Ice Age 2 - ice sculpture

I love animated children's movies and now that I have a small son I have been given a licence to watch them over and over. Many of the big American blockbuster ones are very entertaining and so we can both enjoy the silliness. I'm impressed, seeing how far they have come with CGI from the first experiments with a little light called Lux jr. Now with each one they push the envelop further with amazing realism and the stories are all watchable by every generation.

Being asked to make sculptures to promote the films can also be fun. That is of course if you have watched the movie and are familiar with the content. This is one of those times that I wasn't and really hadn't a clue about what we were doing. Ice Age 2 was just coming out in Germany and the studio was the sponsor of this ice sculpture exhibition. I hadn't seen the first one and all we had as source material were a few screen shots. I probably could have found the movie on bittorrent but that is illegal and I am a good boy.

In preparation for writing this post I decided to fire it up on a very legit streeming service and watch it with my son on Saturday morning while my wife had her sleep in. It was very entertaining. but not at all like I imagined it to be back in Lübeck 2006.

Dream team

@stijgerart and I were asked to make a kind of ice tunnel for the entrance to the exhibition. The material we were given was just some big slabs of ice joined together to form a sort of a canyon with one archway leading into the rest of the sculptures. I figure I was put on the job because of the recent experiments I had been doing with negative carving and they wanted us to make some dinosaur looking stuff behind the walls. They were apparently in the movie. I was happy to be given the opportunity to experiment further and working with Wilfred is always great craic.

Room with a view

Our first mission was to hammer these big slabs of ice into some sort of interesting structure. They were quite thin and we didn't want to loose any mass from the front so we would have enough room for the sculptures at the back. So, every piece of snow we could find we used to clad the whole thing and create like a gallery of windows to hide the joins in the ice and to form sort of frames for the characters we were going to carve. To be honest we spent maybe too much time on this free form cavelike structure but it was a lot of fun. Now it looked like you were inside the ice looking out into water.

Once this overall composition was created we the went and did our own thing and experimented in our own way. Wilfred made this nice plant like structure with just plunge cuts from his chainsaw. It helped hide a very ugly area where to blocks came together in a corner.

Premonition

While he was doing this I made the T-Rex in the first picture and also this little crocodile creature. Watching the movie recently I discovered that there was no T-Rex in the movie I don't know where I got it from. Although in number 3 from the franchise there are several. Maybe someone from the studio saw our work and thought that it would be a great story-line and decided to write it. We will never know but I find it very strange.

Nuts

Real elements from the movie made an appearance. The Acorn that poor little Scratch is chasing through the entire series is now being chased by the crocodile like creature, the object in the top of this image is his tail as he circles around to grab it.

Signature move

Of course no prehistoric scene would be complete without my name sake. The wobbly picture is due to the fact that we had carved all the front surfaces of the ice like those funny mirrors in the funfair. This distorted the sculptures on the back and made them appear to change shape as you moved. A nice discovery which could be used to great effect.

There were lots of different little element we made as we really goofed of. Not having seen the film gave us a nice sense of freedom to go a bit crazy. Not sure if it spoke of the film to the audience but luckily it was an area that freedom could be taken. I have one more sculpture from this project to share and that was a bit more on point with the story.

Intermission

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Ps

Thanks for reading. I use Steem to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, among other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Steem blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.

Vinaros - sand sculpture Documentary

Breaking through - sand sculpture

The sculptor's studio - sand sculpture

Terraform - sand sculpture

I hope you'll join me again soon
@ammonite