The Lone Animator

H P Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time

2012-01-15T06:43:00.000-08:00

For those of you familliar with the works of H P Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time" may be one of his more well-known tales. It's a strange story, more sci-fi than horror, and concerns a peculiar way of time travel. The hero, an academic from Miskatonic University, Arkham, gradually goes mad as he starts to realize that his mind and body was kidnapped during a span of several years, and used by a strange alien race known as the Yith, or "The Great Race", who came to Earth in its infancy.
Here they waged war against other, more horrifying aliens; the flying polyps! After conquering their enemies, the Yith focused on exchanging minds and bodies with representatives of the superior lifeform in different ages of Earth's history. Lovecraft's story jolts from the early prehistoric, to (then) present day, and the far future.
You may not be too surprised to hear that it's never been filmed, although I know the Lovecraft Historical Society did an audio play recording of the tale. One reason is probably that the strange creatures in the story would be difficult to portray, without looking too silly. That, however, was never reason enough for me to not do a particular project, so a while ago I started planning a short animated version called "The Rise of the Yith". I built a Yith puppet and did a test animation. My pal Daniel Lenneer found out about this and revealed his plans to make a film version of the very same story. Thus we decided to join forces and attempt an amateur version of "The Shadow Out of Time". Daniel did the live-action bits, and I produced the animated sequences. So far it's shaping up pretty well. We still have a bit to go, but here are some stills from a few finished scenes for your enjoyment (we hope).

H P Lovecraft's Nightgaunts: The Finished Film

2011-12-21T03:37:00.000-08:00

The finished short film, ladies and gentlemen:

"HP Lovecraft's Nightgaunts"

H P Lovecraft's Nightgaunts

2011-12-16T11:06:00.000-08:00

So, what new film projects from the Loneanimator studio? Right now I'm struggling to finish a short video project before Christmas, which means I have only a week to go. This is yet another H P Lovecraft interpretation, namely my filmed version of his poem "Nightgaunts" from his sonnet cycle "Fungi From Yuggoth".

My main reason for doing this is because I found what I think is a very good recital of the text, done by John Hutch on YouTube. I got his permission to use the audio from his video, and recruited my long-suffering Lovecraftian victim Jimmy Bäckström to writhe about and balance on a stool in front of a green screen to appear to be carried off by the nasty nightgaunts.

Oh, the joys of amateur filmmaking.

The monsters in themselves are gargoyle-like flying creatures without any face or voice. They have oily black skin and barbed tails, with which they torment their victims by tickling them. I know.. It's Lovecraft's odd phobias wrapped up as monsters, again.

I made only one nightgaunt puppet, but with three slightly different interchangeable heads. Nobody will probably notice the difference between them, but it's still there.

To make the puppet fly I built a primitive, but sufficient, flying rig attatched to the puppet's back via a screw. When the nightgaunts walk around on the ground, which they will in a brief clip, they won't need the rig, just the threaded holes in their feet for attaching them to my animation stage.

So far the results are not looking too shabby. I got some great tips from Peter Andrew Montgomery Scott to improve my keying techniques, as well as adding better motion blur. I'd better stop blogging and start animating now!

Puppets by Request: The Monster From Beneath the Sea

2011-12-16T10:19:00.000-08:00

This is a quasi-Godzilla-like monster I did for German amateur filmmaker and animator Oliver Gröbke. Initially he was interested in getting a good enough replica of the Beast From 20.000 Fathoms, but eventually decided to get a monster of his own design. I had pretty free reins while creating this puppet. I gave the monster human-like arms, that are bigger than they'd be on a real dino, so the creature can grab onto things properly while going on it's rampage.

I made this paste-up to inspire Oliver -not that I needed to; he's brimming with ideas for his mini-monster-epic!

Puppets by Request: The Cyclops

2011-12-16T09:54:00.000-08:00

A bit more progress on the "7th Voyage of Sinbad" cyclops I'm building for a guy in the US. As life is keeping me busy with all sorts of fun surprises, finishing something at all this year is taking a lot of time.

I have some patching up to do, teeth and claws to add, some paint and the fur on the legs. And I'll have to make him a big, spiky club, of course.

Umibozu: The finished Short Film

2011-09-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

That's interesting: I've always been able to imbed a videoclip from YouTube here, but not this time! Never mind; Here you go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pz64iwUwIs&feature=channel_video_title

Swedish-Japanese Monster Attacks: Umibozu!

2011-09-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

Now for a little short film project. Long ago I found a Japanese story about the sailor Tokuso encountering an Umibozu at sea, and discussing the peculiarities of life, horror and truth with the monster.

An Umibozu is said to be the spectre of a drowned Buddhist monk, and usually manifests itself as a huge black head, on occasion accompanied by tentacles. The creature is huge and sinks ships daring to venture too far off the coastline. Of course, a giant squid comes to mind, and it has been suggested that such an animal have been glimpsed and the encounter started off the legend.

My version of the story features a poor fisherman, rather than a successful mariner. The Umibozu is pretty intact, and has a couple of nasty-looking tentacles.

In early September I shot some green screen footage of my pal Dag Persson dressed up as the fisherman. We concocted a very simple wooden hold for the "oar", which was just a big stick in reality. I took some snapshots of a small wooden japanese boat model a friend of mine has, and superimposed Dag into it. It works fine for distance shots, while close-ups simply show Dag from the waist up. We used a powerful leaf-blower (which made a hell of a racket) to simulate stormy winds. Dag's been in a few of my projects. He was the hero in my "The King Who Sought Immortality", for which he also stood in front of a chroma key screen with the leaf-blower going full blast in his face.

The Umibozu itself was constructed as a very plain hand puppet, just something I held aloft on my outstreched arm and waved around in front of the camera. Since it wasn't meant to convey any expressions I tried to create a distinct permanent expression on the sculpture for the puppet.

I made a two-part plaster mould for the sculpture and cast latex tinted black into the finished mould.

The finished puppet has reddish eyes created by painting on the flat backside of a pair of glass semi-orbs. I also made a jointed latex tentacle, which I animated twice and edited into the shots of the Umibozu submerged in water.

The finished shots make use of photos of an overcast sky, googled lightning images, shots of a CGI ocean I bought some years ago, and some spark shower footage from detonationfilms.com used as water splashes.

It's not a realistic look, but that's not what I was after. The whole film is stylized in different ways.

For example, I chose to include fleeting images of some of the words from the conversation between the monster and the fisherman. The reason for this is simply to add more punch to the visuals, and also to make sure our Swedish-accented English comes across well enough. If you can't understand what's being said, the purpose of the film kind of falls flat.

I'm still editing the project, but it should be up on YouTube during the coming week. Sayonara!

Puppets by Request: Kong and the Cyclops

2011-09-23T10:25:00.000-07:00

I am asked more and more often to make puppets for other animators, which is fun, but also steals time from my own projects. At the same time it's interesting to try and recreate the look of classic movie monsters. It's a lot harder than I initially thought.
Right now I'm working on a on a King King puppet, which will be just under a foot tall. As you may know, that is smaller than the original 1933 puppet by Marcel Delgado. The client sent me a ball and socket armature that he used for another puppet a while back. I modified this armature and will be using it for Kong.

I've done two face sculptures; One slightly rounded, which is the one I've picked for this armature, and one slightly elongated and a bit bigger. Right now the head I prefer has red "eyes". I touched them up in a few images to get a better look at what they might look like finished. Also, the teeth are just put there for a quick look.

Also, you might recognize this fellow, which is being made for another client:

Again, the teeth are just there for show at the moment, and the eye will, of course, be replaced with a realistic one.

Making a Klingon skull (just for fun).

2011-09-23T10:09:00.000-07:00

Last year I made a Klingon skull, which I thought might look pretty fancy in my DVD shelf (and it did). And let's face it; What would your rendition of Klingon "Hamlet" be without it?? I've done skulls used as props in stage shows before, so making the actual skull was no news for me, except for the fact that it was going to be slightly bigger than an average human skull.

I almost always start off with a sculpture made in Chavant clay. This clay is oil-based and used by the US car industry to sculpt prototype car bodies. But you can buy it at many retailers of ceramics materials and sculpture houses. The thing about Chavant is that it's pretty compact and hard when you start off working with it, but the body warmth from your fingers eventually makes it more and more pliable. But if you don't have the patience to wait for that (like me), you can make it instantly soft by warming the Chavant with a heat gun. If you warm it long enough the clay will go into a completely liquid state, so be careful. Warming the clay is good for getting bigger chunks of it soft, so you can clump them together to get your sculpture started. After having worked for a while on the clay blob with loop tools it started to resemble a skull. I used a book with really good images of a human skull as reference.

After about two weeknights worth of sculpting I was pretty satisfied with how the skull turned out. I tried to come up with my own ridge design, but I probably unconsciously nicked it from somewhere. I made a very lazy underside with hardly any details, but those can be added later as separate casts.

This sculpture is getting a mold made out of silicone, which is a good material since you can cast almost everything in it. I use a silicone called DragonSkin Q manufactured(?) and sold by SmoothOn Inc. What's good about this particular brand is that you can measure up the two components in plastic cups without needing any scales. You just measure by eye two equal parts and mix them together. The DragonSkin Q sets in about 8 minutes and is fully cured in 75. I always brush on the first layer to avoid airbubbles. Some always sneak in, but the brushing helps keep them down. Use a really cheap brush, `cause after you've dipped it in silicone it goes off to brush heaven.

After this first layer I add up to five layers of silicone with a thickener added. This makes it easy to just slap it on like butter.

I also add some tints to each new layer of silicone, so I know I've covered all surfaces.

I like to add a support shell to some part of the silicone mold. If I don't it'll just flop around in my hands when I try to cast something in it, since the silicone is so soft. The nasty-looking stuff I'm mixing here is another SmoothOn product called Shell Shock, which is a brushable plastic.

I just ladle it on thickly over the back end of the skull mold. I put the mold on a black trash bag, since the plastic is pretty drippy. If I hadn't had any Shell Shock at home I would've used plaster bandages, which works almost just as well too.

When I'm casting in the silicone mold I'll put it into its plastic "cradle" first, which will help the silicone mold stay put in its shape until the material cast inside the mold have cured.

The silicone mold is so soft the sculpture comes out pretty intact. Only some of the teeth have fallen off.

I've cut a hole in the slit on the underside, where I'll pour the casting material. Time for more SmoothOn product placement! I'm using one of their plastics called SmoothCast 325. Like all the other stuff you mix two parts 50/50 and pour it into the mold. I've also added black pigments; If I hadn't, the plastic would have turned semi-transparent amber (which can be cool, but not for this project). I realized I actually didn't have enough plastic at home to make a strong enough casting, so I reinforced by pouring in Foam-it, which is a rigid polyurathane foam. It's very light but very hard.

Here's the finished plastic/foam cast pulled from the silicone mold. You can see the yellow foam shine through here and there.

You can swab down your casting with alcohol if you want to remove all traces of oil from the silicone, but I've never had any problems with DragonSkin molds, so I just go straight to priming it. Sometimes I use auto primer in a spray can, other times I use a transparent airbrush color primer (like I did now). It helps the paint stick better and I usually finish my paint jobs by spraying primer over the whole thing as a sealer.

A mix of white and earthy brown acrylic airbrush paints are sprayed on, and a thin layer of brown and yellow are added over that with some brown shading.

And there you go. If you want even better results, go out in your garden and rub some dirt over the skull; it actually takes any shine from the paint job off and adds unmistakeable details of age and wear. If you don't want to go through the hassle of molding and casting you can buy a plastic skull replica and build the Klingon features up with plumber's epoxy putty, making your sculpture and finished prop in one. Of course, having a mold means you can make copies of your skull :)

Making a Gorn Baby

2011-09-21T01:26:00.000-07:00

Kishin of Trekspace and Klingonspace once made a comment about a sequel she had written to the TOS episode "The Trouble With Tribbles". Her story involved lots of Gorn hatchlings running amuck on the Enterprise, which I thought was a funny idea. A Gorn hatchling would be a nice addition to any Trekkie collection, no? In short, this is what I spent my 2010 Easter doing:

I emptied a plastic candy egg and used it as a start for my Gorn egg sculpture. I separated the base from the egg in order to make the casting of the molds easier (read on brave traveller, you'll see what that's about shortly). The egg base was covered with pebbles from my yard to imitate what I imagine would be a nice reptillian egg nest.

The molds for both base and egg, and later Gorn hatchling, were made out of silicone. The egg base was encircled with a clay wall. The silicone was then simply poured in and allowed to find its level.

When the silicone had set, the clay was removed, the mold turned upside down and SmoothCast 325 plastic added to the hollow of the mold.

