This film was finished in March 2024, so it's taken me over a year to blog about it. But I am quickly catching up to my latest published work. I've been delayed by some sorrows of everyday life, and also a stretch of poor health. The idea for "In A Quiet Field" came from the many cow-filled fields I've walked over in my childhood. Where I grew up, there were many such places, and the cows generally didn't bother me. With that huge, open sky above the fields, I thought something might be watching, and here's the result of that pondering. Let's start with our two alien visitors. I decided to build a robot with three legs, inspired by pulp-era sci-fi magazine covers, for my short film ”Nightcrawlers.” In the end, I used a flying UFO in that film instead, but I still finished the robot puppet, which I put in this project instead.
I bought this weird drinking vessel from a dollar store and thought the ”flask” would make a great robot body. I planned to use the ribbed tube on the puppet too, but in the end I found another
solution.
I have this decorative crystal ball with hexagonal shapes ground into its surface, and I thought something like it would make an interesting head for the robot. I simply put the ball on a slab of clay and built a clay wall around it, pouring PlatSil Gel 25 silicone over the ball.
Into the resulting silicone mold I could then cast Burro plastic, first lining the inside of the mold with silver paint dust to create a metallic color that’ll stick forever.
Here are a few things that went onto the puppet. The pink blob to the left is a dental silicone (or silicone clay) mold taken from a detail on an old toy robot. I’ve poured a resin called Onyx into it. It’s black, as you can see, and sets really fast. The middle thing is a resin cast of the whole robot detail, and the right thing is the cap from an old Whiteout bottle. The last two items will join together to become the very bottom part of the puppet.
I wanted the legs to be quite spindly and remind you a bit of girder works, since that’s a recurring detail on the old pulp magazine robot. The bigger bent v-shape is a crochet needle bought at a Dollar Store. These cheaper needles are hollow, which is perfect for my purpose. I bent a bit of steel wire into a u-shape and inserted it into the hollow v-shape, attaching it with super glue. The three feet you see to the right are Onyx resin castings from the dental silicone mold seen at the top of the page. They have been drilled out at the bottom, and threaded nuts have been attached. Likewise, 2 mm aluminum wires have been stuck to the tops.
These are the tiny 3 mm threaded nuts that went into the puppet's feet. I bought a whole bag of them on eBay for a very low price.
The finished legs are, as you can probably see, a mix of materials, from marker pen caps and bits of EVA foam to wooden dowels and balls. All joints are 2 and 3 mm aluminum wires. The legs go into the Whiteout cap, which has a nail inserted to its centre. This nail will help attach this whole piece to the rest of the puppet. A mix of super glue and baking soda cements all the pieces together.
The robot will have black tubes sticking out of its main body. Thet are made by wrapping macramé yarn around a thin wooden dowel, dabbing the yarn with tinted latex and then pulling off the yarn when the latex has dried. I then had a hollow, flexible tube.
Here’s the robot, almost finished being put together. The long tentacles are 3 mm aluminum wires with the ends sharpened by grinding them down with a rotary grinder. Soft crochet yarn is wrapped around each wire (single layer) and then dabbed with tinted latex. The piece at the very top is a plastic casting made from a silicone mold I created to reproduce an ornamental metal piece from a curtain holder. I’ve used those castings for various costume projects. Each black rubber tube is attached to brass tubes at the bottom (I can’t remember where I got those) and to metal washers at the top. All pieces are superglued in place.
Scrapbooking pearls were superglued to the head, one on each hexagonal shape.
The finished robot was airbrushed with black acrylic paint first, then Alclad II ”Iron” was applied, again with an airbrush. The rubber tubes were painted with ArtAlchemy metallic blue rubbing wax.
The other alien character was also built for another project, but I thought he'd fit right in in this one. The body, arms, and legs were leftovers made for alien characters in my film "When Chaugnar Wakes." The body was covered with latex pieces cast into silicone molds made from various model kits. The head is an original sculpture, first sculpted in Monster Clay, then cast in latex from a plaster mold. The eye is an acrylic lens, under which I've glued a paper print-out of a Photoshopped eye. The mouth has an aluminum wire loop going around the edges of it. I used pliers to open the mouth during animation. The raygun is a loan from the Saucer Man appearing in "Rumble On Monster Island."
The flags are bits of stock illustrations showing various patterns, one of which is inspired by a church window. I printed them out on paper and glued the flags to a pair of small barbecue sticks painted silver.
The two spaceships were stock CG animations found at Videohive.com. Thankfully, one shot showed one of them crashing. The transportation beams are also stock CGI.
And the cows were also stock footage. My house is surrounded by fields for grazing cows, but when I made this film, they hadn't been released from their winter accommodations.
To sum up, this little project was fun to make, despite the robot puppet being very awkward to animate. The point of the film is, of course, that being highly advanced is not a requisite for being civilized.
