Face to Face with... Matt Lawrence

This week Rushes Postproduction launches its newly expanded MGFX Studio and to mark the occasion, lead creative Matt Lawrence and his team joined forces with land art collective Blackprojects to create a huge sand version of the Rushes logo on a beach at the Gower Peninsula in Wales.

After weeks of planning, the coastal location of Rhossili Beach was chosen for having perfect conditions for the execution and bikes and trailers were loaded with a construction kit, cameras, food, kids (including Lawrence’s son, James) and rakes, then cycled a mile out to a suitably smooth patch. It may have only lasted for 48 minutes before the tide came in and washed the art away but the photography proves it was quite a spectacle. Here Lawrence tells us more about creating the larger than life piece and what the new studio will bring.

Tell us about the launch of Rushes MGFX...

The studio is the creative design arm of Rushes Postproduction. We specialise in motion graphics for film, TV, commercials and all things digital. We have a talented crew of artists and a dedicated producer all with years of experience in post who bring a diverse range of skills covering motion graphics, compositing, VFX, storyboarding and pre-vis . We are also launching our new website.

How did you come up with the sand sculpture idea?

The sand sculpture concept was born from my connection with land art collective blackprojects - a team of highly skilled creatives who specialise in massive scaled pieces of art, produced using the landscape as the canvas.  We thought it would be a great thing to do in the environment of post production as it challenges the very process of using computers to achieve everything, which doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. We’ve achieved quite a few effects using practical techniques recently on jobs and this project embraces that approach! I think to this day some people still think it’s a digital effect!

How many locations did the team visit?

We had several beaches in mind in the build-up to the project, one being Saunton Sands in Devon. Finally we decided on the Gower Peninsula in Wales because this gave us more options of suitable beaches and also had the added bonus of high sand banks behind the beach, which aided in the elevated photography. 

Did your engineering drawing experience help?

Our skills gained in engineering drawing definitely aided the construction process. Myself and teammate Martin McKinney have a background in both product design and film production design so we were able to call on those skills to make an accurate scaled diagram of the Rushes logo to work from.

Did it take longer than expected to make?

No, actually we made it faster than we thought we would. So much so that we were able to test out some of our other laser construction kit further down the beach. As we were testing some new kit on this project, and also involving my son James we weren’t sure how quickly we’d be able to progress with the construction. Thankfully it all worked flawlessly and James turned out to be a natural at sand sculpting!

Did you have to stop passers-by from getting in the way?

At first we were stressing out as the locals seemed oblivious to our art and were walking and cycling straight over it, but we soon realised that this caused little to no damage to the design. As it was so massive none of it was visible when seen from a distance. In fact, my favourite imagery from the project is where people are walking on the design and it gives it a real sense of scale.

Tell us a bit about the laser optical sighting device...

Ha ha… yes the ‘top secret’ laser sighting device.  We’ve actually got two of them. I can’t tell you too much as it was developed by my fellow artist Martin Mckinney over the period of a year so he’s fairly defensive over the technology in it. What I can tell you is it is programmable, can swing angles over hundreds of metres with supreme accuracy and can also ‘talk’ to other similar devices. It’s the perfect tool for this kind of artwork. I’m very lucky to have a team member like him, he’s a genius!

Did anything go wrong while on location and what was the hardest part of the production process?

Yes things did go wrong.  The sand art nearly didn’t get made.  Martin became ill on the trip and he spent one day in hospital suffering with terrible pain from kidney stones!  This put us back a couple of days so what we were hoping to achieve on the four-day trip had to be rescheduled. We were also planning on getting kite aerial footage of the finished design but there was literally no wind on the day, so our saviour was the sand dunes.

In terms of the hardest part of the construction process, it was the R itself. There are loads of curves in it which all needed centre points finding to allow us to swing the arcs. That part was fiddly and progress slow, but once we’d done that part, block raking was very quick indeed.

Was it hard to see it washed away at the end?

It’s always sad seeing your artwork get destroyed, but we’re used to it. We both have a long history dating back to the early 90s of creating these kinds of artworks in sand and crops, so the very nature of that medium is that it’s temporary.  It’s just part of the process, so as long as we have the photography we want then the design lives forever anyway.

Is there any upcoming projects that you can tell us about?

We have several exciting jobs in the pipeline and we’ve just finished work on titles and graphics for a documentary on the siege of Bin Laden. We’ve also just completed a commercial for Partizan plus created titles for Nigel Cole’s All in Good Time feature film and matte paintings and compositing work to assist Rushes Film & TV department on Combat Hospital.