A different approach was necessary for the egg part. It was turned on its head and stuck in a lump of clay. I didn't need the whole egg, just the lower part. A thin layer of silicone was first poured on the egg sculpture. Two more layers were added with a mix of silicone and thickener. A clay wall stopped the silicone from splashing out all over the place.

When the silicone was thick enough I could remove the clay wall and add a support shell made out of plaster bandages. This will help the elastic mold hold its shape while casting plastic in it.

The egg is supposed to be hollow and perfectly smooth on the inside. This meant it'd have to be "roto-casted". You pour the plastic into the mold and turn it, turn it, turn it, rolling the plastic around along the walls until it starts to set up. This procedure is repeated about three times; Then the plastic shell is thick enough.

And this is the result. The top of the egg is cut and sanded and the two parts joined together.

I painted the egg and the base with acrylic airbrush paints. It's quick and it's possible to add lots of subtle shades this way. I should clean up my airbrush more often.

I didn't know how much of the Gorn baby would be visible while peeking out of its egg, so I decided to sculpt the whole thing. The eyes will be added later as a pair of knobbly buttons, so I just made sure there was enough space for them.

Again; Another approach for making the mold. This time I gradually built up a clay cradle around the sculpture. Eventually I could just pour the silicone into the cradle when it was large enough.

The sculpture came out in bits and pieces. I only had to cut a small bit on the silicone mold to remove all the clay.

The Gorn baby was also roto-cast into a thin plastic shell. Hard polyfoam was then added to make the casting solid, but very light. Another dash with the airbrush and the Gorn is ready for its eyes and its egg shell.

The eyes are plastic buttons painted with metallic spraypaints. They are glued in place with hot-melt glue. I also used this glue to secure the Gorn to the bottom of the shell. I think this project was a pretty suitable pasttime for Easter, just a different kind of egg craft! Are all these materials expensive, you may ask? They're a bit pricey when you buy them in bottles and cans. But they last very long and are quick and easy to use. I made the Gorn hatchling in four days, with a bit of slacking every once in a while.

Wrestling With the Gorn!

2011-09-21T01:08:00.000-07:00

I knew the Gorn captain of TOS episode ”Arena” was a tough cookie, having withstood the considerable combat expertise of James T Kirk. I just didn’t exactly know how tough he was until I tried to make my own mask of him. The head of the lizard-like Gorn is a deceptively simple mask. He almost looks like a green, fanged Donald Duck variation. But as I started sculpting the head in clay I realized how difficult it was getting all the details right, and the Gorn head is full of subtle details. The truth is if you don’t understand that and manage to recreate all those details, the Gorn head will look suspiciously wrong in some hard-to-define way. Wah Chang, who created the Gorn head, as well as the salt vampire, the Balok effigy, the ape/pig creature from “The Cage”, the Romulan head gear and battle cruiser, the phaser, the tricorder and pretty-much-you-name-it on TOS, was an endlessly creative man. Besides coming up with great stuff on a very tight budget, he also had a true visionary eye for shapes that would stick in your mind. His Trek aliens and props you remember because of their perfect simplicity and originality. So, nailing down Wah Chang’s Gorn head was no easy task!

Wah Chang’s mask is actually not symmetrical; The right brow ridge is larger than the left, the nostrils aren’t exactly centered, etc. I decided to try and make my mask as symmetrical as I could. There’s very little information about how the Gorn mask worked. Apparently, there were two sets of see-through holes, one just below the frown in the eyebrows and two (pretty obvious) slits below the eyes. Both holes were sculpted into the mask as hollowed-out spaces.

It took a loooong time to get the mask sculpture finished. It kept growing until I ran out of my clay of choice, Chavant. I had to resort to another clay (the redder one) that was a bit too soft for the purpose, but it worked out fine in the end. In order to finish the mask on time for Wonder Con (where it would be displayed by Judith Daniels of alienhair.net) I skipped adding the scales or warts in clay. More about that in a minute.

In order to avoid airbubbles I always brush on the first layer of plaster. I doesn't take care of the problem perfectly, but it certainly helps.

Several layers of plaster follows, including one with burlap dipped in plaster. This is done to add some reinforcement to the plaster mold.

I forgot to add that a dividing clay wall is built up around the mask sculpture. This is done so I can make a two-part plaster mold. When the front half is done I turn the sculpture on its nose and continue to cover the back with plaster. The exposed front half plaster seen here is coated with vaseline. The small round dips you can see in the plaster will be filled out when the back part is made, and will create interlocking keys for the two mold halves. Important stuff, if you want to keep your whole mold together!

When both mold halves are finished and the plaster has been allowed to cool, it's time to part the mold pieces and take out the clay. Screwdrivers are used the pry the mold halves apart. The burlap reinforcements now help keep the mold from cracking.

After having cleaned out the clay, the mold halves were put together and allowed to rest overnight. This is done so some of the moisture will evaporate from the plaster. The insides of the mold halves are then coated with liquid latex. The latex is sponged on in order to reduce airbubbles in cramped spaces. A few coats goes on, including cotton dipped in latex. This will help make big areas, like the nose and the back of the head, sturdy and make them hold their shape. Finally, the mold halves are put together and a few more latex coats are put over the seam between the halves.

After letting the latex set properly I could remove the casting the next morning. There was a bit of "flashing" in the latex casting where the mold halves created a seam. This is alomst unavoidable and the flashing is quite easily removed with a small pair of sharp scissors.

The seam is also covered with sponged-on liquid latex. Now comes the time for adding the bumpy scales. I simply dip a wooden sculpting tool in latex and leave a drop of it on the mask. Then another, and another. This may seem like a deadly dreary job, but it's actully taken care of pretty quickly. It took me about an hour to cover the mask this way. Had I sculpted every bump it would've taken days.

Here the mask has had its first coat of paint applied. I just mixed some latex with different tints and sponged it on. As this paint is latex-based it really bonds with the mask. It also becomes very sticky and can easily attach to itself, which is why I added a liberal coat of corn starch on each section I finished painting.

And here's the finished mask. The teeth were cast in latex from old plaster molds used for creating horns and claws for puppets. The eyes were a bit of a bother. I have no idea what the Gorn's eyes were made out of, and nobody else seems to know either. I settled on making them a sort of insect eyes, with hexagonal shapes covering the surface. The eye was sculpted by pressing an allen key into a clay sphere. Over that I created a silicone mold, in which I could cast hollow plastic eyes. The eyes were then painted with a tough metallic spray paint bought at an auto shop.

Now, I have a pretty big head (perhaps in more ways than one), but this mask was very roomy even for me. When I put it on I could look out through the holes below the eyes; That worked out fine. I had covered them from the inside with a black veily fabric and had no trouble moving around, though quick head moves made it more difficult to see where I was going.

I'm quite happy with my Gorn mask. For a first attempt it's pretty darn good. I may still take another stab at this character eventually. I want to get the eyes just right, for one thing.

So how did things go at Wondercon? Pretty good, actually, as Judith managed to sell the mask to none other than Bobby Clarke, who played the original Gorn! He'd been looking for a decent Gorn mask for sometime, but not really finding anything that met with his standards. He remarked that my mask seemed "small" and that the eyes of the original Gorn were made out of sequins. Other than that he was apparently happy enough with it to buy it.

Cardassian Latex Mask Pieces

2011-09-20T05:09:00.000-07:00

I once made some Cardassian mask pieces for a Trekkie friend using liquid latex. I often make masks and mask pieces to be glued to the face for friends into fantasy live-action role-playing ("LARP"). Liquid latex is far from the ideal mask material. It's really not soft enough to provide enough flexibility for masks glued to human skin. Foam latex is the movie industry standard, although silicone is being used more frequently now. Both these materials are soft and stretchy, and allow the actor to perform. But using ordinary liquid latex has been suprisingly successful for my LARP friends. You just have to use it in a clever way. Breaking the masks up into smaller pieces with spacing between them to allow the skin to move usually does the trick. Also, adding strips of upholstery foam or expanding polyfoam helps. Whipping up the latex with an electrical whisk before you pour it into your mask mold often works very well, but that's depending on what brand of latex you're using.

All of the mask pieces starts off as sculptures in oil-based clay. Since I didn't have a cast of my customer's head I used a female porcelain wig stand to sculpt on, and crossed my fingers the fit would be OK. For the shoulder and collar bone pieces I'm using a hard polyfoam bust bought many years ago from monstermakers.com
My favorite plaster is Ultracal 30. It's very hard and duplicates small details very well. After the first layer, which is brushed on, I slap on another layer with burlap dipped in plaster.
The burlap reinforces the plaster, preventing it from cracking when the mold is pryed off the sculpture. After the mold is removed the clay is cleaned out. Liquid latex is sponged into the mold, making sure airbubbles are avoided (as best one can). Using a sponge helps make the edge of the mask piece very thin, which is something you want when you glue it to your face. The latex piece is dusted with talctum powder (or corn starch) before being removed. If you don't do that the inside of the latex piece will stick to itself.

My friend Liz acted as a makeup model, very patiently letting me stick scaly rubber pieces all over her face and down her cleavage. I decided to color all the pieces with a neutral human skin tone by mixing latex and pigments before casting the latex into the molds. I did this because at this time I was practically out of the ingredients for making "PAX paint"; a very strong makeup base made with ProsAide glue and acrylic paint. After having applied the mask pieces I would've covered both Liz´skin and the latex pieces with PAX. The forehead piece is not yet trimmed in this photo.

Using the little ProsAide I did have I made some "bondo"; a paste mixed from Cabosil powder and ProsAide. I covered all the transitions between mask and skin with the bondo, making the mask edges practically disappear. This little trick helps selling the illusion better. In this photo I've applied the bondo to the nose and chin pieces.

So, here's the finished mask job with the Cardassian pale greyish yellow skin tone added in Photoshop. A bit of cheating, I know, but this at least shows how the mask will look when applied and painted properly. Having cast the mask pieces in human skin hue helped make the Photoshop tweaking easy. And that's the Cardassian insignia in the background.

While playing around with glue and rubber I also made Liz up as a Vulcan, using ears that are usually created for Elven LARPers. The ends of her eyebrows are covered with wax and bondo, with makeup powder added. You can get a VERY smooth finish using bondo, if you don't ladle it on to thick. Just wet your index finger in water and lightly rub over the bondo paste to smooth it out.

I glued down the latex pieces using spirit gum, but ProsAide is a better adhesive. Do remember to use a proper remover, though. Bond-Off is a really good one. All the latex mask pieces worked fine, especially those stuck to Liz´face. The neck pieces were the only worry, buckling and wrinkling in a weird-looking way when Liz raised her shoulders. So back to the drawing board with those. I added soft polyfoam to the neck pieces, which helped.

But all in all, mask pieces made in liquid latex need not be a horror to wear. Latex is a good economical choice compared to foam latex and silicone and it's up to each and every person to decide if it's something that would be OK wearing during a day at a con.

This image is really a cheat, because it was created in Photoshop, but it shows Liz in makeup as a Star Trek: Original series Klingon warrior woman. It's a design experiment to see if it would be a good idea to make a fan film with her in this getup. It'll probably happen some time.

One last image: I eventually made up my friend Rolf (sadly gone now) as a Tellarite ambassador. I wish I would've filmed him like this and saved the footage for some future project.

Star Trek Alien Masks

2011-09-16T09:26:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I was a member of the Trekspace Star Trek fan page. When I eventually left, the blog posts about Trek props and masks I had made on that page disappeared. For a while now, people have been asking me to re-post the same info, so I'll be doing just that. Hopefully it'll be of interest to any wayward Trekkie dropping in here, or just to anyone curious about how to make your own latex mask pieces.

I'll start off with a bunch of molds I made for simple Trek alien masks. I make all my masks in either liquid latex or silicone. Latex is cheap and easy to handle. This means low costs and quick production time. Silicone is infinitely more flexible than latex and very skin-like. The problems with latex are that some people may be allergic to it and that the material isn’t quite as flexible as you’d want it to be. The problems with silicone are that it’s expensive, hard to paint and a bit of a hassle to cast. There are good uses for both, however. A simple false nose, ears or a forehead will work just as fine in latex. If you want a full face with great movability, say for a character like Odo, silicone is ideal.

But before getting started with any of these materials it’s all about getting a decent sculpture as the basis of your mask. The choice of clay and tools do the trick. I prefer the oil-based clay Chavant, but any oil- or wax-based clay that’s not too soft is good. I have a stack of tools that I use for different purposes. The ones I hold in my hands most of the time are loop tools. Often, they are a bit clumsy for really detailed work so I’ve made small loop tools by attaching steel wire to old brush handles using “Friendly Plastic” thermo plastic. But you can also use plumber’s epoxy.

