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 theme was cinema and I wanted to make something more about the experience of film rather than illustrate some famous flick in sand .
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 surrounded 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.
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 direction had to be eyeballed as I had no sky hooks.
The sculpture was very much a one angle piece and as the viewer moved around the pile of image became very skewed. The circles were quite difficult to work out and as can be seen below, they had to be egg shaped to stay in perspective.
I had done a few sketches in my notebook to help work it out. They didn't help much but it was a way of programming the concept into my head. 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.
When i first joined Steem i was all excited and posted some of my favourite sculpture from over the years. When i settled in a bit I decided to post my work in chronological order and this one now fits into this timeline.
My style of writing has also developed and I have found other information to add to the sculptures stories.
Also some of these deserve a second outing so my new followers can see them and I can add them to my Steemitworldmap
So ever time you see a remastered post this is what I'm on about.
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.
The black death - sand sculpture
Lough Derg monster - sand sculpture
Asterix sand sculpture
I hope you'll join me again soon.
@ammonite