4D Train- sand sculpture

The first film ever shown was by the Lumière brothers and it was of a train arriving at a station. The audience was so frightened of this moving image of a train bearing down on them that panic filled the Cinema as people tried to escape.... Or so the story goes. This was the inspiration for my sculpture which I made for the 2003 Scheveningen Sand sculpture competition in Holland.

The urban legend has been all but dispelled but it is still a great story. To see a moving image for the first time must have been amazing and it's difficult to put our own reception to the test because we have been surround by such things all our lives but in 1895 this must have been fantastic.

One theory of how the myth got started was that the brothers began to experiment with 3d film making and re shot the film with a stereoscopic camera. This was displayed at the French Academy of Science in 1935, so in some ways the film historians could have confused and inflated these two showings.

Here is a copy of the original, relax it's only a movie.

4D Sculpture

With my sculpture I wanted to make something that was 3 dimensional even more 3 dimensional by giving it a sense of movement towards the viewer. I concocted a plan to use extreme forced perspective in three different axis. I had never seen anyone attempt something like this before, especially in sand. I wasn't really sure if it would work and feared I would have wasted a week of carving going off the rails. I used a hole in a piece of wood as my viewing position and strings tied at what I will call the vanishing points to help the perspective lines converging. Z and Y were easy enough but the Z directed had to be eye balled as I had no sky hooks.

The sculpture was very much a one angle piece and as the viewer moved around the pile of sand became very skewed. The circles were quite difficult to work out and as can be seen below had to be egg shaped to stay in perspective.

As a nod to the sculptures inspiration I made the train track have the appearance of a film strip.

Due to a memory card becoming corrupted I only have the images that I show here, salvaged from my phone and friends. The other side of the sculpture only had some movement lines carved in on the last day. They were an afterthought and not necessary to the piece.

I was very happy with the end result and so too seemed the judges of the competition as I was awarded first prize for my efforts. I have gone on to experiment with perspective sculpting in lots of my other work. You can scroll through my blog to see other examples.

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Ps

Thanks as always for all the feedback you give on my posts and to all of my followers and up-voters. Hope all the guys who went to Steemfest had a great time, would have loved to have been there. There seems to be alot of people becoming disillusioned by Steemit at the moment. I do try to keep updated on all that is going on. I am positive about it's future and along with all the community will continue to strive and make it the place I want it to be. For now you can check out some of my other posts below.

Flaming Pumpkin - sand sculpture

Rodin Mishmash - sand sculpture

Loop de loop - snow sculpture

See you again really soon.
@ammonite
!steemitworldmap 52.114053 lat 4.280521 long 4D Train - sand sculpture d3scr