The Garden files 03 - sand sculpture

I made a post about this one before but wanted to revisit, it to keep it in sequence with the others I've been posting about lately of sculptures I made in my friend's garden.

He asked me back just before Easter in 2010 to make a themed sculpture for his children and at the same time I was asked by another friend, Jordan to collaborate on a pilot for a web series he wanted to make and to see if we could make it an entry in a video competition which had just been announced by a company called Baby Skip.

The idea for the competition was to make a video about what you could do with their product the Baby Skip. It is a large bag that you can buy and fill with rubbish and they would then come along and take your rubbish away. Getting rid of rubbish can be expensive and so this company wanted to try and make it affordable. The skip itself is just a 1-tonne strong bag with handles that can be lifted by their truck when full.

The pilot idea was to have different professionals in one field try their hand with the tools of another. Think of what a brain surgeon could do with a 3D printer. I have always thought about this in my work as a sculptor. I don't like to get too attached to my tools as I think sometimes it is nice to change them up to see what other ideas new ones would bring.

So, I figured I could kill three birds with one stone and join them all together. Make a sculpture using the BabySkip bag and Jordan would film the whole thing with me as the star of the show.

We got a beautiful actress, Aishling Bodkin to act as the host of our show.

The making of the sculpture was simple enough I used the bag as a form to compact the sand into and I will admit it was a good idea as it is something that could be used instead of the normal big heavy forms I usually use. It is light and strong and makes for easy cleanup.

I set up my DIY solar-powered timelapse camera to shoot the proceeding and then had Ashling and Jordan back at the end to film the outro.

Jordan edited the competition entry and sent it in. We thought we were in for a fair shot compared to the other entries which all seemed to be just jokes. The outcome of the competition would be whose video got the most views on YouTube. We were off to a good start as we asked all of our contacts to watch it. Then we noticed something strange. One of the entries which wasn't getting many views at all started to climb very fast and it was crap. Doing a bit of research we discovered how easy it was to hack the game with a simple plugin in your browser that would just keep clicking on the video. Set up several computers doing the same with multiple browser windows and you could have all the plays you wanted. This is what that video maker was doing.

Of course, we were tempted to do the same and win by outdoing the cheaters but we wanted fairness and that is all so we contacted BabySkip with our proof and said how the present judging criteria were being gamed. Unfortunately, that was the last we heard about the competition as the whole thing was canceled and every evidence of its existence disappeared from the internet.

We never got to do more with the pilot idea as we both moved on to other things. Jordan got a job with Buzzfeed and then moved on to the BBC. Ashling is still acting I think, I saw her in the movie Death of a Superhero.

At the end of the day, I still got my sculpture finished and a story to tell. I still like the BabySkip and will use it again although will probably not use one of their bags as I get sand delivered to the same kind of thing all the time for smaller jobs.

I also think the video worked out nicely, have used this post as an opportunity to try out some AI video upscaling to remaster it in full HD.