Nattravn

The story in "Nattravn" is based on local Swedish folklore, but I have added a few bits myself. Briefly, the Nattravn ("the night raven") is a pretty generic folkloric creature. The Nattravn is a supernatural monster belonging to a group of beings in Swedish folklore called "kyrkogrimmar", basically meaning "the grim ones of the church." They are spirits created from animals sacrificed at the location where the church was being built. The Nattravn exits the churchyard and flies about chasing late-night walkers, while other kyrkogrimmar stay around the church. There are a few versions of the Nattravn. Sometimes it looks like a big raven; in my local parts, it looks more like a pterodactyl. I added the part of the shining eye, and its purpose is to hunt the dead who leave their graves. The stories of my local version of the Nattravn say that if you look up when it's passing the moon, you'll see its bones through its skin, and that will turn you very ill. So don't look at that part of the video too many times!

This is an illustration of my local version of the Nattravn I made for a Swedish horror RPG a couple of years ago. I used this as a template for my Nattravn puppet.

The only new piece I sculpted for this puppet was the head, which had a fair amount of details. The sculpture was made from medium-grade Monster Clay and cast in latex from a dental plaster mold.

Here's the armature for the Nattravn, mostly made from 2 mm aluminum wires. You can see that parts of it have been covered with a mix of cotton and latex, soft polyurethane foam, and yarn. Under and above the tail, two bits of 4,76 mm square brass tubes have been attached with blobs of thermoplastic. Into these, a 3,96 mm brass tube attached to a flying rig will be inserted to hold the puppet aloft during flying scenes. After all the animation was finished, the shoulder joint for the right side wing broke. During all my years of stop-motion animation, this was the second time an aluminum wire joint had snapped, so the material is actually quite sturdy. The problem with this particular joint was that it was too short; there wasn't enough length of wire between the two hard sections -the upper portion of the arm, and the shoulder. The aluminum wire gradually became frayed from being bent up and down, and it eventually broke. I'll cut open the latex skin and fix it, but I'll also remember to make longer wire sections for my joints.

The puppet is getting close to being finished. All of it has been covered with patches of tinted latex cast in skin texture molds. The chest area is a latex cast from a mold originally created for the demon puppet in the film "Memory." I have shamefully reused this chest piece a couple of times.

I usually make wing membranes by submerging the wing armature in soft plaster and then adding latex over both the plaster and the armature. But since this puppet was so big, I used another method to save on the plaster. For each section of the wing requiring membranes, I made a simple recreation of the two relevant armature bits holding the latex skin using clay on a flat plaster mold backside. I then painted on latex over clay and plaster using cotton Q-tips. After two layers of latex, the skin could be removed and attached to the wing armature. Having the latex follow the shape of the armature helped place the membrane along the centre line of each armature "finger", making it look very natural (I hope that made sense.) 

I didn't use any tinted latex for the wing membranes, just standard latex straight out of the bottle. I didn't add any textures either. I only placed a few holes in the latex here and there to make the wings look old and worn.

 

The finished Nattravn was painted with tinted latex applied with a sponge, and then touched up with an airbrush and acrylic colors. The wings were given a mottled look and subtle veins with the airbrush. Teeth and claws were made from tissue paper and latex. Tufts of synthetic fur were glued to the body using liquid latex as a bonding agent. The glowing red eye is a piece of UV resin cast in a silicone mold. Red resin pigments were added to what would otherwise have been a clear dome. Radiating lines were etched into a piece of aluminum foil with a pointy sculpting tool. The resin dome was then stuck to the foil using transparent glue. The eye has the effect of glowing when a light is pointed directly at it, due to the reflecting foil at its base.

I did get a few questions on YouTube about this shot, where the puppet passes in front of the full moon and becomes transparent. Here follows a description of how that shot was made.

When I animated the puppet flapping its wings, I held off a few seconds, just having the creature glide through the air. I grabbed a screenshot of a frame where the puppet is still, and edited it in Photoshop. I drew a black skeleton on the image and removed the green background I used during animation. Since the puppet remains still during animation, attached to the flying rig, I have to keyframe the monster flying across the night sky in After Effects. Using the animation footage as a parent layer, I attached the skeleton image to it. The reason you don't see the skeleton layer until it passes the moon is that I added a mask on the layer following the shape of the moon. The skeleton layer is invisible outside of that mask.

Now over to the "gast", what would be called a revenant in English. Basically, it is a walking corpse, but like the vampire, it also has ghostly characteristics. The Swedish revenant is an all-around useful being for when telling stories about the dead returning. They behave like spirits, but also have a tangible quality, which makes them creepier than a regular ghost. 

