At Sand In Your Eye we are constantly trying to innovate and refine our services and artwork. We began almost 20 years ago with sand sculpture, the next logical step was to apply sand sculpting skills to ice sculpture, this meant we could be busy all year round! We have become one of the leading exponents of sand drawing and sand art in the UK and have since pushed ourselves to make bigger and better land art, travelling across the British Isles to make our artwork. New developments and ideas excite us and we are always looking to the future, trying things we’ve never done before and mastering new forms of art.
British Sugar are another UK company that pride themselves on being at the forefront of their field, amazingly they supply over 50% of the sugar consumed in the UK – all coming from sugar beet grown on British farms! Since the industry began in the UK over a hundred years ago they have developed the production of sugar beyond just making the sweet stuff for cakes and coffees, and now produce bioethanol and animal feed from what is left over and supply topsoil, amongst other innovations.
They have become virtually zero waste as a company and can fuel some of their own production using bi-products from the sugar refining process.
They came to us in summer 2020 to produce an animation for their new in house film highlighting the different elements, processes and products of their business. During lockdown whilst we were on hiatus due to the Coronavirus pandemic, we had been taking the opportunity of some rare down time to look at innovation and develop new products – one of which is sand animation.
Sand animation is very popular in eastern Europe and Russia but nobody in the UK does it, so we thought we ought to try our hands at it.
You can film live sand drawings or time lapses of sand art and it makes great live entertainment or eye catching, social media friendly, animated films. It’s really fun but so far very unique to the UK market.
It only takes a small leap of the imagination to step from using grains of sand to grains of sugar. 6 kilos of British Sugar produced granulated sugar went into making the film, we built a table especially for the film and Rich Spence, our sand artist, worked hard to illustrate all the great work at British Sugar, using his hands and at times a paint brush to manipulate the sugar.
Animation of all kinds including sand animation and sugar animation takes a very long time, this film took four very long days, working all hours of the day and night, to shoot and was composed of several hundreds of frames. It included making images relevant to the work of British Sugar, text and the British Sugar logo and several time lapse animations of the sugar beets growing, a tractor ploughing a field and the sun passing through the sky, and a cow chewing the tasty feed produced by British Sugar.
It was great to work with the team at British Sugar and Middle Table Productions, who produced the film, and to have a chance to further develop our sand animation, which we will be doing much more of in the near future – we hope you enjoy the film.
