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Another
stint at Image Animation’s Pinewood Studios workshop.
Remember
that Gladiators game show from the 90s, where contestants
were invited to be chased / blocked / thumped by musclemen
opponents across a variety of disciplines? The producers of
Ice Warriors had a similar
thing in mind, but with a science fiction theme – the ‘gladiators’
were to be sort of futuristic superheroes. (Did someone say
“tie-in merchandise and action figures”?) Oh, and I forgot
to mention… the whole thing was to be staged on an ice
rink.
The
early written proposal for Ice Warriors was insane - they
had people being twanged across the ice on lengths of elastic
and all sorts of madness. It was the kind of whacked-out premise
that was either going to be warped genius or ill-conceived
chaos. (Despite a high-profile Saturday teatime slot on ITV,
the finished programme sank after one series. You be the judge.)
Anyway,
Image were charged with designing and creating the Ice Warriors’
costumed identities. The art department crew consisted of
Dave Bonneywell, Martin Astles, Matt O’Toole, Rich Allport
and me.
The
costumes had to offer the wearer a degree of protection, so
we focused on finding ways to soup up existing safety wear.
We sculpted over crash helmets to create snug-fitting face
plates; we stuck skull-faced shoulderpads onto ice hockey
tunics; motorcycle gloves became gauntlets, etc.
One of the problems with all this was the growing pains involved
in converting our drawn designs into reality. If you sit down
and draw a superhero costume, you naturally depict it being
worn by an 8-foot man-mountain with arms as thick as your
legs and an imposing, “don’t mess” stance. Put the same costume
on your average 5’7” skater, with rounded shoulders and all
the attitude of a sack of potatoes, and the effect is a little
muted in comparison. We learned something that day.
The
next thing that happened was the safety people took one look
at the finished Warrior headgear and said, “no way”. (In fairness,
the helmets did have fangs / horns / spikes sticking
off them.) So in the end, it was decided that our customised
helmets could only be worn for show. Before the Ice Warriors
‘did battle’, they had to take off our spectacular efforts
and don common-or-garden crash hats. Gumph.
A
funny postscript to all this was that I got my work on the
cover of the TV Times
magazine through this job. Heh hey! This was about six months
later. The irony was, I was in typically skint 'unemployed
young artist' mode at the time and had gone into the newsagents
to get the local recruitment paper for any kind of job that
could pay the rent. To see my silver Ice Warrior staring back
at me from the newsstands was a surreal experience. “Hey,
I sculpted that!” “Yeah, right. Look, there’s some factory
work going in Paisley…"
Scans
of the whole TV Times article on Ice Warriors: page
1 / page 2.
Looks rubbish, doesn't it?
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