I use a face plaster cast to put my mask sculpture on. You can make one yourself casting your own face or a friend’s face. I might go into techniques for doing that in another blog. I’m using a cast I made myself from a bought polyfoam bust, since these masks will all be generic. The plaster face is often referred to as a “positive” while your mask mold will be the “negative”. When casting with foam latex or silicone, the mask material will be put in between these two parts. The sculpting process in itself is about adding and taking away clay. If you want some really excellent advice on sculpting techniques I recommend that you check out any of Mark Alfrey’s instructional DVDs. From time to time, I put a tiny amount of Vaseline on my fingers and rub on the clay surface to smooth it out. I use a closely cropped brush to get at where my fingers can’t reach.

Here’s an important detail: If you leave your mask sculpture without any skin detail it’ll just look flat. Add some pores by laying a piece of soft plastic, a plastic bag for instance, over your sculpture and gently press with a pointed tool on the plastic. This will leave subtle little markings that’ll add plenty of life to the mask.

I’ve done a version of the Bajoran nose ridges here (the Bajorans are a very human-like race). I’ve made a clay wall around the sculpture marking where the so-called “cutting edge” will be. When making mask pieces in foam latex, the cutting edge will result in a very thin edge on the finished foam mask, making it easier to apply and cover. You really don’t need a cutting edge while casting latex, but I prefer to put one in anyway, since it shows me how far out I’ll be putting the latex in the finished mold. This will help making every casting virtually identical. I’m using a softer clay for the cutting edge. The one I’m using is also oil-based, but it’s more common to use a water-based clay. Klean Klay is very popular for this in the US, but I can’t get that in Sweden so I’m sticking to what I can find to do the trick.

I use a plaster called Ultracal 30, which is very durable. It will hold up to repeated castings much, much better than ordinary hobby plaster. I always brush on the first coat of plaster. Here I’m using a small brush to get into all the details. This will help eliminate air bubbles in the finished plaster cast. After this first layer I put on a big gob of plaster. Notice that I’ve built up a wall with the softer clay surrounding the sculpture to help keep the plaster in place while it sets.

After the plaster has set up it’s taken off the sculpture and any residual clay is cleaned off the cast. The best time to remove the plaster mold is when it’s hard, but still a bit warm. Then it’ll come off pretty easily.

This sculpture is based on the Andorian look from “Star Trek Enterprise”, which differs from the The Original Series look. They have a pair of antenna, which will be created separately and attached to the mask.

Another cutting edge put on using the softer clay.

As this is a bigger sculpture, I’m using a bigger brush to cover up more quickly. Again, after the first layer has set up I add a thick layer of plaster on top. Have a bowl with some water to wash your brush in directly after having applied the plaster. NEVER wash your brush in a sink. The plaster will clog up your pipes and wreck them. If you have a soft bowl, (sculpture houses sell rubber bowls) just use very little water and leave the bowl with the dirty water in it after you've cleaned your brush. After a few days the water will have evaporated and you can clean the dried up plaster out.

This is a Tellarite mask design, mostly based on how they look in the TOS episode “Journey to Babel”. I’ve added some other details based on their look in ST Enterprise, mixed with some of my

own ideas.

After adding the brushed-on plaster layer I can recommend that you put on a layer of soft burlap pieces dipped in plaster. This will act as reinforcement to the plaster mold and give it extra strength. This can be important when you pry your mold off your plaster face positive. If your mold isn’t thick enough or reinforced, it may crack. So add that extra layer of burlap just to be sure. When I have to dip into the Ultracal plaster with my fingers, I cover my hands with surgical latex gloves.

Here is a weekend’s worth of mask plaster molds. At the top left is also a Romulan forehead and below the Andorian cast are the tips of the antenna. When prying the mold loose from the plaster face positive I use a flat screwdriver. Using gentle force I get the mold loose in one place and then it’s usually enough to use my fingers to remove the whole mold. Having that extra cutting edge area outside of the sculpture means that I never get the screwdriver inside the actual sculpted area, damaging it.

Of course, I also had to make a Klingon head appliance. This one was created for a friend in the US. I tried to come up with a ridge design of my own, and I think I was partially successful. It's hard to come up with something for a Klingon that hasn't already been seen and done.

That’s all for now, children. Next time I'll show a couple of the masks applied to some willing victims.

My Own Gandalf

2011-08-02T03:43:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned before, sometime around 1999/2000 I was involved in an amateur musical film project based on J R R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. This project was actually, believe it or not, endorsed by the Tolkien Estate. Due to creative differences the project drifted apart and nothing came of it. However, during these later years I've revisited video footage shot during the project and put together my own short films. This latest effort features Niels elley, who is an old friend of mine, and a sculptor, stone cutter and artist.
I made a big crepé hair beard and mustache for him, and used a wig actually made from real human hair. About half of it was shot on location and half in front of a green screen.

Gandalf taking a leak behind a tree (even wizards gotta go..)

Save Prince Plutonium on YouTube!

2011-07-11T03:51:00.000-07:00

So, here’s the finished little epic. It took two years to put together, mostly due to interference from ”real” life. For instance, this spring my little studio, an old boiler room connected to my house, was flooded due to melting snow. It was the start of endless problems and very expensive repairs. It’s still not over, but I’m getting back to something similar to ordinary life. About six months were eaten away by this problem. It’s tough keeping your spirits up when you have a lot of worries to take care of.

I also made a little behind the scenes film. It’s very compressed, but shows some of the process behind putting this project together.

Sayonara, old buddy...

2011-05-27T12:07:00.000-07:00

One of my oldest and best friends, Rolf Berg, passed away today. We made 15 films together, and had a blast doing them. Rolf played everything from pirates and crooks to trolls and wizards. He did it all and did it very well. I will really miss him.

Recreating Taurus

2011-05-10T11:13:00.000-07:00

I just finished one of my very few puppet-building commissions, a recreation of the monster Taurus from the film "Equinox" (1968/71). I built it for a fellow YouTuber with a great interest in vintage monsters. This puppet is built up, like all my puppets, having a aluminum wire-jointed skeleton covered with soft foam and a latex skin. It's a pretty good recreation, and I'm quite happy with it. I hope my YouTube pal will like it too.

"Equinox", for those of you that don't know, is a low-low budget horror fantasy of singular pedigree. It was put together by people who would in the 70´s rise to fame as creators of the effects for "Star Wars" and most of the blockbuster fantasies that followed during the 80´s. Besides Taurus there's also a bat-winged devil and a Lovecraftian tentacled horror, chasing no other than fantasy author Fritz Lieber in a small role. Today you can get "Equinox" as a very polished double DVD set (of course).

Save Prince Plutonium Trailer!

2011-04-22T23:55:00.000-07:00

The poor people who appear in my films are almost always in for a long wait to see the finished piece. I sort-of film first and then later try to figure out how to make the film hold together. I've also learned to film WHEN people are available, and stock up on footage. Anyway, for the young actors in "Save Prince Plutonium", my space movie, I put together this little trailer as a "Happy Easter to you" message. Hope you enjoy it too!

Building an Oliphaunt

2011-02-18T10:26:00.000-08:00

I’m sure most of you know what an oliphaunt is by now. Or Mümakil, as they’re also called. If you haven’t read J R R Tolkien’s poem, then you have seen oliphaunts stomp around in the two last Lord of the Rings movies. They’re big, mean elephants, basically.

I like Tolkien’s poem “Oliphaunt”, or I should say Sam’s poem, as Tolkien credits Sam Gamgee as its actual author. I’ve wanted to make a short-short animated video clip based on it for years. In fact, I started sculpting an oliphaunt puppet three years ago, but got no further than the head. But a while ago I decided to finish the puppet nad animate it, urged on by 10-year old Joel, who has a soft spot for the monstrous elephants. So, a short description of my oliphaunt puppet.

As I mentioned, this sculpture was begun three years ago. I made a plaster mold and sort of forgot about the project.

Recently I cast the skin of the head in tinted latex, sort of creating a mini-muppet.

The armature was really simple, using pieces of very hard cardboard for larger body sections, and thick aluminum wire, untwisted, for the joints. This made the joints less “springy”, and in theory that means easier to animate. As I’ve started animating now I’ve found it to be quite true, but only quite.

First muscle foam padding of the body…

And then some additional padding to smooth things out.

The eyes are home-made; plastic beads painted and dipped in Crystal Clear plastic to get a nice shine.

The tusks are paper clay and not as brittle as you might then think. They’re painted and airbrushed. They’re also NOT as white as my camera flash makes them out to be.

The trunk, ready to be attached to the skull, which, by the way is made out of Friendly Plastic thermoplastic.

Trunk attached and covered with latex skin.

Head attached to body, ready for it’s latex skin covering.

I cast about 40 or more smaller latex skin pieces to allow for better stretch and movement. All skin pieces were dyed black.

Having the latex dyed black meant that I could get away with a very quick paintjob, namely just some drybrushing, using acrylic paint and ProsAid make-up glue.

And here’s the big boy ready for the camera. This puppet is actually pretty big, over a foot tall. It’s not at all heavy, though. I’ve started animating him now, and as with all puppets he’s got shortcomings that you don’t find out about until you start bending and twisting the joints. Still, so far he’s behaved pretty well. My idea was to create a slightly surreal elephant, something that would look a bit funny, but also a bit scary. I based most of my design on Mammuthus imperator, a really huge relative of the Wooly mammoth, and then tried to make the finished look a tad cartoonish.

Imitating Life

2011-02-11T02:28:00.000-08:00

I'm a member of UFO Sweden, an organization researching strange anomalies encountered and reported by people. UFO Sweden is led by the indefatigable Clas Svahn, journalist and author. We publish one magazine for the general public, and one for the investigators. Several years back I drew a comic for the internally published magazine, portraying Clas and his colleague Håkan as Men in Black. The comic was called “The Y Files”, and made fun (rather innocently, I thought) of the sometimes very weird and crazy UFO movement. Some loved it and some hated it bitterly, arguing that this single jest undermined the whole purpose of our organization. Eventually I grew tired of the crybabies and put the comic to rest.

I decided to give Clas a surprise Christmas gift this years, and sculpted a figurine of his “Y Files” alter ego, about to be grabbed by a stalky-eyed alien.

I created both characters in Chavant clay, and built up silicone molds around each figure separately.

The finished figurines were cast in SmoothCast 325, my favorite plastic, and painted with acrylic airbrush paints.

Clas had a really bad Christmas. Both his mom and his father in law passed away within a few days of each other. I hope my little gift gave him cause to smile a bit, and I think it did.

I also made a small sculpture of my uncle Ingvar as a gnome, since he’s interested in folklore and old traditions, but not least because he’s actually seen one!

When I make my silicone molds, I just build up a clay wall as closely to the sculpture as I can, so no excess silicone will be wasted. Also, I don’t want the molds to be too thick. If there’s a good enough thinness, without making the molds to soft and wobbly, I don’t have to make many, or any, cuts in the silicone to remove the sculpture, and later, the castings.

The camera wouldn’t give us any sharp images today, but I hope you get the general idea.

The King Who Sought Immortality: The Film and a Little Extra Film

2011-01-17T08:34:00.000-08:00

A little mythological tale of the meaning of life, quite a bit inspired by the Dynamation epics of animator Ray Harryhausen. YouTube doesn't like this clip. For some reason, all the campfire scenes are of terrible quality in this upload, and there are some lines and blips flashing by NOT in the original film. I hope you still find it entertaining. The film is shot with DV consumer equipment and contains some of the worst chroma key work this side of 1985. It took two years for me to finish it, working on other projects in between. I learned a lot from it, particularly what NOT to do next time.

I also made a little clip showing some before-and-after stuff:

Making a Dentist Beastly!

2010-12-17T07:21:00.000-08:00

A while ago, I was contacted my Mary Engholm, a costume-making friend of mine. She's working on a Swedish musical stage adaptation of "Beauty and the Beast". She had designed the beast, but needed help with making the actual mask, claws and feet for the character. I saw this as an opportunity to try out making a silicone mask, something which is a bit more complicated than my usual latex masks.

Mary took a plaster cast of Tommy, the singing dentist playing the beast, and sent it to me. Over that, I sculpted a cat-like face after Mary's design (cat faces seemingly being the norm in adaps of this tale).

An Ultracal 30 plaster mold was created over this sculpture and the clay removed from the cured mold. Now, the silicone mask was created by first brushing a thin layer of Dragon Skin FX silicone into both the mold and over the cast of Tommy's face. A new batch of silicone was then mixed with "slacker", a chemical which makes the silicone very runny. Some skin-colored pigments were also added to the mix, which was then poured into the mold. The face part, often called "the plug" by the pros, was pressed into the mold, making the silicone mix run out and into all parts of the mold. After about an hour, the silicone cast could be removed, now having a fully cured, but very soft and jelly-like consistency. I added some extra paint to the mask, mixing "psycho paint" (from SmoothOn.com) with red and brown pigments and sponging it on in thin layers. I also added some mutton chops with fake fur. This face mask, with a pair of silicone ears, was stuck onto a silicone face cowl. The whole contraption could be pulled over the head, fitting snugly and not need any glue to be kept in place or to respond to facial movements. I tried the mask on with a wig that Mary sent me. I have a big head, but Tommy's head is even bigger, so my fit wasn't perfect.

