>> Davis: Hi, everybody. So here we are at the American Fine Arts Foundry with Brett Barney, owner.
And we are going to see the process of our Stan Winston busts being cast into bronze.
>> Brett Barney: Thanks for coming down today, Davis, and hopefully this will be educational
for your crew and you can see what we are doing here.
>> Davis: Yeah, this is going to be pretty exciting. This kind of falls outside of the
realm of special effects, which is primarily what the Stan Winston School is all about,
but I think it's going to be fun to see a piece cast in bronze. There are a lot of
artists, like myself, and a lot of others who live in both worlds, a special-effects world and a fine arts world.
This would be a cool peek into that, going through to the other side of the mirror.
>> Brett Barney: Yeah, well, what we are going
to hope to show you today is,
there's about ten steps that occur in The Lost Wax Foundry process, and so my goal today is to take you
from beginning to end and show you all those steps that happen. Some are dynamic, some
are static, but hopefully through all of it, you will get a good perspective on how much
work it actually takes from trained artisans in each of their specialities, in each of
their departments to realize your sculpture that you've put all your heart and soul
into and bring it all the way through to the final product. Our goal is to be not the weakest
link in your process but at least on par with the artists themselves, so hopefully that
comes through in the final piece.
>> Davis: Yeah, I think it really will resonate with people who do special effects because
they are all just the craftsmen behind the scenes and they don't ever get the glory
or the credit that they often deserve. The fine art world is exactly the same way.
There's the artist who gets to stand next to the piece at the gallery, but there is a whole army
of people, whether in the bronze world or the marble sculpting world or everything else,
that does all the actual technical processes. They are unsung heroes just like special effects artists.
So I am excited to see ... my first thing as an artist was an apprentice in a
foundry, and I haven't been around it since ... it's going to be exciting.
>> Brett Barney: Well, welcome home.
What I'm going to take you through right now is the steps that it goes through and The Lost Wax Foundry process
to take an initial sculpture by the artist, such as Davis. What we usually receive here, and how we take that
and we apply our process and take it from raw materials all the way through to a cast bronze.
The first thing that happens—and I know you guys have already taken care of
this, but in most cases we have to mold the piece. That means that typically what we receive
here at the foundry is an original sculpture. It is made either in clay, wax, wood, any
material—it could be stone—that an artist likes to work in. The next step is to make
the mold. I think you've covered that well. After we have a mold, we go over to our wax
department. In the process of making a Lost Wax Casting, which ultimately becomes a bronze,
is much like making a chocolate Easter bunny. We want a hollow shell because to make the
bronze solid creates two problems. One, it'd be very costly, but two, you have a lot of
casting defects that can occur when you're managing to heat in the process. What we strive
for is a casting wall of about three-sixteenths of an inch thick. What's the first thing
is that we do, is we have to take the mold, and we actually make a hollow wax, which is
now a positive image of their negative that you created with the mold. It is going to
look, hopefully, just like the original sculpture that you have done. Once we have that wax,
we are going to take it out of the mold, crack the mold open, get the wax out. The next step
is then to do what we call wax chase. Now whenever you pour a wax, it comes out of a
mold, there has to be parting lines on the mold, so we have to remove any of the seam
lines that have occurred just in making the wax itself. Plus if there are any air bubbles
in making the wax that ended up in the wax, anything like that, we go back and we call
it perfecting the wax.
>> Davis: In the special-effects industry, the term is seaming. What you would call chasing,
they tend to call seaming, or the fabrication department will then take a piece, in your
case it's wax, in our case it would be fiberglass or foam latex or anything, and the seams would
be cleaned up and any bubbles filled in, in a probably a very similar way.
>> Brett Barney: I'm sure it's very similar. So seaming or chasing, we go back through,
and we clean that wax up. The next thing that we have to do is we have to engineer how that
piece is going to get cast and how the metal is going to flow into the shell throughout
the piece when we pour the bronze down the process. What we do, it is called gating,
and we design the channels for the flow of the bronze in and the escaping of the air
out of the temporary mold that's going to be used for casting the bronze. We then have
to put a coating of a ceramic material. We call it the shelling process. When you shell
the material onto it, is a multiday process because you have to essentially dip it in
a slurry solution, which makes the piece wet. Then we apply a coat of a special type of
sand to it, and we repeat that process about eight times. In the beginning part of the
process, we are using a very fine powder. It is actually called flour, and that has
such a fine texture to it that it is able to re-create and capture all of the detail
that you put into your culture. Then as we get the detail captured, we then move forward
with larger and larger crystal sizes in the sand, and that begins to build strength. That
takes about two weeks to just get through that part of the process, so everybody always
ask me, why does it take so long? Well, it's like watching paint dry in some parts of it
because you just have to let the process take care of itself.
>> Davis: Essentially, it's a second mold. You have your original mold from your sculpture,
which is usually a silicone mold so you can get your wax out, and once you have your waxes,
you are essentially making a second mold, like a rigid mold made of ceramic.
