Road Test: Strong Technobeam, page 40 - PLSN.com

Carving a Thin Line
Projecting holiday warmth with sculpted ice and theatrical lighting
The Grinch-themed display represents the first time the scenic designers have incorporated licensed characters into the carved ice on display.
Scenic designer Michael Hotopp and
his creative partner/scenic designer
Bill Hoffman have worked together
for two decades on myriad productions
— touring theatre shows, trade shows,
and the Radio City Christmas Spectacular
— but nothing could have prepared them
for working during the last eight years on
ice sculpture installations as part of the Ice
series for the Gaylord Hotels. Working on
Christmas-based themes, they have created
walk-through attractions that depict famous
holiday characters and events, but this past
year they got a real treat — designing the
Ice! How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
Hotopp and Grinch senior project designer
Hoffman apply their imaginations and
extensive theatrical backgrounds to a special
endeavor, one that recreates Whoville and
the magic of Dr. Seuss’ Yuletide classic, How
the Grinch Stole Christmas. Hoffman has illustration
skills that help him bring their ideas to
life, and then deliver them to a talented team
of sculptors to carve lively, colorful figures in
ice. Hoffman and fellow scenic designer Garry
Wichansky draft these sculptures as if they
were being done for the theatre.
The Challenge of the Canvas
“I literally hand-draw most of the figurative
items,” says Hoffman, “and as part of the book
for the sculptors they have a front elevation
of each piece, a top view, and a side view, so
they’re working in a three-dimensional medium
here at all times. I spend about 75 percent
of my year just creating these drawings that
they work from.” The design team actually compiles
a 200 to 250 page, 11-inch-by-17-inch
book with specifications for each venue.
The ice sculpture shows generate their
own set of challenges that are far removed
from the more easily controlled environments
of Broadway shows. “The artists have a very
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limited time to work on this, and it all has to
be worked out within an inch of its life,” says
Hoffman. “There are ways of fudging some
things in the theatre. You can always kick a
piece of scenery six inches to the left or pull
out a chainsaw and cut it down a little bit and
stretch the fabric. There are ways of cheating.
With ice, it’s a whole new ball game. The sheer
volume of it ... once it’s down and in place, you
can’t decide, ‘Oh, I think it’ll look better three
feet to the left.’ The clock is ticking, and the
cost of breaking the ice down and starting
again is a huge factor. We have to be buttoned
up so tightly with our approach to the design
in order to make this work.”
The ice carvers come from China, specifically
the Harbin region, which hosts the
annual Harbin International Ice and Snow
Sculpture Festival. “It’s outdoors, and the one
group we worked with first on this project
had over 300 acres, and over 3,000 carvers
spent a month putting their particular project
together,” Hotopp says. “One of the things
that surprised me is where in the world do
they have this much acreage in this small
town of Harbin, and it turned out we were
on the river, and it was frozen. They had 15 to
20 story replicas of the Arc de Triomphe, and
they built giant slides on hillsides that went
up 12 to 14 stories,” not to mention massive
reproductions of the Taj Mahal and the Great
Wall of China. “It’s phenomenal.”
The Big Ice Experience
Hotopp and Hoffman wanted to bring
that sense of grandeur to Americans, but
with a holiday theme familiar to our culture
and which could fit into a smaller space. The
Gaylord Hotels chain has afforded them the
forums they need to create their annual ice
extravaganzas. For the first three years they
were solely in Nashville, then expanded to a
location in Orlando, then two years later one
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in Grapevine, TX. A fourth location in Washington,
D.C. will be unveiled in Nov. 2008.
“In conjunction with this hotel chain, we
create a big ice experience that they sell as
part of their holiday package to bring people
into the area and into the hotel,” explains
Hoffman. “All of these venues that we do are
large, refrigerated venues. In Nashville, it is
actually an old theatre that’s been gutted,
painted black, and then it’s refrigerated. They
bring in huge air coolers and bring the temperature
down to nine degrees. In the other
two venues, in Florida and Texas, the Gaylord
people have purchased large tents, and we
refrigerate the tents and create this huge
holiday ice environment within the tent.
These experiences are only holiday-related.
The carving process begins about four weeks
before Thanksgiving, and they roughly open
these up to the public around Thanksgiving
and run through the first of the year.”
Ice Sculpting 101
Hotopp reports that the spaces for their
ice exhibitions are between 15,000 and 18,000
square feet. “Close to two million pounds of
ice is carved in 35 days by the carvers from
China,” he says. “It’s a gated attraction that
runs approximately 45 days. It’s incredible.” It
also features music in the background. And
it’s a lot of work. “There are no ‘Ice 101’ courses
being taught in any universities anywhere as
far as design is concerned,” says Hotopp.
All of the sculptures are cut from cubes
that are each roughly four-feet by two-feet by
one-foot. “Everything is stacked, and then it
becomes a subtractive process,” says Hoffman.
“We’ll have large, seamless blocks of ice, but
everything is built from a basis of a block that
is roughly four by two by one. Sometimes we
stack it vertically, sometimes we stack it horizontally,
depending upon the shape, quality,
and feel of the piece. In Harbin they carve from
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very large blocks that are literally pulled out of
the frozen river that they’re working from, and
we don’t have that luxury.”
The duo explains that the Ice! show includes
seven to eight areas that feature
chronological vignettes from How the Grinch
Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss. The trail leads
people through the Grinch’s large igloo cave
through to Whoville center to scenes in the
house, on the mountaintop, and ultimately
back in the village, with characters like the
Grinch, Max, and the Whos included among
the scenery. There are even ice slides for
people to glide down. Most of the exhibit is
carved out of ice.
Putting on a Good Face
The ice is colored from a twelve different
possibilities — clear, white, and a palette of
ten other colors. “Within that we do add a few
selected props that we design here and have
built by a scene shop,” Hoffman says. “We add
that to the ice as a supplementary visual. We
always work very hard to keep the focus on
the ice, and 75 percent or more is ice.”
For the Ice!, the duo used a fair number
of non-ice items. “There’s no way that you
can architecturally and engineering-wise
do some of the poses,” states Hotopp. “Bill
came up with a great solution that all those
figures live on a clear, round cylinder, and
the legs are shaped to it. But the arms are
non-ice as well as the headpieces and some
of the props of food. There’s no way we
could do them effectively in the ice, and the
sublimation over the 45 days, maintaining
all that detail, is just a massive job.”
Hoffman says that one of their biggest
hurdles is to present intricately carved faces
and figures to the public, but coping with
the fact that every day the attraction is open
to the public, it sublimates. “It evaporates,
so as a rule we have to work with very large
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PLSN MARCH 2008