It does, however look better on Tommy:

Mary will probably add more hair, especially a pair of eyebrows. It'll be fun seeing the finished beast in full costume. This musical is produced by a small stage company in the south of Sweden. The show will probably premiere in March or April, 2011. I hope I have an opportunity to see it.

The King Who Sought Immortality: The Epic Trailer...

2010-11-15T12:14:00.000-08:00

...For the epic film!

The King Who Sought Immortality: Sumerian Dragons and Clay Snakes

2010-11-14T11:48:00.000-08:00

The last creatures I built and animated for this two-year project of hope and despair was a dragon and a snake. Which means that the stop-motion part of the film is finally done and finished. Now, only a narration remains to be recorded.

The Dragon was based on the "Sirrush", a pretty mystical creature portrayed on the so-called Ishtar gate, alongside ordinary animals like bulls and lions. The Sirrush has a more than passing resemblance with a dinosaur, but is also furnished with a very snake-like head and clawed paws. Some very enthusiastic researchers have suggested that the Sirrush is in fact, based on observations of live dinosaurs. The bulls and lions of the Ishtar gate are actually rendered in a quite realistic way. Is this also the case with the Sirrush?

Whatever the Sirrush was meant to be I thought it was a pretty cool beast to build and animate. I sort of took a middle path with my puppet version; It's not quite a dinosaur, and it's not quite the creature from the gate artwork.

I printed a large photocopy of the ancient artwork and measured every part of my armature after it. It wound up looking like this.

So, the proportions of the puppet were fairly close to the Ishtar gate Sirrush. However, the foam muscle padding of the body was entirely based on drawings of dino muscles.

The ancient Sirrush has a spearhead pattern of scales, that looks very ornate, but also very functional. I tried to copy it for the skin of the puppet and soon realized what a nightmare it meant trying to invisibly overlap the skin patches. I managed to piece it all together well enough. You can see the seams here, but when the puppet was painted, they pretty much disappeared.

The finished puppet is about two feet long, which is manageble, and allows for quite a bit of detailing.

In the film, the king of the title challenges a herd of Sirrush dragons to show his prowess to the gods. The big creatures, however, are less than impressed by the pipsqueak at their feet.

I did four different animations and spliced them together in After Effects to create the "herd". The longest animation has the puppet lumbering across my chroma key puppet stage, appearing to the right, and exiting to the left. This animation took almost four hours straight to do. Can't say I'm entirely happy with it, but it does show the dragon walking with a bobbing head and a snaking tail.

Now, for the snake. I was so lazy with this very short sequence, I simply sculpted a plasticine snake and animated it. I also animated a pair of gold paper wings for a clip where the snake goes psychedelic and flies away.

The King Who Sought Immortality: Fake Feathers for Flying Fiends.

2010-11-06T12:20:00.000-07:00

I based one of the creatures in my film on the Assyrian/Babylonian demon Pazuzu. If this figure looks familiar, it's probably because he's the antagonist in the Exorcist movies. Max Von Sydow's father Merrin confronts a statue of the demon in the beginning of the first Exorcist movie. There is at least one very vivid real-life statue of Pazuzu, and I based my design of the stop-motion puppet on this particular one.

I didn't have any real feathers in the right size to make Pazuzu's wings. Instead, I folded pieces of opaque sticky tape around bits of aluminum wire and plastic-covered copper wire. After trimming the tape and cutting into the sides of each tape length, I ended up with something resembling feathers. I then joined each feather to an aluminum wire wing armature with friendly plastic.

The wings, four of them, were in their turn attached to the puppet body armature. This demon was intended to swoop down from the stormy sky in one brief shot, so a wire support was added to its bottom to help it stay aloft.

I added some color to the feathers with my airbrush. More paint was added later.

As usual with my puppets, this fellow had a foam-padded body, covered with patches of cast latex skin.

The support wire of the finished puppet was simply attached to a large block of wood, and held still while animating with a clamp.

The top part of each wing was covered with fake fur, glued on with contact cement.

The puppet wasn't required to do much, and had only an articulated mouth in its head. The rest of the body was fully jointed. A bit more work than necessary for a few seconds, one might think. However, it only takes a few seconds for the audience to see that a puppet (or any kind of effect) is done badly. So, better to put enough love in all that you do for it to be visible.

The support wire going up the puppet's bum was removed via a keyframed mask in After Effects. In the film, the flying demon attacks the hero, but is swiftly dispatched by a thrown double-bladed javelin.

The ups of making your own feathers using sticky tape is, of course, that you can decide the size and shape of them, and that you don't have to use parts from a real animal, if that makes you uncomfortable. Fur and feathers are not always removed humanely, and that is an issue for me. Another advantage is that you can actually animate every feather, and bend it as the wings flap up and down to achieve an admittedly more cartoonish, but also very dynamic movement. I'll be experimenting more with fake feathers eventually, and try to make them more and more realistic.

The King Who Sought Immortality: Building a Monster Puppet.

2010-10-09T23:36:00.000-07:00

When I built the puppets for this film, I decided to film the process of making one of them. I did forget to film some steps, but most of it is there:

I believe you can see the clips with a better quality at my YouTube channel.

The King Who Sought Immortality: Crocodogs and Scorpion Men

2010-09-23T08:44:00.000-07:00

It's pityfully dour to think about how little you get done on your personal projects while having a day job. It's equally depressing thinking about how little the money you make from your day job, but that's a separate discussion. Take this madcap project as an example, my film "the King Who Sought Immortality". I've been at it for two years now, and though I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, it's taken too long, or has it. The film's an experiment in what can be done creating a virtual world using only consumer market cameras and software, and no money at all. It can be done if you have the one vital currency: Time.

What I'm doing now is simply adding some icing on the cake; Extra details in backgrounds and extra monsters to spruce things up. The scene you can see a still from above is an example of this. The king of the story enters the Underworld to ask help from the queen of the dead. Two "scorpion men" are standing to attention on either side of her throne, and two crocodile/dog hybrids are loitering in front of her. There is nothing Ray Harryhausen about this -no monsters are fought or killed- except that the scene lives up to his idea about making characters out of your monsters. Rather it is inspired by the touches ILM made to the Star Wars and Ewok films they supplied the effects for. Life is visible everywhere in these films, be it strange desert creatures outside of Jabbas palace, or weird birds flying through some swamp or forest.It's all about making a world filled with wonders, a place different from ours.

A quick walk-through on how the crocodogs were made. The upper and lower jaws were sculpted separately and cast in latex, reinforced with hard thermo plastic.

The head pieces were attached to an armature made of braided aluminum wire and thermo plastic (most US puppet makers seem to favour plumber's epoxy putty).

The armature was covered with layers of soft polyurethane muscles, glued on with contact cement.

And on top of that layers of scaly latex skin, cast from a plaster skin mold, were added.

The finished crocodog (there's only one, but filmed twice) was painted with tinted latex, diluted with water. Acrylic airbrush paints added the final details. This was actually the first time I animated a walking four-legged creature. It took two attempts to get it right. The first time around, the animator part of my brain just didn't click.

I made the crocodogs simply because I liked the idea. They seemed like something that appears in ancient myths, although I haven't really found anything resembling them in ancient art. They might also fit nicely into a Conan sword & sorcery yarn. The scorpion men do exist in Sumerian myth and play quite an important role. The "king" film is a hodgepodge of ideas stolen from mainly the Sumerian myths, and I had to have some scorpion men.

In the actual myths, they are rather strange hybrids; Winged, bearded men with bird's feet and a scorpion's tale, brandishing bows and arrows. Among other things, they guard the gateway to the Underworld, a concept which I used for this film. Making a puppet of these strange creatures were tempting, but I had a different idea. While reading about the scorpion men I thought about comic book artist Basil Wolverton's strange and uncomfortable insect/human hybrids, which pop up in his sci-fi and horror tales. I thought that would be a great deal more disturbing to see.

I needed four different scorpion guys, but the only real difference between them would be the look on their faces. So I did something I've never tried before (but will do again): I made one carefully detailed puppet body, with four interchangeable heads. The heads were molded in latex and had aluminum wire mouth armatures. Their necks were simply sawed-off marker pens, with a cork fitted between the shoulders of the puppet body. This may seem like a terribly cheapskate arrangement, but it was, in fact, a very good solution. You know how a thick marker pen pops into its cork and stays there. I could still twist the heads around, and a small joint in the head allowed it to tilt forwards and backwards.

The body was made of two parts, a front and a back side shell. All the body parts were cast in latex, simply because plastic body parts put a greater deal of stress on the aluminum joints. I've made one puppet with rigid body parts, and the joints kept snapping repeatedly!

The armature was the usual mix of aluminum wire and thermo plastic. The latex body parts were glued together around the armature. I wanted the bald human heads to be bizarrely distinct from the rest of the body (Wolverton-style), but I still toned the rosy human hue down in editing to a paler one.

What is Your Work Worth?

2010-09-19T08:59:00.001-07:00

This summer I made quite a lot of stuff for Castle Kalmar, which is a stately 16th century fortress (begun in the 12th century). It's one of the big tourist attractions in the south of Sweden and all sorts of arrangements for kids are going on there. This summer they needed some new stuff, which they wanted me to produce for them. Here's some of the stuff I did:

They needed about ten fake rats to be handled by storytellers dressed up as "forgotten prisoners" in the castle's dungeons. As always, they were first sculpted in clay.

They were then cast in latex, filled with soft polyurethane foam and had jointed feet and black button eyes added. The tail was also made in latex. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of them with fur added, but they were actually quite effective when used. A costume-making lady at the castle did the fur-adding job.

I did eight fake bats in the same way, though I added the fur myself. The toes worked as small grappling hooks, so the bats could be hanged around the castle.

They also needed a bunch of fake herrings that could lie in a wooden barrel all summer without going smelly. The fake herrings were foam-filled latex fish.

I also made a latex character mask for one of the storytellers telling ghost tales about the castle.

The nicest thing I did was probably an oversized version of "Five in a Row", using only three pieces per player. Kids could challenge the black knight of the castle to a game of wits. The knight used the black pieces and the kids the smaller white ones. The game pieces were cast in plastic and reinforced with metal bars inside.

Apart from the aforementioned stuff I also made three decapitated heads, with hair, and a bunch of rubber swords. At the beginning of my dealings with the castle, I was only supposed to do the rats and the swords, but as summer went along the crew at the castle came up with more and more stuff. However, I soon realized they didn't have that much money to spend. The things I made for them eventually wound up costing $700, which is not much to begin with. I don't have a registered company, which means that when I do work for, say, a stage show I get paid by buying stuff for the amount I've quoted for doing the job. The stage people take care of the bills and everybody's happy. This time the castle wanted to pay me and needed a proper company to go through. I contacted a billing company to take care of the business. It's run by a friend's friend and they charge 6% of the payment for their services. But after all the taxes and fees that you have to pay in Sweden for running a company were finally paid, I only ended up with $240. This has deterred me forever from doing more of the same work. This is what it's like having your own business in Sweden, ladies and gents. I've never been very interested in politics, but the more work I get, the more I see how much a part of business-making politics is. For a few decades the Social Democratic Labour Party has been in power in Sweden, and they simply don't like small businesses. They rather have workers lined up inside factories and weighed the solitary business-owners down with loads of costly taxes. The last four years the Swedish government has consisted of a coalition of four centre-right, liberal conservative political parties, which have done whatever they can to lighten up things for the small-time business-maker. And things have brightened up a bit. It's actually election day today in Sweden, and I hope they get another four years. Maybe I'll get enough guts to start my own official business eventually.

The Blunderblat Lands on YouTube

2010-07-28T00:13:00.001-07:00

You might remember this project, which I blogged about sometime late in 2009; A short film based on Colin West's nonsense poem "The Blunderblat". I thought it would be an easy one to pull off, and completed quickly. But Amanda, the girl who first agreed to appear in the film, dropped out and then it turned out to be nigh impossible to find a replacement. Amanda was supposed to appear as two characters (shot against a green screen), so I actually needed two replacements.

I eventually found them in a local fantasy role-playing club, that I frequently collaborate with. Sarah and Olivia turned out to be just perfect, having no acting training, but going on instict. People like that are invariably the best ones for amateur film productions. We shot the whole thing in a room prepped for chroma key shooting, with the floor and one wall covered by green screen cloth.