>> Brett Barney: Correct, the way we call it, we take the original mold that came right
off the original sculpture, we call that the master mold or the mother mold. The mold that
we use, that we create out of a ceramic material is essentially, it is a waste mold. It's
a one time, and it's going to get destroyed in the process. So once we have the shell,
we then move into what we call the burnout phase. We cut off the bottom of the ceramic,
we turn it over, and we heat it. What happens is as that shell is brought up to temperature,
a couple hundred degrees, all that wax then just melts right back out. That wax is captured
and then recycled back to our suppliers. So once we have now an empty shell, no wax in
it except maybe a little residue, we put it back into an oven. We bring it back up to—or
not back up to... We take it up to temperature for the first time, about 1500 degrees. At
1500 degrees, it burns off any of the excess wax that's in that shell, and it vitrifies
the material. Vitrification is the process of taking a silicone-based sand and turning
it into a ceramic material, and it's basically making it into like glass. What that does
for us, is it gives us a very brittle but very stiff and strong material that we can
then pour the bronze, it'll take the pressure that happens when you pour that molten, heavy
bronze into the shell.
>> Davis: Sure, it is again, we are essentially dealing with the same processes generally
of sculpture in casting and in applying them here into the bronze world but similar general
processes and chemical concepts of heat and heating things apply also in the special-effects
world where we heat up the ceramic to vitrify it. Vitrification?
>> Brett Barney: Vitrification.
>> Davis: Then the same thing would happen with foam latex where it's heated up for
vulcanization, right? So the heating process changes the physical properties of a substance.
>> Brett Barney: Okay, cool. You're teaching me a lot here today.
Once we have that piece in shell and it's ready for casting, the next thing we're going to is typically the
next day we will bring it back up to casting temperature, which is about 1500 degrees from
the shell. Once that is at 1500 degrees, at the same time we're bringing the bronze
up to temperature, which is approximately 2000 degrees, and then the crew will work
together to pull the shells out of the oven, line them up for the pour sequence, which
is all predetermined. Then they pour off all the shells, and they have to do that as quickly
as they can because that bronze is cooling, the shells are cooling, but the reason that
the shells are hot is so that the bronze as it enters then flows through there, you don't
want it to just cold stop. You want to get a good even pour through the entire shell
so that you get a great casting. For us, the whole process of foundry is about managing heat.
We don't want too much heat, we don't want too little heat, and so that is the art
that goes into the process here, especially with casting art because every piece is unique.
>> Davis: Right, yeah. To continue the comparison, with the... when people are pouring foam latex,
again it is a big hurry. The pour somehow always seems like a big, scary, runaround
hurry but same thing. It's not cooling, but it's jelling. It's the same thing,
as it jells, the flow decreases, and so we're seeing all the one-to-one corollaries. If
you're special-effects artist, everything you learn in special-effects world can be
applied to the fine arts world and vice versa, and people can jump worlds, which is what
this is all about.
>> Brett Barney: It is interesting because there are parts of the process that are like
watching paint dry. You stand around and you wait. It takes multiple days, but then there're
other parts that happen like that.
>> Davis: Sure, yeah. It's definitely like working in a shop or working in a the fine
arts studio, it's a lot of hurry up and wait, a lot of real horrible boredom, and
it's punctuated by moments of panic.
>> Brett Barney: Well put, well put. Okay, so now that we've got the piece brought
up to temperature, we've poured the metal. The next thing we do is we let that shell
cool down with the molten bronze in it. As the piece cools, the pressure from the shrinking
and cooling bronze begins to splinter or shatter that ceramic material that we use to make
the shell. It begins to slough off, and then whatever is not naturally coming off by itself,
we'll knock it off with a hammer just a little bit to just break it. We then take
the piece and we bead blast it with glass beads, and we get off any remaining shell
material, clean it up and get it ready for the next step in the process which is what
we call metal chase. I don't know if there's a corollary for that in your process or not?
>> Davis: The funny thing is that there is always, it seems, in the bronze world, there
is a repetition of steps. There is a casting of wax and the chasing of the wax out of a
mold and then another mold, which is the ceramic shell, then a casting of the bronze, and then
again, a second chasing or seaming step. It is just kind of a repeat of the seaming step
that you would do with the wax but this time in the metal.
>> Brett Barney: Yeah, okay.
>> Davis: Or like us doing a fiberglass or urethane or foam latex piece, again it is
just cleaning up all the seams and any imperfections.
>> Brett Barney: Okay. Well, once we have the piece cast and it's in the metal department
ready for metal chase, there're two things that really happen in there. The first is,
if the piece had to be segmented for mold making or just to manage the casting process,
we then reassemble all those parts back together. In the metal chase, we've really got to
be able to get the textures and the assembly back to what the artist approves, and so our
guys typically ... our average back there is 23 years of experience in this industry.
This is something they've committed their life to and they are very good at. What we
get paid for is to accurately reproduce all your texture and all your detail to the best
that is possible. All the welds that have to go into the piece and any imperfections
that happen in the casting process, all have to be eliminated, and you've got to look
at the piece and go, "That's it." At the end of the day, that's what we've
got to get to.
