- [Shintaro] My name is Shintaro Okamoto,
and this is how I turn a 200 pound block of ice
into a cockatoo by hand.
[smooth music]
First, I sketch an outline of the sculpture
on a block of ice with a small pick.
I'm looking at the profile of the design first.
Ice is a really funny material.
It's crystal clear, so it's void of color and shadow,
so we have to rely a lot on silhouette and think about
how light can refract and try to manipulate that
to create our work.
It's a very special ice.
It's a carving ice that's made through a process
with two important points.
One is one-direction freezing, where it freezes bottom up,
so all the impurities and kind of air bubbles that builds up
in the process of freezing stays on the surface.
And two, freezing agitating water, moving water,
and that allows it to kind of constantly release
those air bubbles away.
Then I cut a rough shape with a chainsaw.
Off the shelf chainsaw blades have this little notch,
an extra metal piece behind each blade
to prevent the kickback for cutting wood, but for ice,
we take those away because with those on,
it kind of clogs the blade and ends up hiding
the cutting blade and makes it harder to cut,
so it's one of the common modification
that the ice carvers do.
So with the chainsaw, I carve all around it
and basically take out all the negative space
and get the actual design punched out.
[smooth music]
I would say about two thirds of the work
is done with the chainsaw.
It's amazing how much finesse you can get
out of such a brute tool.
Once the contour is set, I'm staying on
with the chainsaw still, but now it's time
to start shaping the sculpture.
I'm gonna then start thinking about in respect
to the overall thickness of the sculpture.
Proportionally, where would the head be?
How wide would the head be?
Thinking about the angles of the wingspan spreading out.
Really, just start to form the animal as I'm carving out
and establishing the 3D volume of the sculpture.
It's very blocky, but the volume is there.
So the next tool that I usually pick up will be
either the chisels or the chippers.
This tool is called a chipper.
This is where, if I'm carving an animal,
I think about anatomy, I think about, you know,
where is the skull and where the muscle connects to
and where all things kind of come together and connect,
and this is when the sculpture starts
to take a life of its own.
And it's fun because I'm personally
a big, big fan of hand tools.
I first encountered ice carving through my father,
who learned the craft during his training
as a sushi chef in Japan.
I got trained in kind of an old world technique
of appreciating and respecting the sharp hand tools.
Once that's done, I think I'm more than halfway through.
I'm back to power tools at this point.
The first thing then I pick up would be the burrs.
It's basically a conical special bit that goes onto
a die grinder that's got tiny, tiny teeth all around.
And that basically further refines the overall shape
and really just smooths it all out.
Once this stage is done, I'm ready for final detailing,
and I usually just touch two other tools to do that.
One is a knife bit on a die grinder that establishes
the deepest creases of the forms.
[smooth music]
Then I finish it with a needle bit that has the skinniest
of tips, and that can establish the smallest
of the eye detail, to the beak lines,
to all the feather details.
We can spend as much time as we want with that,
however level of detailing we want to put into it.
[smooth music]
I use the blow torch sometimes to really heighten
the clarity of the ice after everything's finished.
Working with ice, there's inevitable understanding
that it's passing, ephemeral,
constantly changing and melting and gone.
Ultimately, when our sculpture leaves the studio,
that's when it really takes on its true life.
More than anything, it's so rewarding to see the sculpture
be experienced by people and see them be fascinated
in such unfamiliar scale and level of details,
and then to see it melting away, it's incredibly humbling.
As it melts and, you know, deforms and disappears,
that first impression stays in their memory.
[smooth music]