I think the result turned out very well. I recently bought an HDV camera, to improve picture quality, especially when shooting against a green screen. However, I can't edit the footage in HD (yet), so the clips are transferred into standard DV, while retaining HD frame size. This allows me to do a bit more image trickery than I've been able to do before.

The background was a very simple silhuette of a city skyline at night. My idea was to evoke old children's TV shows in style, and I think I accomplished that.

As usual, animation was timed with the live-action, so the puppet and the people could interact. The Blunderblat monster puppet was animated against my small blue screen and then composited into the live action/background footage.

A bit more trickery than usual was sometimes needed. In order for Olivia to be carried off by the Blunderblat, she had to balance on a cloth covered stool with legs kicking.

Her footage was then linked to the animated Blunderblat in After Effects. A simple trick really, but it looks pretty good.

Just as I had finished all of the animation, one of my cats smacked the Blunderblat puppet to the floor, where one of its wings snapped.

The culprit himself. I think this is the third puppet he's messed up.

It's a pity this film took so long to finish, simply because I couldn't find any actors. I can't believe how difficult it was to find a pair of girls wanting to appear in this film. At last I met Sarah and Olivia, who are used to dressing up and acting out. They happily agreed to participate, and did a good job of it too. And we had fun doing it. It's likely they'll appear in something else I'll do eventually.

Since this film has a 16:9 format, Blogspot doesn't post it correctly. So I'll have to ask you to go directly to YouTube to watch the finished film: "The Blunderblat".

Lovecraftian Horrors of Clay

2010-05-29T08:45:00.001-07:00

I recently helped my filmmaking buddy Daniel Lenneer put together an animated Shoggoth for his non-epic version of H P Lovecraft's very epic "At the Mountains of Madness". You could say Danny's version is the ultimate example of the budget version of a mega-budget project. If you're going to make a condensed version of something too big to really pull off, this is probably the way to do it. From what I've seen, his "The Terror From the Abyss" is turning out to be a very entertaining short film, especially if you know your Lovecraft.

For those of you not that aquainted with Lovecraft's literary heritage, this is a quick sum-up of "At the Mountains of Madness": An expedition from Miskatonic University discovers the remains of an alien civilization in Antarctica and are eventually attacked by a sort of alien guarddog; a Shoggoth. Shoggoths are horrible masses of eyes, mouths and limbs, bred to fight for their masters, the Elder Things, but eventually rebelling against them. This is the dream project of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who has been trying to get it made for years. I hope he eventually does make it. He'd do the book great justice, I think.

On to my version of the Shoggoth. I thought it would be fun to do some really quick claymation to represent the monster, and since I'm such a lazy bugger I figured out a pretty easy way of pulling it off.

Instead of animating a huge mass of clay, trying to keep check of what's moving where in what direction (I'll leave that to Harryhausen), I simply animated separate blobs of clay, morphing into different eyes, mouths and tentacles. These were then pieced together into a writhing mass in After Effects.

Danny had already shot himself and his frequent partner in artistic crimes, Christopher, against a green screen in his basement. We added some smoke to represent churning snow. The Shoggoth comes out of a very dark cave..

..And then procedes to chase our heroes until it overcomes them and they turn into a Shoggoth snack. This is what the finished film will probably look like. There's been a fad in recent years of amateur-made silent film versions of Lovecraft tales. There are basically three reasons for this: Many of his stories were written in the silent film age (though not "At the Mountains of Madness"), as an amateur you don't have to worry about the sound, and it just seems to work very well for his stories.
You can view more images from Danny's project HERE.

The King Who Sought Immortality: Still kicking...

2010-04-26T03:55:00.000-07:00

After having worked on this confounded project for almost two years now, all because of crappy bluescreen work, I've come to the decision to get the film finished and move on to the next project. Some scenes have turned out great, others not-so-great. But that's the way of amateur filmmaking. I'm not kidding myself into thinking anything else -I make amateur films. My aim is to have them be entertaining enough, and better than most of the slapped-together stuff you find on YouTube.

All through this project I keep finding that I'm one puppet short. I refuse to cut anything from the fight choreography performed by Dag (the king), and so after thinking I've actually finished his demon-slaying romp, yet another sword slash in thin air is revealed to be supposed to hit a monster. While working in stop-motion mode and studying the live-action footage frame by frame I forget about the purpose of some of the moves filmed almost two years ago.

And I still have quite a few planned puppets left to animate. A bunch of dragons, some scorpion men and som dog/crocodile hybrids. And a snake that sprouts golden wings. All the backgrounds are finished, though. And I've got all the music I need. I probably have more music than I need.

If nothing else, I've learned lots from this project and that knowledge will go into the next film, and on and on it goes...

Busy, busy, busy...

2010-04-22T06:50:00.001-07:00

Long time no see...

I thought I ought to post something on my blog to, at least, show some vital life signs. The truth is I've been incredibly busy making stuff for other people than myself. The past six months have raced by! Mostly, I've actually been making masks and props for Star Trek fans. I'm a Trekkie myself, and not the least ashamed to admit it, and very interested in the craft behind the shows and movies.

So the truth is I HAVE been blogging about my work, just not here for a while. In order not to repost any info I'll just redirect you to my Trekspace Blog Archive. There you can read detailed accounts about making Klingon skulls, Gorn babies and other weird, but fun, projects.

Also, I've been making (and still am making) fake rats, decapitated heads and latex swords for Castle Kalmar in Sweden. They're having lots of activities for kids this summer and they're gearing up with props and stuff. It's a fun project and they pay me well, so I'm happy to be a part of it. There will be images of this work shortly.

And my film projects are coming along slowly.. slowly..

Beware the Blunderblat!

2009-11-01T23:04:00.000-08:00

One of my ambitions with posting films on YouTube is that I would get in touch with likeminded people from all over the world and even get to collaborate with them. This means exchanging footage without ever having met, and still making a film together. My first attempt at this was "Concerning Brown Jenkin", which I filmed and RavenOfPoe from Australia narrated. But now it's time to try and take things one step further.

One of my favorite children's authors of today is Englishman Colin West. I'm especially a fan of his nonsense rhymes and I had been wanting to do a little film based on his poem "The Blunderblat" for a long time. I finally contacted him and asked for permission to make the video and post it on YouTube. Colin gracefully agreed and disclosed that he (like most people, it seems) was a YouTuber as well.

I asked one of my YouTube friends Amanda, aka VanillaPomme, if she'd like to do the live-action part of the film if I provided the animation for the monstrous Blunderblat. Amanda thought this was a great idea and I mailed her my storyboards for the project. She's a crazy (in the best sense of the word) 13-year old with big acting abilities and ambitions, and perfect for what I intend to put together. So, the idea is that Amanda will play two parts in the story (something's she's vary apt at doing), film all the footage needed, mostly in front of a green screen, and upload it somewhere where I can get it. I'll animate the Blunderblat puppet in front of my blue screen and edit mine and her footage together. The finished film will be posted by us both (and by Colin, if he'd like to) on YouTube. There will probably be some technical issues with the US NTSC footage and my European PAL footage, but I know that they can be resolved. I'm really looking forward to putting this together.

Now; something about the Blunderblat puppet.

There's really nothing new about this puppet -it's made the way I make almost all of my puppets. But it does have insect wings cast in semi-transparent plastic, which is a first for me. More about those later. Basically all the parts of this puppet started as clay sculptures. The Blunderblat is very insect-like. An illustration by Colin West and the line "I watched it rise into the skies Like some colossal locust" seems to indicate this. So I made it as a sort of cross between a grasshopper and some kind of crustacean.

All the parts for the body were cast in latex from plaster molds. All the joints were made with braided aluminum wire and held together with the thermo plastic Friendly Plastic.

The tail and body latex skins were filled with hard, but light, expanding polyfoam. The excess material was cut and sanded down.

Aluminum wire joints to animate the mouth, eyes and mandibles were added to the latex head skin using Friendly Plastic as bonding "bone" material.

I did sculpt and cast parts in latex for the legs, but eventually they just turned out to be too bulky. So I re-did the legs by simply building them up in Friendly Plastic over the wire armature. It took a bit longer to do it this way, but the legs turned out much better.

Now for the wings. This is how I did them, but there are probably better and simpler ways to achieve the same results. I just couldn't figure them out. I started by drawing one wing on a piece of paper, and then traced the drawing onto clay by simply pressing the pencil hard on the paper. I then turned the drawing over and did another inprint in the clay to make a mirror version of the wing. This is how the tracings looked after a bit of clean-up.

I then did a plaster cast of the clay imprint and a silicone mold of the plaster cast. This finally yielded a mold to cast the plastic wings in.

I did two castings of each wing in SmoothCast 325. This plastic is a slightly milky transparent and quite perfect if you want something that'll look transparent, but really isn't. I couldn't make the wings totally transparent, as I was using a blue screen behind them. The wing castings were then pieced together using more plastic to make two wings.

Here's a wing after piecing two halves together and cleaning them up. I didn't mind the little imperfections along the edges of the wing, as that would be natural for a giant insect monster (I suppose). As you can see I've drilled a little hole at the base of the wing...

This is for attaching a bit of aluminum wire with Friendly Plastic. The plastic goes through the hole and really attaches itself to the wing, making the bond between wire joint and wing much stronger.

The Blunderblat has been pieced together and is ready for its paint job. The eyes are plastic beads and the teeth and neck skin are latex. The mandible claws are Friendly Plastic.

The Blunderblat was painted (as I always do) with PAX paint (a mixture of ProsAide glue and acrylic paints). The base is a dark brown with a mix of grey and gold drybrushed on top of it.

The eyes, teeth, mouth and some highlights were airbrushed with acrylic airbrush paints. They usually stick very well to the PAX mixture.

Along the back a pattern in yellow and bright purple was airbrushed on. It was inspired by markings on certain insects.

The wings also got a dash of paint to give them a bit more depth.

In order to animate the beast flying around with as little trouble as possible I attached a thick aluminum wire rod to the puppet. The rod was covered in soft string and painted blue, and stuck to the side of the puppet that isn't going to face the camera as planned. If I were to change that set-up I'll just flip the image in the editing and that should work out fine. I prefer to use a support rod to hanging the puppet from strings attached to an aerial brace, which can be a bit of a mess. You also have to stop the puppet from swinging every time you've touched it. When the puppet is attached to a rod it stays put. Sometimes you have to remove the rod in post prod editing, but it's worth the trouble.

Well, that's all for now, boys and girls. Hopefully the Blunderblat will make its YouTube debut before Christmas and you'll find out exactly what a Blunderblat does, why Amanda is cloning herself and how our collaboration worked out.

Latex Masks and Plastic Skulls

2009-10-19T22:04:00.000-07:00

I just posted a short film clip on YouTube about one of my biggest pastimes; making latex monster masks. I thought I'd post it here as well. One of the masks featured is the Dagon mask I blogged about earlier this year. Also, I included a gallery of some of my LARP work.

Some of my best friends are very much into Live-Action Role-Playing (LARP), meaning they dress up as orcs, elves, warriors, clerics and various ancient and fantasy-inspired characters. They help me out making stuff for my films (clothes, leather- and metal work, etc) and I return the favor by making masks and various slippery slithery things for them. Recently I did a plastic orc skull for my friend Liz, who often makes clothes for my puppets and people appearing in my videos. As usual, I first did the skull as a sculpture in Chavant clay and built up a mold in Dragon Skin silicone over it. The actual skull was cast in the mold with SmoothCast 325 and painted with bone white car spray paints and acrylic airbrush colors.

I wanted a (what is now) retro orc look, inspired by the big-jawed orcs made popular in the late 1980's and during the 1990's by British Games Workshop. This design is frequently referred to as the "Warhammer" orc. The orc designs from Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" films have pretty much taken over, which means that the modern orc is quite human-like and thus easy to recreate for the LARPers. The older orc was green, muscular and a bit cartoonish. I kind of like them better and I'm trying to re-introduce them (along with a friend) into the Swedish LARP arena by subtly changing the look of my masks and props. Someday we'll explode onto the LARP scene with a fully fledged retro orc suit! (this is the stuff you ponder when you don't have a proper life to worry about)

Tiger Shark Ready to Swim

2009-09-30T00:57:00.001-07:00

I finally pulled my thumbs out of my arse (a Swedish expression) and finished my contribution to Shelley Noble's "Halfland" project -the Tiger Shark. I just have to find out how she'd like the puppet supported during the animation. Right now it's attached to a bendable rod of braided aluminum wire, but that wire must in its turn be attached to some kind of foot or stand. I'll await instructions from Shelley.

