Albuquerque has quietly become a hub for the people who build the worlds you see on screen, and Five Ton Monkey is one of the shops making that happen. Founded in late 2019, the design and fabrication company has spent the years since weathering a pandemic, pitching in on the COVID response, and turning out work for more than thirty feature films, television shows, and commercials—plus another thirty-five-plus clients who have nothing to do with Hollywood at all.
The shop's mission is refreshingly plainspoken. "We convert ideas into things," reads their site. "Our ideas, yours, or the ones we develop together." That could describe half the fabrication shops in the country, but Five Ton Monkey backs it up with range: fabrication, foam carving, foam assembly and coating, mold-making and casting, and scenic finishes, all inside more than 14,000 square feet of shop space. They cut wood, foam, plastics, and aluminum on a CNC machine with a 60-by-100-inch bed, spray finishes in a commercial booth, and offer contract design services on top of it. When a job calls for something outside their walls—powder-coating, waterjet-cutting—they bring in collaborators. "While we don't do everything," the company says, "we can get it all done."
Their offerings run just as deep: design and 3D modeling, fabrication, CNC routing, mold making and casting, foam carving, scenic finishes, and small-scale lighting and controls. The work covers props and set pieces, scenery and sets, exhibits and festival builds, immersive environments, architectural elements and cabinetry, art and displays, and signage—for clients ranging from film and television to museums, festivals, conferences, designers, architects, and inventors.
That range shows up in the client list. The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. The Electric Daisy Carnival. Route 66 Casino. The Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe. Desert Aerospace. Meta-Facebook. Nike. Wunderkind. On the production side, credits stretch across Netflix, A24 Films, Disney, Nickelodeon, Paramount, NBC/Universal, Warner Brothers, Fox Searchlight, Amazon, and AMC—with recent titles including Pluribus, Dark Winds, Oppenheimer, and Coyote vs. Acme sitting in the shop's portfolio.
Behind all of it is Adam Eisman, the founder and sole owner, who has been designing and building things professionally since 1991. He's been an IATSE member since 2011, working as a prop-maker and construction foreman, with screen credits on more than twenty-five productions—The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Independence Day: Resurgence, and El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie among them. He cut his teeth at the legendary Stiegelbauer Scenic Shop in Brooklyn on Saturday Night Live before eventually landing in New Mexico, where he's now lived for more than thirty years.
The team around him rounds out the shop's skill set. Juan Suarez, the production manager, is a third-generation craftsman from Roswell who grew up working alongside his grandfather, father, and younger brother. Certified in fine woodworking from Santa Fe Community College, he runs his own furniture line, J.R.S. Fine Furniture, on the side—pieces that now anchor local spots like Zendo Coffee and Slowburn Coffee. Cypher Galbreath serves as digital fabrication lead, running the shop's CNC machinist duties while—in their words—"deep in the adventure of learning the other crafts of a prop shop."
Clients keep coming back, and their words say why. Nan Masland, director of the Anderson Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum, called working with the shop "a dream," praising a team of "highly skilled designers, fabricators and finishers" who delivered museum-quality work on demand. Thomas Tomlinson, an exhibit designer who has worked with the shop on zoo, aquarium, and museum exhibits, pointed to their responsiveness and flexibility as what sets them apart—work that arrives "high quality, on budget, and delivered on time." And Karen Zabarsky Blashek, who brought the shop an unusual brief with architects, a general contractor, and a landlord all weighing in, said Adam didn't just execute the design—he helped solve the open questions too, leaving her client "giving standing ovations for the end product."
The company's stated aims read like a mission statement written by people who actually build things for a living: be the go-to source for design and fabrication in New Mexico and beyond, keep a reputation as hard-working problem-solvers who deliver on time and act with integrity, provide a great environment for the people making the work, and keep improving—every single day—their skills, range, and operations. "And we are well on our way," the shop notes, with the kind of understatement that comes from a client roster that already proves the point.
As the shop puts it: "We are all in this together."
https://www.fivetonmonkey.com/
High quality, on budget, and delivered on time.
Museum-quality work on demand