From the start, I knew that I needed the revenant in two scales; One big enough to allow for a decent amount of details, and one for when it's grabbed by the Nattravn. I sculpted two heads with a torso in Monster Clay.

I also sculpted two sets of feet, which you hardly see in the finished film. All the pieces were awkwardly clumped together on a slab of clay for the making of the mold. Dental plaster was applied over the clay.

From that plaster mold, a latex duplicate of my sculpture was cast. A 1,5 mm aluminum wire controls the jaw. Thermoplastic holds the wire in place inside the head and also adds a bit of support for the chest. 

2 mm aluminum wires folded up (so, really 4 mm) make up the armatures in arms and legs. The wires are covered with cotton and tissue paper soaked in latex. 4 mm threaded nuts are placed in the feet as tie-downs. 

All parts are held together with blobs of thermoplastic. The next step is to cover the neck and torso parts of the armature with foam padding.

The shroud for each puppet is made from kitchen tissue paper dabbed with latex. The bandage holding the jaw shut is also made from the same materials, but also has a 1 mm aluminum wire running through it, so I can animate it flapping about when the revenant removes it. There really was no need to sculpt the whole torso for these puppets, but when I started planning the film, I hadn't decided how much of the revenant's body I'd show. The finished puppets are painted with tinted latex and detailed with acrylic airbrush colors. Crepe hair (sheep's wool) is used for the head, and plastic pearls for the eyes.

I wanted threads laying like webbing over holes in the shroud, but I found that using real string wasn't doing the trick, and would take far too long to piece together.

I resorted to using "chunks o´ flesh", an old makeup FX trick used to create bits of fleshy viscera. Here's how you make it: Tint your latex in any desired color and use a bit of polyurethane foam to sponge out the latex over a slick surface. I used a plastic tray. A hairdryer speeds up the drying process. When the latex is dry, you dust it down with talcum powder or corn starch. Then you simply tear up sections of the latex using your fingernails. The latex will bunch up into web-like organic textures with elastic qualities. You can then drape the webbed latex over your puppet, using liquid latex as a bonding agent at points here and there, to keep the texture hanging on, but at the same time allowing it to move and stretch when the puppet is animated. I also used chunks o´ flesh for the frills around the edges of the shroud's arms.

When animating the Nattravn carrying away the revenant, I wanted a shot from below. To achieve this, I rigged the Nattravn puppet to basically sit straight up in front of my animation green screen. In After Effects, I then animated a night sky rolling overhead and curving slightly, the way it would if you were standing looking up at something and trying to follow it by turning your head.

The cross on the church steeple is similar to crosses seen atop some older Swedish churches. It's actually a crucifix I got from a local iron smelting business. They had cast a few things in old molds and were throwing away castings with imperfections in them. I picked up a crucifix and some other bits and bobs. After having cleaned up the crucifix with files and sanding paper, I created a silicone mold over it, into which I could then cast a resin copy.

I drilled a hole into the bottom end of the crucifix and attached a threaded 4 mm metal rod using super glue. The crucifix was then secured to my animation stage like any other puppet, using a wing not from the underside.

I knew that the Nattravn's toes wouldn't be strong enough to hold up the puppet while it was sitting on the cross, so I kept the flying rig arm attached to the puppet.

The backgrounds are a mix of AI images rendered in Adobe Firefly and photos of real locations. For example, the image above has a church from the south of Sweden mixed with bits from an AI graveyard, and a real 18th-century Swedish churchyard. It's all mixed together in Photoshop.

This stock photo of a spruce forest has a sky that contrasts with the dark trees. In After Effects, I added this to a layer of a night sky, with the animated Nattravn sandwiched in between. Changing the layer value to "Multiply" made the sky transparent and allowed the Nattravn to appear from behind the tree tops.

This little film was my contribution to the YouTube Halloween ambience. I'm thinking of making more videos on the subject of folklore, some of them local stories. There are quite a few good ones to pick from!

 

Woodland Lurkers

The idea for Woodland Lurkers came about when I thought about doing a film about strange forest creatures that we've never heard of, that hide in the deepest areas of the woods. Originally, I would only have made one critter, but I came up with a bunch of them, so the menagerie grew. I even added yet another one when I had finished editing the film. Let's go through our fauna.

The first creature you see, or glimpse, is a Bigfoot-like figure that towers over the forest.

I reused an older puppet, the hulking creature from "The Path Through the Marsh," and if you're interested in how that puppet was built, check out my blog post HERE! 

I call this little fellow "spud guy", since, well, he looks like a potato. He was built up without me using any parts sculpted in clay and cast in plaster molds.