The puppet in itself is a big experiment for me. It's made only out of silicone, with some cotton padding. It's also painted with tinted silicone. Only the teeth (latex rubber) and the claws (plastic) are not silicone. The puppet turned out way too toy-like for my taste, but that may suit the overall style of Shelley's project, so if she's happy I'm happy.

Save Prince Plutonium!: Go green!

2009-09-01T02:15:00.001-07:00

I was lamenting a couple of posts back about how badly my BLUE screen compositing experience turned out. While filming "Save Prince Plutonium!" this summer I used a GREEN screen instead and the results have been like night and day. I've been able to key my diminutive actors into new backgrounds without any heartache. Just take a look:

I hardly have to do any adjustments in the Keylight keying software to get everything the way I want it. Apart from this I've had tremendous difficulty actually getting the footage into my PC. I shot all of the live-action scenes using a HDV cam borrowed from a boarding school, where I help out teaching art on occasion. Problem was all of the footage was saved on a memory card and I needed the necessary software installed on my PC in order to have the camera "talk" to the computer. The CD with the software had been mislaid by the very slack drama teacher of the school and I've spend the past two months trying to figure out ways of saving my precious footage. This past weekend, with the help of a friend working with cameras and different softwares, I managed to transport the film clips from card to PC. I also found and bought a software that will transfer HD footage into standard DV footage, `cause I really don't need it in HD. In fact, I can't edit HD on my PC at present. But my plan had always been to utilise the higher resolution of HD even when transferred to DV, and this software allowed me to do that. So I'm happy again!

So now there'll be a few months of piecing together of footage, backgrounds, pyrotechnical effects, model work and stop-mo animation. I haven't started on building puppets yet, since I have a bunch of older stuff to finish first. But I'm already happy with how this is turning out. The kids did such a good job acting in the film, I'm really happy to know now that the chroma key effects and all the other stuff will turn out very well, and they'll have a film they'd be proud to show their friends.

Frodo in the world of home movies.

2009-08-26T23:36:00.001-07:00

Here's a real curio for you: This short clip comes from a bigger project that was never finished. Somewhere around 1999 I was part of a group of Swedish artists and musicians who worked on a musical video version of "Lord of the Rings"! For real! This was just before Peter Jackson´s mega-version of the books grabbed the world. At the end of the 1960's, Krister Gustavsson and Stefan Håkansson had written folk-rock songs based on the many poems of the books. (You can find Krister's YouTube channel HERE.)
At first we got permission from the publisher Harper Collins and the Tolkien estate to do an amateur version of the story. Then New Line Cinema pulled all the worldwide rights to protect their interests. This could very well be the biggest disappointment of my life. Now I realize that our version was very humble indeed and not much different from other amateur efforts, with hand-held cams and kids for hobbits. Those of you who know the books can see that I've changed the barrow-wight fight a little bit. For those of you who don't know the story, it is as follows: The Hobbits are captured by a ghost called a barrow-wight, but rescued by Tom Bombadil, master of the Old Forest.
This past weekend I found the old tape containing this particular footage, the devil went into me and I took a holiday from my other obligations to piece together a little video featuring this episode from the book "The Fellowship of the Ring". On Saturday evening I started building the barrow-wight hand and late Sunday morning it was ready to be animated. It's probably the fastest I've ever built a puppet. On Sunday evening the animation was finished and edited into the live-action footage. I wish all projects would go as easy as this one.

Here's the aluminum wire / Friendly Plastic hand armature. Nothing fancy, but it could do everything a human hand can do.

The hand armature covered with latex skins and a latex / cotton mix. It's been attached to a support rod made out of braided aluminum wire.

A pretty simple set-up as you can see. But why make things unneccesarily complicated?

The support rod was partially painted blue to be keyed out with the rest of the background.

There are a number of Tolkien fan film projects out there, and quite a bit of them on YouTube. Most of them are parodies but some are dead serious (perhaps a bit too serious for there own good). I've done a couple and am planning to do more. I'm a member of a forum on the web page "theonering.net", originally devoted to Peter Jackson's films, but now more of a stomping ground for Tolkien purists. There's a section for "fan art", including music and some home-made films. Some of us posting there have recieved quite a beating from those who believe that nothing should be produced without the approval of the Tolkien Estate. Tolkien himself stated that he'd like to approve all the art being produced based on his ideas, and now that he's gone, that job falls to the Estate. But I must say the taste and judgement of the Tolkien Estate is highly debatable.
I use a by-line in my forum posts that read: "I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama." Now, this is a quote from a letter that Tolkien wrote to editor Milton Waldman to convince him to publish "The Silmarillion" and "The Lord of the Rings" simultaniously. I took this quote as a postive affirmation that Tolkien would approve of at least of what some of us are attempting to do. He had, after all, the ambition to create an alternative mythology for Great Britain, that hopefully would be as appreciated and widely read (and studied) as any other real mythology. It was, however, pointed out to me on that forum that before that statement in the letter, Tolkien makes it clear he has all but abandoned this early idea for a larger, shared mythology. Thus, using that quote as a statement is a great misjustice to Tolkien's memory.
The concept of that great shared mythology may not have been a reality when "The Lord of the Rings" was first published, but, by God, it certainly is now. I'd say Tolkien's ideas and imagination have grown out of the hands of any copyright holders. I'd say it falls to the love of us fans to do his work real justice, without any thoughts of any profit besides the shared joy of the finished result. I'll go so far as to say that some fan efforts help make up the perception of LOTR et al, for some of us. The fan efforts help make this a phenomenon, and I'm surprised this fact is not acknowledged. It's not any damn commerce that make a myth, but constant, honest retelling of it.

In the 60's when "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" were absorbed by pop and hippie culture Tolkien was, as I understand it, befuddled by the great interest, the fanzines, the rock songs, the "Frodo Lives" stickers and the people trampling the flowers in the garden of his peaceful Oxford home just to take pictures of him and his wife. But as far as I know he never raised any issues of copyright infringement or claimed any "creative injury". And he very well could've, had he been inclined. The only debacle where he actually took action was against Ace Books, who published "The Lord of the Rings" in the US without telling him, using a loophole in the copyright law. In order to stop those books Tolkien addressed his most powerful ally; his fans, and asked them to boycott the Ace editions, which they did. I think that says a lot about the relationship between this author and his admirers.

A bit of a rant there, I'm afraid, but I feel strongly about all of this.

Save Prince Plutonium!: Props and shooting

2009-08-10T01:08:00.000-07:00

Last year I shot the film Goblin Wood with my friend Björn's step-daughter Angelica (you can find several posts about that project here on my blog). We all enjoyed the experience so much we decided to repeat it this year, adding Angie's friend Tove, who had gotten quite worked-up about becoming a YouTube film star herself. The resulting project was Save Prince Plutonium!, about two rival space heroines, Astro Girl and Galaxy Girl, setting out to rescue and win the same boy (never a good thing). As a side-note, the girls are at present having a bit of a real-life fall out over a boy in school, but the issue seems to be resolving in a way quite similar to what eventually happens in our film. Life imitates art, as always!

Also shot last year were two projects filmed in front of a less-than satisfactory blue screen. I've spent close to a year getting usable extractions of the actors from that blue screen background, but this experience hasn't deterred me from having another go at chroma key. This time I decided to use green, which seems to have been a much better choice. This meant we only had to build a couple of consoles and seats for space ship interiors. The rest would be models keyed in behind the girls. My pal Björn helped me build the things we needed.

The cockpit chair for one of the space ships was an old automobile seat. The controls for the consoles were all sorts of old stuff gathered up; buttons and keyboards repainted and pieced together.

While Björn and I were building the set pieces the girls started getting into their roles and playing with the stuff. This was very cool, of course, since it meant they were really looking forward to doing this project.

For Angie's (Astro Girl) space ship we only fixed up the auto chair with a couple of control handles. The handles were painted jet black and retractable buttons for firing laser cannons (of course) were put into the grips.

Tove's (Galaxy Girl) space ship had a big console used for long shots of her steering her ship. Astro Girl, on the other hand, gets into a space battle with robot ships and only needed her chair for her action-filled, very quick shots. The console was built out of fiber board. Nothing fancy at all, but it worked great.

The console was painted with a black base coat. The steering wheel was made out of an old coat-hanger and two wooden dowels.

With gold paint and controls added the console looks snazzy enough for this project. I ran out of gold paint while spraying the front of the console. But that was alright, since we never intended to shoot very low anyways.

The laser guns were just two water guns lazily bought by me and modified slightly.

Angie's mom Lisa took care of the make-up duties. Looks like neither of the girls really enjoyed being made up.

But it was worth the slight anguish! The space suits were two (very expensive) gymnastics suits I bought, with some small details added. Before we started filming the girls got to do some inspired action-heroine posing. Might be good for poster art or the end credits.

As you can see we used a cloth green screen (4m x 2m) for the background. Another piece was added to the floor when that was necessary. It's difficult getting the cloth completely smooth, but a simple iron with the steam turned up will go a long way fixing that.

And off into space we go! There will be additional stuff like blinking lights added to this console.

All the new stuff for Angie's cockpit will be added in the background.

We shot all the scenes in an old room in a boarding school, just a stone's throw from where I live. Angie's turning into quite a mini-Milla Jovovich, with ever-expanding fight scenes. Both girls were very acrobatic, doing back-flips, cart wheels, high kicks and other sorts of gymnastics that looks particularly painful to a 35-year old couch potato. In the film they'll be fighting stop-motion animated robots.

And of course I'll have to mention Prince Plutonium himself. I shot the scenes with Elias playing the prince about a week after we did the scenes with the girls. He dressed up in clothes picked from the costume storage of the boarding school's drama class. I made a suitable "atomic" head band for him. Like the girls, Elias is 10 years old, but already severely bitten by the acting bug.

I borrowed the camera from the school as well. It was the first time I shot in HD, in 16:9 and saving the footage on a digital memory card. I wanted the best possible image quality for all the green screen shots and that's why I didn't use my old standard DVcam. It's good for most things, but I don't trust it for producing good keyable footage. This big, expensive camera was not the easiest to cooporate with. I will buy my own HD camera as soon as I can, but it will be something much simpler that this big chunk of plastic.

After the filming was done we all had a wrap-up dinner. Angie fooled around with a Beltain deer mask I made a while ago and we decided that for 2010 we would do a celtic-inspired fairy tale, where she could wear the mask. The main focus here would be to find stunning spots of real nature and keep the chroma key shots to a minimum. It may seem foolhardy do discuss new projects while old ones are unfinished (or just shot), but you never know how long the enthusiasm will last when it comes to kids. All of a sudden they might decide that they're too old or too adult to play around in front of a camera, so do what you can as long as you can. Stock up with good footage while you can get it. I don't really think that attitude will be a problem with Angie, since she's really easy-going and adventurous. She's a very good actress despite her tender age, so I'd really like to do more films with her.

Finally; a background shot from the planet where the prince is held captive. This unhospitable, monster-infested place was created using photos of twilight skies with shots of coral reefs provided by a friend living in the caribbean.

Editing "The King Who Sought Immortality",

2009-08-09T23:49:00.001-07:00

Now here's an old project I haven't talked about in a while. That's mostly because I've been deep into the gruelling task of trying to get good composites out of quite bad bluescreen shots. While filming this project the actors were placed in front of a pretty dark blue screen and lit with two stage lights. About half-way into the filming we managed to smash one of the lights, which considerable lessened the effect of the blue screen background. The resulting footage is full of background shadows, grainy imagery and other compositing horrors. The main problem has been achieving an edge around the actors that doesn't flicker.

So for almost a full year I've been trying to make the best out of the situation, using different ways of extracting keyed material and applying hand-drawn mattes (sigh!) The finished result varies wildly from scene to scene. Sometimes it's quite horrible, at other times not that bad. But I've been told that for an amateur production shot under the aformentioned circumstances with a DV camera, it's not that bad at all. It's just that I always pump up my ambitions to abnormal proportions, aiming for highly unlikely results: "But.. But, Peter Jackson's got these really nice composites in the Lord of the Rings films! Why can't I have that too??" It's been a good learning curve, though. Here are some stills from some finished scenes:

Tiger Shark for Shelley; Part one

2009-08-09T23:06:00.001-07:00

I thought I'd join the band of puppet makers / animators that have contributed with sea creature puppets to Shelley Noble's project "Halfland". My idea was to make the puppet in cast silicone for maximun flexibility. It was supposed to be a learning experience for me too, and it was.

I started off with making a sculpture of the creature; a "tiger shark" all in line with the rules for how wildlife in Halfland looks.

A dividing wall in softer clay was put up around the sculpture in order to cast a two piece mold.

A thin first layer brushed on to avoid air bubbles.

Top layer cast and sculpture turned around for second layer.

The whole plaster mold ready to be separated. The thin wooden stick provided a tunnel through the plaster, where I could stick an aluminum wire support rod for the puppet.