>> Davis: Yeah, all of their handiwork has to be completely invisible and to get the
vision of the artist done basically from what he intended originally, as if there was no
intervening steps and it was just kind of his vision completely, which again, is just
like the effects world where all that hard work you do is completely invisible. No one
really knows what you did. There're crews of hundreds of people, and every step they
make, they're not trying to put their signature on it like these guys aren't. Their pride
comes from almost being invisible, and the more invisible they are, the better they did
their job.
>> Brett Barney: Great, so once the piece is finished out in metal, typically in our
process, the artist comes in and approves the metal. Now this thing is been through
a number of processes so far within our foundry, and the artist has to make sure that everything
from that point has been completed to their expectation. Once that's good to go, the
pieces brought out our patina department where we then work with the artist to put the coloring
on it that they have envisioned from the beginning. The patina process is done as a ... it's
a heat process, which is the catalyst which drives an oxidation typically done by salts
or acids, so different salts, different acids would give you different color effects. The
patina artist, or the patineur, has to have a good understanding of the solution strength
for those materials, the heat that's required to get different affects, the layering that
might have to happen in order to drive different colors or different kinds of shadings or luminosity
through the patina, and so, I don't know if there's a corollary for that in your process.
>> Davis: Oh, yeah, there absolutely is really, but I guess the term patina is where we get
our term paint from, just a surface coloration. Whereas we actually use paints, an airbrush
and latex paints and silicone-based paints, you're actually doing a chemical process
that indelibly causes the material itself to take on a color as opposed to applying
a color. It's essentially the paint process in a sculpture.
>> Brett Barney: Yeah, the true patina, the patination, is done with that process that
changes the molecular structure of the surface of the bronze. We do apply paints. We use
pigments. We use all the same tools, airbrushes. We do a lot of different kinds of sprays.
We do things with waxes. For us, we have a lot of options on how we can colorize. Typically
more contemporary artwork is using a combination of patina and pigments and dyes, whereas more
the classical work that we do tends to follow classical process. Then it is much more of
your classic browns and your verde greens and some of those kinds of colors that we're
used to seeing—a statue you might see in Central Park for example. It's either been
fully oxidized by the natural elements, or it's just been done by hand with an intention
on the color that they wanted. We found that most artists think monochromatically because
they're working with a material that's monochrome, whether it's clay or wax—and
oftentimes, they get to the end of the process and I don't know. I don't know? What color
should it be? So we find ourselves in that advisor or almost sometimes therapy session
kind of step to help them figure out what should be maybe the primary color and then
any kind of transitional effects that they want to do in the piece.
>> Davis: Well, in the effects world typically, the designs are done, a million color tests
and a million variations, so they tend to know ahead of time what the finished piece
is going to look before the piece even starts. But still, in the end, it's the same thing.
We're applying colors to something, and the color, just like in special effects and
in sculpture, the actual colors that you use can enhance or really detract from a piece.
>> Brett Barney: Absolutely.
>> Davis: If your patinas get too busy, it can really detract from all the detail of
the sculpture, or a really great patina can sometimes make a not so great sculpture look
a lot better.
>> Brett Barney: That's absolutely true. I think the last step we have that you may
not have in your process is we have to mount the piece, and so typically that's on a
stone or wood base. Sometimes it's got a pedestal or a stem that holds it up, and it's
whatever they want to mount it on. Sometimes they're freestanding, but that wraps it up.
>> Davis: So here we are, back where we started.
>> Brett Barney: Yeah, it's been a long process.
>> Davis: It's been really great for you to show us this whole process from beginning
to end. It's been really exciting to watch. This is actually the first piece I'm having
cast in bronze of my own, and it's been really amazing to watch this happen. It's
also been great for the students to see how these skills as we repeated throughout this
process, how it applies to special-effects work and to fine-art work. Artwork is artwork,
and the craft is always the craft. Creating three-dimensional objects by hand, all of
the processes are similar with just slight variations depending on where you're applying them.
>> Brett Barney: Yep. Well, being located here at Burbank, a lot of the people that
this is addressed to, we ultimately see here. We have a lot of our clients that are in the
industry, and they are used to sculpting, and it's just a matter of what do you do
with the sculpt once you're done with it, and in fact, we've even used molds they've
used for other processes and made a wax out of them. It's not always a perfect match,
but it's a great way to get started with a piece and take it into bronze if it's
really important to you.
>> Davis: Yeah, Stan made bronze pieces of some of his artwork.
>> Brett Barney: We did.
>> Davis: I believe this is the foundry that he used.
>> Brett Barney: This is the foundry he used, yeah. It has been a number of years, but yes.
We were doing his work here. This foundry has been here for 40 years, so many people
in Southern California, especially this part of the valley, have been using us for many,
many years. I'm just lucky to be the third owner of the place, but it's got quite a
legacy, quite a history. We're doing work for some of the top contemporary artists today.
>> Davis: Well, this whole process for me has been really exciting, and I'm really
honored to be able to sculpt a bust of Stan for the school, for his family. Then to top
it all off, to use the same foundry that he used. There's something really great about
that, really brings it all together for me and for everybody I'm sure. Thank you so
much for your help in that.
>> Brett Barney: You're very welcome. We're glad to be part of the process.
>> Brett Barney: You're welcome.