosthetics have progressed to the point

that appliances like the Flex-Foot Cheetah

have been banned from some competitions.

They give amputee runners too much

of an advantage over the able-bodied.

GIUFFRIA: I've kind of taken the route

of making it more noticeable from things

like I have lights in my arm, which are really cool.

I have a remote that can change the lights.

I have different colored covers.

It's kind of like this whole,

like, Pimp My Arm versus Pimp My Ride type thing, right?

CAMPBELL: Are today's artificial limbs even better than the real thing?

Angel Giuffria has been on

the cutting edge of technology her entire life.

Now, she's using the latest in high tech

to master an ancient art.

That looks vaguely familiar.

GIUFFRIA: Some of the issues I've been having

is that I feel like the reaction time's a little off,

with my wrist especially, but a little bit with the thumb.

Let's go ahead and hook you up to the computer.

Technology's been a huge part of my life, right.

I charge my arm every night.

You know, you plug in your phone, I plug in my arm.

There are days when I forget to charge my arm

just like you forget to charge your phone.

I have a car adapter for it!

DODSON: So what I just switched you over to

is proportional control. -Right.

It's like a dimmer on a light switch,

same thing with your muscles.

So you can actually, if you wanted to pick up an egg

or something fragile. -Right.

You wouldn't crush it.

GIUFFRIA: Whatever I can do to make my arm more functional,

feel more like me, also make it cooler.

So, we're gonna go to the electrode screen

so we can actually see your settings.

Now try.

Perfect.

GIUFFRIA: This is a world that exists in the future,

and I think that I have, hopefully, this ability

to make people understand what life is like

as a girl with a bionic arm.

Like that.

Having cool ideas is one thing, but bringing them to life?

That's when the real innovation happens,

impossible dreams transformed into the stuff of magic.