So far all's good and well. I mixed some PlatGel 10 silicone with yellow pigments (to provide a painting base) and brushed that into both mold halves. I should also say that the armature was padded with soft foam after this photo was taken.

Before putting the mold halves together some more silicone was added as a glue. The halves were clamped together and in theory the finished casting should come out just dandy.

Which of course it didn't. It turned out I added too little silicone and in some parts there were just big air pockets of loose skin. So the new plan will be to either recast the puppet with a (very expensive) silicone foam I'm dying to try out, or just do it with a latex skin, like I usually do. I'd like to get this puppet finished as soon as possible or it won't be of any good to Shelley's project. There have, however, been a few complications.

Taking up most of my time the last month-and-a-half is a theatre production of a famous Swedish children's book. I have been making 40-something soup terrines, one to be smashed each show, casting them in thin plaster and painting them to match the non-breakable original. Thank god it's all over now, but a rumour of a revival next year is already buzzing. I did get handsomely paid for it, though.

My little studio was also flooded during a week of terrible rains and I've been working with the drying and cleaning of the room since then. So quite a bit of my many projects have been on the backburner due to both planned and unplanned interludes. There's also a little film project that I had planned for this past summer and that I actually, despite all other interventions, managed to get done as far as the raw footage with the actors goes. More about that one in a bit...

Green Man Mask

2009-06-01T00:19:00.001-07:00

Instead of doing stuff I had originally planned to do this past weekend, I took a vacation from my ever-consuming film projects and made something completely different. I like the image of the Celtic Green Man or Jack-In-the-Green; The human face with leaves for hair and beard. It's a powerful but cheerful symbolic image of the symbiosis between nature and man, or at least it's a reminder that we should be connected to nature.

I thought a Green Man mask would look just right on the staircase wall in my house, so I sculpted one in Chavant clay on top of a plaster cast of a friend's face.

When the sculpture was good enough for me I built a clay wall around it and poured in DragonSkin Q silicone. The silicone was slushed around over the sculpture until it set (in about seven minutes)

I applied some more silicone, with added thickener, to cover all areas properly. I tinted the new layer green so I'd see exactly where I'd put it.

I put a reinforcing plaster shell over the silicone. This shell created a "cradle" to put the silicone mold into, making sure it maintains its shape while the casting process is going on.

Here's the first-ever casting of my Green Man mask in SmoothCast 325 plastic.

And after some clean-up and acrylic airbrush painting it looks like this. Those are my eyes peering through the mask. It was a quick, fun thing to do, although I really should've spent this weekend doing some puppet work instead.

Concerning Brown Jenkin

2009-06-01T00:16:00.000-07:00

Just a short post about the film featuring the Brown Jenkin puppet -for those of you wondering what it might look like moving about.

Brown Jenkin Comes Alive

2009-05-04T06:25:00.001-07:00

Last fall I got in touch with Jennifer, who has the YouTube channel RavenOfPoe. She creates little videos with philosophical musings, poetry readings and quotes. She did a terrific reading of a part of H P Lovecraft's short story "The Dreams in the Witch House". The part in question describes "Brown Jenkin"; a rat with a human head and a witches familliar. I thought her reading was so good I asked if I could use it for a short-short video project on the subject. She gladly agreed and I went off to my workshop to produce the Jenkin puppet. A couple of months ago I shot scenes with a friend of mine acting out the angst of Walter Gilman, the unlycky hero of the story. Last weekend I shot the last live-action scenes with a witch puppet and some background footage, so it's time to put this one together.

Which means I have no moving images to show yet, but I do have a pretty thorough documentation of the making of the Brown Jenkin puppet. As always I started off with a sculpture of the head. If you get the head right, the rest follows quite easily.

First I cast a stiff latex head skin and attached it to the aluminum wire/friendly plastic armature. My intention at the beginning was to not show very much of Jenkin apart from something quick-moving. But of course while working with the character I fell in love with him and wanted a better-looking head.

This meant I would finally cast my luck into the silicone pond. A make-up artist friend of mine recommended PlatSil Gel 10 to me and I bought a set from Mapont in Sweden. This silicone can probably be found from a number of retailers in the US, the UK and other countries. One place I know of and can recommend is Bity Mold Supply. Mitch, who runs the store, also has a very cool YouTube channel, where he shows how to use many of his products. As you can see, the finished silicone skin is very flexible. I added some Silc Pig red and flesh tint from SmoothOn.com while mixing the two-part silicone. Ideally, I would've added some red flocking but that wasn't available when I bought the silicone.

The head armature for this puppet turned out very simple in the end. I chose to add just two moving sections; an aluminum wire to animate the nose/upper lip and a jointed jaw.

The silicone face was attached to the head armature using Sil-Poxy silicone glue. This stuff also comes from SmoothOn and will stick silicone to absolutely everything.

Sil-Poxy takes about 10 minutes or so to do its work properly. The question was how to keep the silicone face pressed against the armature without having to sit and press on it with my fingers. The simple solution was to hold the face in place with some bits of thick aluminum wire.

Here's the face attached to the armature. As you can see I've also started to add some pieces of upholstery foam to the body.

There was no need for any accurate reconstruction of muscle patterns. Just some basic stuff, so I would know that I was on the right track shaping the body while adding the fur later. The tail and the feet were simply wrapped with thin string and dipped in flesh-tinted latex.

Claws are sometimes a bit of a bother since it's hard to get them to stick properly to the fingers. The best solution seems to be to make them out of the same material as the fingers, in this case latex. I cut out claw shapes in thin cardboard and dipped them in latex tinted black.

The latex-covered paper claws are then simply attached to the fingers with some un-tinted latex. They are quite flexible and very durable, and always maintain their original shape.

I've started adding the fur. So far it's just about gluing down pieces of fake fur. But for the legs and the face I had to add small clups of hair, glued down with latex or silicone glue.

Here's the Sil-Poxy again. When using this to add hair to the silicone face I scraped up a tiny amount of glue on a dental tool.

A small clump of fur was cut off the fake fur fabric.

The Sil-Poxy was smeared onto the face.

The clump of fur was pressed down onto the face and a tiny amount of Sil-Poxy was added on top of the hair ends.

Here's the finished result. Since Sil-Poxy is transparent it won't really show up that much despite being a bit shiny. If you add it thinly it's even less obvious and you don't have to add that much, since its bond is super strong.

Time to paint the little bugger. Which means it's time for some more SmoothOn product placement. Their Psycho Paint is designed to be used on any platinum silicone, which means that it will stick to PlatSil Gel 10 as well. You mix the two Psycho Paint components with whatever tinting you find workable. I used SmoothOn's Silc Pic pigments.

When thinned with Toulene you can put the Psycho Paint mix through your airbrush, though I didn't have the guts to try that out this time. It wasn't necessary either, since the puppet's face only needed some minor touch-ups.

And here's the finished paint job.

The fur on the legs was stuck on with latex. The process is very simple, with overlapping layers. You just have to remember which end is the right one to start at.

The finished fur covering on a leg. The latex bond is very strong and should a shiny surface appear from it, just dab it with some baby powder or transparent make-up powder.

The finished Mr Jenkin. Hopefully, you'll se him wriggling about on a YouTube screen near you quite soon. Lastly; a quick description of the creature by Lovecraft himself:
"Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch's blood, which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages."

Some More YouTube Stuff.

2009-05-04T05:43:00.000-07:00

Those of you who have looked through my blog will already have seen posts on this stuff, but I decided to make a couple of image streams for YouTube on the subjects. They might be of interest, as they include video footage of the finished puppets and props at work. So, enjoy!

Goblin Wood Behind the Scenes (of a sort).

2009-04-15T01:53:00.000-07:00

Some more YouTube stuff. These two little documentaries were made for the DVD, so Angelica could show them to her class. They are made to be watched by a 10 year old audience and therefore very simple. But I hope you'll find something in them to enjoy anyway.

Goblin Wood Film Up!

2009-04-14T02:25:00.000-07:00

After finishing the DVDs for the folks involved in the film I posted it on YouTube (HERE). Still NOT happy with how YouTube compresses videos. The image quality when using HQ is fine, but the flow of the video appears disrupted and choppy. I can't have both good image and movement, apparently, though some YouTubers appear to have solved that problem. However, using their exact settings for compression doesn't solve mine. The web is weird.

Bilbo Baggins Figurine

2009-04-02T23:58:00.000-07:00

I love sculpting characters using my favorite clay in the Universe; Chavant. Mostly, my sculptures end up as puppets or masks, but I have also done sculptures that are cast as plastic figurines. For the past three months I've been really busy finishing films for both myself and others, plus I've been doing some art for books. But I decided to spend ten minutes every morning right before I go to work on creating a sculpture, made for no other redeeming reason except that it's fun to just do it. I decided to try my hand at one of my favorite characters ever; Mr Bilbo Baggins, hero of J R R Tolkien's "The Hobbit". I think the moment that best sums up Hobbit life is when Bilbo steps out to smoke his enormous pipe right in the beginning of chapter one ("early one morning in the quiet of the world"). He hears someone (Gandalf) coming up the path beside his Hobbit hole and starts to turn his head.

This sculpture was going to be quite small, but still needed some support. I made this very simple frame using tin wire and a plastic bottle cap.

The humble beginnings of Mr Baggins. I soften the Chavant with a heat gun and just slap it on to form a basic shape.

I was pretty sure I had taken a couple of photos of the sculpture in the middle stages of its creation. Obviously it wasn't so, so we'll skip right to the finished version. I added a clay pipe just for fun. It wasn't a part of the finished casting.

Here's a bunch of photos showing how the silicone mold was cast. I used DragonSkin Q from SmoothOn Inc. First I sponged on a very thin layer, just to get rid of air bubbles. I then built up a Chavant clay wall around the base, then pouring in silicone and letting it seek its level. Then the clay wall went up a little futher with more silicone, and on and on until the sculpture was covered. This way I was able to make a very sturdy, yet not overly thick, silicone mold. In the last two images you can see the clay wall removed and then the sculpture dismantled and taken out. I had to cut the mold in the back a bit using a hobby knife. I also cut the space between Bilbo's legs inside the mold in order to get the support frame out.

SmoothCast 325 (also from SmoothOn) was poured into the mold. To the right; the casting just after it came out of the mold.

The finished Bilbo figurine. The pipe was made by softening Friendly Plastic and rolling it into a long tube, then shaping it. The head of the pipe was made out of Apoxie sculpt. But if I start making any copies I'll make a pipe head that can be cast instead. The figurine was painted with acrylic airbrush colors. In some areas I painted on the color with a brush.
I think this turned out quite well. Bilbo is 13 cm tall. You see, the plan is now to go on doing some other characters from the book; Gandalf, Thorin, Gollum, the Great Goblin and so on. Making Bilbo this size will allow me to make many of the other characters in scale, ending with Beorn. The Trolls and Smaug, if I ever make them, will have to be in a scale of their own.
It seems my mornings will be booked for a while ahead. Roll on Gandalf..

Goblin Wood Trailer

2009-03-25T01:58:00.001-07:00

I made this little trailer last night for my friends who helped me make this film. As of yet, they've seen naught from the post-production except stills. Hopefully I'll get the finished film up pretty soon. Still have some intricate soundwork to do.

I'm pretty disappointed with how my vids turn out on YouTube. They're often blurry and "jumpy". My animation often looks like crap, which bothers me more than anything else. I'll seek counsel with one of my mates, who's a lot more successful with his uploads. So the linked-in version you can see here is quite shitty. Go to the trailer on YouTube instead and see if you have the "HQ" button in the lower right corner of the YouTube viewscreen. Click that and the film will at least look decent.

Making of "Dagon" Monster Mask

2009-03-18T00:26:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago I was sort of planning to do an amateur film version of H P Lovecraft’s short story “Dagon”. The plan was to film it down the very south of Sweden, where incredibly tall, dark cliffs rise up from the sea, creating cathedral-like coves. It went as far as me doing a sculpture for a mask of the head of the creature rising up from the depths at the end of the story. I also made a plaster mold from the sculpture. The intention here was to create a monster suit, reaching from the waist up. Usually I do all my monsters as animated puppets, but I’m also unashamedly fond of Japanese monster movies, so… But the actual mask was never cast. I did that recently, just to finish it and see how it turned out.

But starting at the beginning (in my old home, even) I did the mask sculpture in Chavant clay during weekday nights. It took about one week to finish it and I made the mold the following weekend.

The tool I use most often is a loop tool I made myself. It’s quite small and allows you to get in close and add pretty small details. I have an even smaller one for sculpting my stop-motion puppets.

I decided the sculpture was finished at this stage. I tried to make a creature that would look organic, evil and amphibious. I also wanted him to display some character the short moments he would be visible on film.

