(beep)
(operatic music)
(garage door opens)
- My name is Shintaro Okamoto.
I'm the founder and creative director of
Okamoto Studio Custom Ice.
Coors Light asked me and my team to think about
what different, unique things we do with ice
and I wanted to really kind of
focus on the freezing process itself.
Right now I'm sitting in my freezer,
here in my studio in Queens, New York.
(classical music)
I always say not all Alaskans played with ice, but I did.
I started carving ice with my father, I think,
when I was, maybe 12-13.
That's when my father first entered an international
ice carving competition that the city of Anchorage hosted.
And I was his partner.
It was a really terrible experience.
My job was shoveling snow and scrap ice all night
but at the end the sculpture was beautiful,
the response was amazing.
It was a really beautiful thing that I really kinda
fell in love with.
(water spraying)
Trying to get rid of any kind of excess soil.
Oh boy, it's gonna be really tricky.
(tools clink)
Oh, I lost my ring.
I thought this was going to be easy.
This is gonna suck.
Nope.
Screen, screen.
(playful music)
Change of plan.
Plan A didn't work, plan B didn't work,
plan C I think is brilliant.
If it works.
Don't touch it, I don't wanna do it, re-do it.
(laughs)
I've always seen ice as a time-based material.
It's constantly changing, evolving.
It's that kind of embodiment of time passing.
Freezing items inside the ice
does almost exact opposite.
Where we stop the time.
(train rumbles)
All right so the ice's been freezing since yesterday.
So it grew quite a lot last night,
it was nice and cool I guess.
(chain clanking)
That looks great.
(scraping)
(chain clanks)
We really work with the moments of freezing
and studying the process of how ice is formed
and how ice itself really kind of comes to life.
(saw whirs)
(scraping)
(soft music)
There's a really beautiful dichotomy of the cold
trapping the best of the summer within ice.
(match strikes)
I think my father is really chuckling every day
with the different kind of things that we do
and challenges we face.
It's him who really got me into ice.
And it's often frustrating,
cold,
not the most comfortable things to work with
but the end result
is always mesmerizing
and I'm always looking for something fun to do everyday.
(soft music)