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