Garry Donnellan
The last large scale foam carving project I worked on in Australia for the film Alien Covenant, or what's commonly known as the "one after Prometheus." I moved out of the sculpture community for health and safety reasons 20 years ago constantly working with resins and plaster and clay was starting to show signs, I lost my sense of smell for a few years, also I was concerned with silicosis which has become well known in recent years, even something seemingly benign like clay dust can smash your lungs. Another factor was the creeping use of technology where 3D printing and scanning was seemingly taking over, robots are also capable of carving. Strangely enough this pattern keeps repeating itself and what happens is all the skilled people leave nothing gets passed down and we are left with a bunch of dim witted technicians that really have no idea of the artform. On this project 3d scanning was made of 1:10 ratio maquettes and the horizontal contours were cut out of foam on a CNC type process, I believe they use pressurized water to cut the foam the layers that were stacked up glued and sculpted. The process was super fast making up to 10 meter high heads within a week. Being a film it didn't need much of a hard coat it was covered and sealed in shellac and painted over. If you skip to 5:18 in the following video you will see a time lapse of the process.
"Alien: Covenant" Movie - Set Construction Time Lapsehttps://youtu.be/PXIupM277lc