This is the very basic armature for the character. 2 mm aluminum wires were used for the arms and legs, with Polymorph thermoplastic (the white blobs) used to hold them all together. The upper lip is made from a steel wire wrapped in yarn and is rigid. The jaw is a 3 mm aluminum wire wrapped in soft yarn, and is flexible for animation. 

The midsection is totally rigid and made from a wooden tongue depressor reinforced with a large 

stainless steel nail and thermoplastic. 3 mm threaded bolts are attached to the feet using super glue and baking soda.

EVA foam was used for most of the padding, making the body solid but lightweight. Below the jaw and around the neck, I added a bit of soft polyurethane foam (not yet attached in this photo) to make the opening of the jaw easy. Hot melt glue was used to attach the bits of EVA foam.

Soft yarn was wrapped around the arms and legs, which were then dabbed with latex.

The torso was also wrapped in soft yarn to smooth out the slightly blocky shapes of the EVA foam.

The body and head were built up using cotton dipped in tinted latex. I used a pointy sculpting tool (a dental tool, actually) to create the wrinkles and other shapes by simply pressing down with the tool in the cotton and moving around the material.

The throat was covered with a patch of wrinkly latex skin cast in a texture mold.

The fingers were made by wrapping yarn around a toothpick, dabbing the yarn with tinted latex, and then slipping the yarn off the toothpick when the latex had cured. The fingers were attached to the cotton/latex hands using liquid latex as a glue.

The eyes were made from two small plastic pearls, with irises cast with UV resin.

The puppet was painted by dabbing tinted latex over it with a sponge. Various colors were applied with this method in thin layers to create a mottled look. 

Acrylic airbrush colors were used to add highlights here and there.

Teeth and nails were just blobs of latex tinted white applied to the puppet using a toothpick.

The tuft of hair on the head is from an old fur winter hat, from which I have cut bits over the years for a few of my puppets.

The living tree stump is a staple critter among Swedish illustrators of children's stories. Trees and stumps with eyes and faces add color to many books throughout the 20th century. Swedish illustrator Gustaf Tenggren worked on Disney's Snow White and created a bunch of truly monstrous trees for the flight through the woods. I grew up with the staring storybook trees and have been thinking about how to add the concept to one of my films. 

The main part of the body, the actual trunk, was made from a piece of thick, rolled-up EVA foam. I cut two holes for the irregularly placed eyes, which were made from two plastic pearls, and also inserted two 1 mm aluminum wires to work as eyelids.

Two blobs of silicone clay pressed down around the backsides of the eyes hold the plastic pearls in place, allowing them to swivel when poked on the outside of the trunk. Thermoplastic was applied over the silicone to lock it down. More plastic was used to line the insides of the trunk, making it very sturdy.

The trunk creature has three limbs for walking, made from folded 1,5 mm aluminum wires. I used this smaller gauge to make the feet as small as possible. Using 3 mm threaded nuts as tie-downs, the wires were attached with a mix of superglue and baking soda. Thick, soft yarn was wrapped around the wires to build up the rough shape of the legs, and then dabbed with latex.

The legs were attached to the trunk with thermoplastic.

Hot melt glue was used to piece together the EVA foam bits.

To create the bark-like texture on the trunk, I dipped cotton in latex and draped it over the foam trunk. With various tools, I could then shape the dough-like substance into the look I wanted.

The splintered bark on the top of the trunk, as well as the smaller roots at the bottom, were made from tissue paper dipped in latex and rolled into pointy shapes.

The finished puppet was drybrushed a few times using tinted latex and a foam sponge. Concave dips were reamed into the plastic eyes, and then painted to create the look of colored irises. Drops of UV resin filled out the dips to create a lens effect.

The eyelids were created by attaching patches of latex cast in a skin texture mold to the edge of the aluminum wires making up the lids and the trunk, using liquid latex as glue.

Texture mold latex patches were also attached to the legs, instead of using cotton and latex, as that would’ve made the legs too stiff for animation.

This creature makes a very brief appearance, but I tried to make it memorable. I wanted something that was both creepy and a bit goofy, and hopefully I achieved that.

The head and jaw were made completely from Cosclay, which is a polymer clay cured in my kitchen oven. In contrast to other polymer clays, Cosclay cures semi-flexible and feels more like a piece of plastic.

The jaw was attached to the rest of the head by a single 2 mm aluminum wire running from the back of the head to the underside of the jaw. A mix of superglue and baking soda was used to fix the wire in place. The neck and torso have 4 mm aluminum wires running through them, and the legs have three 3 mm wires. Polymorph thermoplastic holds the armature together. Thick and soft yarn pads out the neck and thinner crochet yarn pads out the arms. I used soft polyurethane foam for the legs.

