So, this is another one of my "contemplation" or "mood" shorts, which I thoroughly enjoy making. They're not as simple to do as one might think, since it's easy to overdo things, and just make the video campy. I think I'm guilty of crossing that line a few times in my films. I once did a short called "The Haunted Room", and you could say this is an expansion -we're having a look at the rest of the house.
The house itself is nothing more than one stock video file and a bunch of stock images acquired through my various subscriptions. Through first Photoshop and then After Effects, I can work with the images to achieve the look I want for each shot.
Here's one example. This exterior photo of an abandoned castle has been altered by cutting out the sky in Photoshop and placing the image on a transparent alpha layer. In After Effects, I then add a layer behind the castle, a photo of a stormy sky, which is then manipulated into becoming a moving image by applying and manipulating the "Mesh" distortion tool.
In the same way, the ghosts are added in their own AE layers using a mix of stock videos and images. Changing the transparency setting on the ghost layers helps make them a more subtle element. I also add an adjustment layer on top of all layers where I add a filter to change the colors and create that dreamy, fuzzy look. I hope all of this isn't all gibberish to you. Suffice it to say, if you manage to get a decent grasp on After Effects, you have a wonderful toolbox at your fingertips. I access AE through an Adobe subscription, which one of my Swedish book collaborators kindly pays for.
However, this shot is a little bit different from the others. The whole background is a photo of a dilapidated house, like the other settings in the film, but the ghosts are originally two of my older puppets.
It's these two guys, whom I have used many times before in my film projects. Once they both had full heads of grey hair, but moths have eaten away all of it. Though the ghost to the left moves, he's not animated via the miracle of stop-motion. I snapped photos of the puppets arranged in their positions for the tableau, extracted them from their backgrounds in Photoshop, and added them to the background photo in AE. Besides erasing parts of their heads and adding smoke stacks (digital stock footage) over these areas, I also animated the arms and hands of the left ghost via the AE "Puppet" tool to make them shake. With the metallic grinding of the soundtrack looming over everything, I felt that I, unplanned, managed to create a sort of David Lynch-like atmosphere to the scene.
I did add a bit of stop-motion in the shape of two demonic pics having a discussion about something. Demonic pigs and cursed houses seem to go like hand in glove. The Amityville Horror house has a diabolical porcine in it, as does the haunted derelict home in Edward Lucas White's "The House of the Nightmare." The stately but crumbling "House on the Borderland" by William Hope Hodgson is positively swarming with pig monsters. So, in short, no haunted home should go without one. The two pigs here are actually just the one puppet, and again, it's one I've used before. It was built and animated for a very brief shot in my film "Imps." I thought it would be ok to recycle it and have it do a bit more (like playing two characters.) Though I do have a full post about "Imps," I'll do a quick retread here of the pig-making process.
