Sunday, November 30, 2014

Witchouse Monsters part 1

It seems I will be lending my time and talents to quite a few projects during 2015. I have lots and lots of stuff I want to do myself, not to mention stuff that needs to be finished, but I thrive on collaborations, especially where several talents are involved and each contribute to a piece of the creative puzzle.
Here's one of those collaborative projects: The video-horror-musical "The Dreams in the Witchhouse", based on the rather good tale by H P Lovecraft. The mastermind behind the film is Brian O'Connel, who apparently acquired the rights to the music from the Lovecraftian rock opera of the same name.
This time I'm not designing the stop-motion beasties, I'm building puppets based on drawings from DeviantArt artist KingOvRats.


This octopoid creature will be one of several monsters floating around in a parallel dimension, which the "hero" Walter Gilman" visits in a hallucinatory experience. I decided to make the puppet rather big, and started with a head sculpture in Monster Clay. Details like the saw-toothed edges on the monsters beak/snout and the crest of spines were added later.



Most of the puppet was actually built up in a rather improvised way, which I don't do very often. The head was such an important feature, though, that I felt that had to be made as exact as I could replicate it from the design drawing. 


To create the tentacles, aluminum wires covered with soft string were dipped in liquid latex, and casts of wrinkled and textured latex skin pieces were stuck on as a covering.



The spine was another bit of thick aluminum wire, covered with Friendly Plastic thermoplastic to simulate unbending bony parts. As you can see, the creature will eventually be quite blue. The green support rod at the rear part is detachable, and will only be used when animating the puppet against a green screen. The saw teeth have now been attached, and are simply made by cutting out the shapes in paper, and then covering them with tinted latex.


The body was built up with simple foam padding, augmented with thick layers of cotton held in place with a thin cover of liquid latex.

The skin on the body was created by casting multiple smaller patches of latex from many old plaster moulds. Additional texture were created by simply dipping pointy dental tools in blue-tinted latex and dripping warts and small wrinkles onto the skin. The spines on the crest were created by mixing latex and cabosil to a butter-like paste, and rolling the goop into pointy shapes between my thumb and index finger.


 The puppet is now ready for it's final touch up, which is a coat of tinted PAX paint (Pros-aide glue + acrylic paint), and finer detailing with acrylic airbrush paints. This was a fairly simple puppet to build. For example, it didn't need any complicated head joints for jaw or brow movement. The lack of joints also makes it very light for a puppet of its size, which is a little over a foot long.




Here's what it might look like in its natural habitat. We'll see how this project develops, and how long it'll take to finish. It's presumable that all involved will work on it on and off for quite some time, but that's the nature of non-commercial projects. All those crowd funded films seem to take forever to finish up, but it's eventually they do get made and released, and we should all be much happier for it. Every finished little rogue movie points the way for more of the same, and perhaps also to the future of film making as we know it. 




10 comments:

Luffy said...

WOO-HOO!

McTodd said...

Magnificent!

Kelston Hubler said...

That is a great puppet.

Kingovrats is a really cool artist. His Great old designs are sublime.

Honestly, I have tons of projects I've announced but never finished. It's frustrating, buts it's part of the idea process. Besides, you can always reuse those ideas.

On your deviantart page, can you do your interpretation of the Mbwun beast from Relic? Or the sea creatures from Journey to the Centre of the earth? That would be cool.

Another question: Have you ever considered THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SARNATH? It's a good dreamlands story, and it would be awesome to see Bokrug destroy Sarnath.

I have some new stuff on my blog, talking about my new 50s era short film. Do you have any opinions on how to animate a giant insect?

Great to hear from you again.

Kelston Hubler

Luffy said...

@Kelston-Hubler That's the reason why I scooped him up for the project. His Old Ones are FANTASTIC. Did you see his other designs for our film?

I personally think that Richard should take a crack at a mini-epic version of "THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH" (think "Terror from the Abyss" by your colleagues). He has zoogs, he has ghouls, and he has Nyarlathotep...why not give it a go?

Kelston Hubler said...

Yeah, that would be cool. The dreamlands have so many cool monsters in it, would be a seriously fun movie.

I saw a couple designs. Very surreal and creepy. I like the ghouls. Makes me wonder what lovecraft would think about his extensive fandom. I also like kingovrats depiction of Mbwun. Very skeletal and creepy, looks a hybrid of a walker and a gorilla.

Have you read FRAGMENT? It's a really good sc fi novel, wrath a read.

Good luck on the project. I can't wait to see it.

Luffy said...

@Kelston-Hubler Seeing the scene on the Moon would be great, but I'd DIE to see him do the Underworld sequence. Richard: you have a ghoul, you have a gug, you have a night-gaunt...all you need is a ghast and a few voice actors and BOOM! You have what many people consider to be the high point of a monster-packed novel.

I think so too. :)

Have not read "Fragment", but I'll have to now!

And thank you. I hope it turns out alright.

Richard Svensson said...

Brian: A friend and I have spent the past three years planning out a doable version of "Dream-Quest", so it will eventually happen. We'll try to get started sometime during 2015.

Luffy said...

WOO-HOO AGAIN!

Kelston Hubler said...

That will be awesome. ANOTHER thing to be excited for in 2015. Good luck on that project.

Kelston Hubler

David P. Geister said...

Richard, you have been busy - and the work looks GREAT, as always. Bravo!