More soft foam was used to pad out the whole body, except for the arms, which I wanted to look feeble and scrawny. The dark grey section on the back is a piece of EVA foam, which is tougher, and was OK to use here, since I didn’t plan on bending the midsection of the puppet when animating.

The body of the puppet was covered with patches of tinted latex, which were cast in various skin texture molds. Wrinkly skin covers the join between the head and the jaw. This was also made from latex using the ”chunks-o-flesh” method, where latex is stippled onto a flat surface, allowed to dry, and then rubbed off the surface, creating a bunched-up, organic-looking texture. While the body was painted with tinted latex using a sponge, the Cosclay head was painted using water-based hobby paints.

The eyes are two plaster half-spheres with a mother-of-pearl effect, bought at a local scrapbooking shop. The flimsy hair is crepé hair (sheep’s wool) attached to the head using Pros-Aide prosthetic adhesive. The back spikes are tissue paper dipped in latex and rolled between my fingers into thin, pointy shapes. They were attached to the puppet’s back using liquid latex and glue. Highlights and other additional details were added with acrylic airbrush paint.

This scene was the first one conceived, and would, at one point, have been the entire film.

The largest puppet from my film is what I call the ”big mouth.” You only see him from a distance, but I still wanted to add a fair amount of details. A big chunk of medium-grade Monster Clay was shaped into the character.

Dental plaster was applied over the sculpture to create a durable mold, and three layers of tinted latex were cast into this mold. The latex skin was also reinforced with thin pieces of polyurethane foam soaked in latex, which were pressed into the mold over the latex surface. The head was reinforced with a mix of cotton and latex.

Here’s a better view of the insides of the latex skin. The cream-colored material is foam padding. The white stuff up in the head is thermoplastic, which adds extra sturdiness as well as provides a fixing point for the aluminum wires working the nose and the jaw. Two wooden ice cream sticks provide extra support for the head, helping it keep its shape.

The legs were actually created for the pig demon in my film ”Snail Wizard”, but they turned out a bit weak for that large puppet. I saved the original legs and put them to good use here instead. 3 mm aluminum wires are used to create the armature for the puppet. Thin metal rods are tied down against portions of the wire using yarn to create hard sections simulating a skeleton.

Soft polyurethane foam is wrapped around the armature, creating a pudgy look for the puppet.

Teeth and claws are made with tissue paper dipped in latex.

The finished puppet is painted with tinted latex and detailed with acrylic airbrush paints.The eyes are Photoshop print-outs of goat’s eyes, with drops of UV resin applied to create a lens.

The trunks are aluminum wires with yarn wrapped around them to create both the shapes as well as wrinkly skin. 

Clear varnish was painted onto the mouth and the nostrils to create a wet look.

Here’s the smallest puppet from ”Woodland Lurkers.” 

I forgot to snap photos of the clay sculpture, but the image above is pretty much what I sculpted. This creature is basically just a big head with legs and a tail.

The head was cast in tinted latex from a plaster mold. The eyes are two acrylic half-spheres with Photoshop print-outs attached to the flat backsides using transparent glue.

The mouth has a 1 mm aluminum wire looped around it inside the latex skin.

All the limbs for the puppet were made from 1 mm aluminum wires and wrapped in soft yarn. Liquid latex sealed the yarn.

Thermoplastic holds together the head and the limbs. Right under the second leg pair there's a small dark area. This is an attachment point for a flying rig.

Soft polyurethane foam was attached to fill up the back area.

The finished puppet is around

3 inches long. It’s painted with tinted latex and acrylic airbrush colors.

Here’s how the scene where the big mouth monster eats the tree grabber was made. A flying rig arm (far right) is joined to the attachment point on the side of the grabber puppet facing away from the camera, holding it aloft when the puppet is animated. Beside this is another flying rig arm, made from a 5 mm aluminum wire, working as a substitute for the tree the creature is grabbing. The green sticky tape makes both arms invisible when shot against my green screen puppet stage background.

When the shot is static, I'm using still images of mossy woodlands from Depositphotos. When the camera is moving, I'm using stock footage from Storyblocks or Videohive. I could've gone out in the forests where I live and gotten the kind of shots I wanted, but being quite lazy now in my old age, I went for stock options instead. 

My first idea was to make a fake nature documentary about these creatures. As the project evolved, it began to take on a more found footage-like quality. At least, the whole series of events is observed by someone walking through the woods, as we can hear his / her footsteps and breathing.

I am tempted to make a similar video in a different setting, but my aim is always to try and vary my content  -we shall see what turns up in the future.