Just some more shots from the side and the back. The bumps along the sides and the back of his neck are the basis of spines that will be created separately and added to the finished mask.

Here the sculpture is reclining on a table, cushioned by upholstery foam in a plastic bag. I’ve build up a wall from blocks of wood around the head. Clay will be added around the sculpture to create a dividing wall, allowing me to make a two-part plaster mold. The wood blocks will add support to the clay.

The dividing clay wall has been added. If you look closely you’ll notice square pieces of clay sticking up along the wall. Those are clay keys that will create notches that will help line up and interlock the two pieces of the finished mold.

Time to create the actual mold. I always use Ultracal 30, a very hard plaster that replicates great detail. The first coat of plaster, the so-called “splash coat”, is brushed on in order to eliminate air bubbles. Then another, thicker coat of plaster is added. Burlap soaked in plaster is then put over that as reinforcement, and finally a last layer of plaster to smooth it out.

The front half of the mold is finished. Time to turn it over and do the backside (this thing is already weighing a ton!)

Looking at the mold from this perspective it’s easy to see those key notches I was talking about. What happens now is that another clay wall goes up and the exposed parts of the plaster mold is covered in a thin coat of Vaseline, working as a release agent.

As you can see there are new lumps of clay along the insides of the mold. They are there to provide small holes along the edge of the mold, where I can insert screwdrivers to pry the mold open and separate the two mold halves.

Now the whole sculpture is encased in a huge plaster mold. When the plaster has set it’s time to pry the mold open using those screwdrivers I mentioned (you can see one lying in the bottom right corner.) This part of the work usually entails a lot of grunting, swearing and sweating, so let’s skip that, shall we?

The two mold halves are separated (though only one is shown here.) The clay from the sculpture is still in the mold, but that will soon be removed and the mold halves cleaned up for the casting of latex. I got rid of the clay as soon as I could and clamped the mold halves together. If I hadn’t the halves would probably have warped a bit while the water evaporated from the plaster. A good thing I did that, since it would take another two years before actually using the mold!

Here’s the first latex casting, with fin-like appendages added along the neck. They were created with thin sheets of latex strung between spines made out of latex-soaked cotton. The “beard” was also done with cotton and latex.

Here’s the finished mask, base-painted with PAX paint and finished with acrylic airbrush paints. A coat of clear gloss lacquer was added over the eyes. There are actually very small holes in the folds and wrinkles around his nose and eyes, which you can look out through. You still have very limited vision, but this character was never meant to move about much. Maybe someday my “Dagon” adaptation will see the light of day and the mask will be joined with the rest of this monster’s body. Stay tuned…

"The Sword of the Oceans"

2009-03-17T23:15:00.001-07:00

Last year I promised my friend Daniel Lenner to help him out building props and doing modelwork for his Jules Verne-inspired film Wavebreaker , but I had no idea it would be such a dragged-out, energy-consuming event. The film is scheduled to get finished at the end of March. Then I'm finally off to finish some of my OWN projects. It's been mostly fun doing the stuff for Wavebreaker, though. But one thing seems to have been particularly gremlin-infested; the creation of a workable version of Captain Nemo's sub "the Nautilus". I first built a 3 feet long version made out of two joined plastic bottles, detailed with Apoxie sculpt. Just as I was getting the final shape sanded and finished for more intricate details, I dropped the damned thing on the concrete floor in my workshop and the model shattered into quite a lot of pieces. I discovered I had not taken any photos of the model prior to the accident and I had none taken after it, as I ran outside with all the pieces I could find and hurled them fuming into the trash can.

So what to do now? I remembered I had an old Revell model of the Hindenburg zeppelin stashed away somewhere. I found it and stripped it down to its very bare essentials, turned it around with its stern becoming the stem, and found that, yes; this could actually turn into a decent steampunk submarine.

I added some very minor details, as Danny's intention had always been to have a very sleek, rocket-like sub, much like the Nautilus from the original illustrations from the first edition of "20 000 Leagues Under the Sea", and not at all like the fish-like Disney film version. To create the famous ram of this fantasy sub I made plastic casts of a saw-toothed knife blade. While the plastic was still soft I pulled out the casts from their silicone molds and bent them slightly to fit the shape of the hull. I added a small command tower from a war ship model kit, reused a fin from the Hindenburg to make the rudder and added a big propeller from another old toy model.

And this is the finished result, painted with airbrush acrylics. The windows and portholes are a mix of clear plastic beads with flat undersides and casts made from Crystal Clear plastic. Now a bit of a problem arose. The original model was built quite big in order to photograph well. This little bugger, its substitute, is only little over 1 ft long. This meant that our original intentions of having it animated in very cool camera moves went out the window. Instead I asked Ola, the husband of a friend of mine, to take some good close-up photos of the model, that could then be cut out and 2D animated in After Effects. Ola is a pro photographer with his own studio and the photos he took really did the trick. Thanks, Ola!

The photos Ola provided already had the model against a pristine white background. Cutting it out and putting it against a solid blue background was therefore not a problem. I took separate photos of the propeller in three different positions and added those to Ola's photos. I imported the photos of the Nautilus into my StopMotionPro animation software and looped them. This created long sequences of shots of a hovering Nautilus with a spinning propeller, that I could then 2D animate in After Effects.

And here's what some of the finished shots look like, with animated 2D and model fish added. These shots will all have a "underwater" filter added.

Little Big Octopus

2009-03-16T06:04:00.001-07:00

I've been criss-crossing between my different projects on this blog and this post is no different. The puppet I'm going to talk about here was made for two different films. Having made a big latex octopus tentacle for my friend Daniel Lenneer's film Wavebreaker I thought about putting it in one of my own projects. It ended up in "The King Who Sought Immortality", shot last summer. So both projects now featured said rubber tentacle and both stories needed additional shots of the rest of the octopus. The beast was to be realized as an animated puppet.

This is the early clay sketch, done in Chavant clay (that I always, always use for any kind of sculpture to be cast).

A lot more detailing added and ready for its Ultracal 30 mold.

The mold is cast and the clay removed (we're really moving along quickly here!)

A sculpture for the underside of the tentacles. Another for the top side was also made, but looked a lot less exciting so I'm not showing it here.

The armature for the octopus was made out of very thick aluminum wire. So thick, actually, that I had to grind the top end of each tentacle wire to a thin point. But this little trick added tremendous flexibility to each tentacle when I started animating them.

Each tentacle wire recieved a covering of thick, soft string (the same kind I always use when adding bulk to body parts that need to be somewhat symmetrical.) Yes; it took some time to wrap all that string.

While getting incredibly bored wrapping string around aluminum wires all day long, I took a break for casting the head of the octopus. It was done as a soft, flexible latex skin.

The latex castings for the tentacles, and their molds.

Waiting to be stuck onto the armature...

And this is the actual armature for the octopus. As you can see it's incredibly simple. The green plastic piece of tubing (from a roll of plaster bandages) is attached to an aluminum wire, that will allow for the animation of the head bobbing up and down.

Some very soft upholstery foam has been added to the armature. It's almost obvious now what it's going to turn into.

The eyes have it, both for some dating humans and for some stop-motion puppets. I was never going to go for a 100% accurate, natural look for the octopus. It's a monster octopus and they need certain details to make them look really handsome. For something as non-human as an octopus, this puppet needed eyes that made it look as alive as possible. The coloring of the eye was done in Photoshop and printed out on sturdy paper. The actual eye lenses were glass thingumabobs that you're supposed to put in flower pots. They have a bulging lens-like top and flat undersides, and I've discovered they're excellent for making watery eyes for larger puppets. I painted the slit-like pupils on the underside of the "lenses" and attached them to the printed pieces of paper using hot-melt glue around the edges.

The eyes are stuck to the inside of the head skin using more hot-melt glue.

There! All pieces of skin are stuck to the foam-padded armature. Time to add some paint.

This nasty-looking goo is acrylic paint mixed with Prose-Aide No-Tack glue (also known as Pros-Aide III), thus creating a variation of make-up man Dick Smith's famous PAX paint. It sticks to latex well enough, remains flexible and doesn't cover up smaller details on the puppet.

The paint is simply sponged on, using pieces of old upholstery foam as sponges. I use two of them; one to add the paint quite liberally and one to soak upp the excess.

The coat of paint has been added and allowed to dry.

Now for the neat details. A mottled coat of blue-grey acrylic paint is airbrushed on.

The finished paint job. I sometimes overdo the painted details like highlights and shadows, but I find that I often have to in order for them to show up in my camera.

The big guy ready to get moving on my little blue screen stage.

Sometimes you stumble on really simple solutions. I had to animate the octopus emerging from behind the semi-submurged sub Nautilus in a shot for "Wavebreaker". The model for the Nautilus was too small to work with the big octopus puppet. I needed something cylindrical and at the right scale to wrap the tentacles over. And it had to be blue, so I could matte in a close-up of the Nautilus under the tentacles. I found a plastic bucket in a kitchen cupboard that did the trick perfectly.

Here's an early test shot of the octopus on the hull of the Nautilus. It seems to work pretty well.

While working on this puppet I noticed that my budding latex allergy had reached full bloom. For some time now my eyes have been really irritated, even when using protective goggles, and this time and I actually suffered some respiratory problems as well. It's the ammonia that does me in. This is probably a good sign that it's time for me to go silicone, like many others have done before me.

Goblin Wood: The Goblins

2009-02-22T22:52:00.000-08:00

Here's a little photo session showing, in some detail, how the goblin puppets for "Goblin Wood" were made. This is the way I make just about all of my puppets.

The heads of the goblins start off as sculptures in Chavant clay. The head to the right is actually the second attempt at "finding" the right character. Plaster molds were made for each head. Head no 2 had a two-part mold.

This is the head of one of the goblins cast as a loose latex skin. The latex was tinted before pouring it into the plaster mold. Red beads have been added for the eyes.

This is the insides of the latex skin and it might be a bit hard to see, but the red beads are attached to the latex using the thermo plastic Friendly Plastic.

The armature for the goblin head you've just seen the skin of. The "skull" is made out of Friendly Plastic. All jointed parts -brow, ears, jaw, upper lip and cheeks- are aluminum or copper wire covered with a string wrapping. The brow is also padded with thin foam rubber.

This is how the joints for low-budget stop-motion armatures are made. You stick two or three lenghts of aluminum wire together in a power drill and hold the other ends of the wires with a pair of pliers. Gently turn the drill and you've got instant braided aluminum wire. Braided because it will hold up much better under stress and it won't be as springy or wobbly.

The braided aluminum wire is has been covered with Friendly Plastic, working as skeleton bones. The fingers are made out of plastic-covered copper wire. As you perhaps can see, the left goblin has another head than the one shown as a sculpture earlier. This is the first, discarded attempt.

Goblin no 1 has been covered with a wrapping of soft wire, and then some foam rubber and latex. Eventually I removed the wire from the arms and put some cotton/latex muscles there instead.

The goblin has been covered with a skin of latex, also acting as a pair of trousers and a pair of (so far) very floppy shoes.

Goblin no 2 has had his arms and legs attached to his armour. This fish bowl-like chest and back piece was made out of a big acrylic ball (intended as a home-made Christmas decoration). It's been patched-up and had details added using Apoxie.

The head has been added along with some latex spikes and a covering of latex skin on the arms and legs. A studded band made as a Chavant sculpture and cast in latex has been attached along the middle of the armour. As you can see it's been painted a matte black as well. It's pretty much ready for the final paint job now. A small hat and some shoes were also added.

Armour and other details (such as leather straps) for goblin no 1 were sculpted in Chavant and cast in SmoothCast 325 plastic from silicone molds.

The boys are finally finished and ready for animation. They are a mixture of my own concepts and influences from other artists, primarily Arthur Rackham and Brian Froud. It's hard to escape your favourites. They work their way into your subconscious and usually does not make themselves apparent until the work is finished.

My Illustrious Illustrating Career

2009-01-26T22:05:00.000-08:00

And now for something completely different. Life is not just about making jolly movies. Sometimes it's also about making money and trying to establish some kind of career. I have no illusions as to being able to make a living out of my animation or puppet building, but I have the intention of making it as an illustrator. I have started out quite modestly, but at least I'm on my way. I first published a couple of books in Sweden, but I really want to branch out in the US, where the big money and the big opportunities are.
I self-published Fearsome Critters at Lulu, a book about the sometimes outrageous creatures of lumberjack folklore. Then I got in touch with Kelly Christiansen at Cyberwizard Productions. She took a fancy to my art and comissioned some illustrations for the humorous fantasy/sci-fi anthology Strange Worlds of Lunacy. After that I did art for L. Frank Baum's American Fairytales (not yet published).

Just published, however, is Night Ship to Never, another anthology, collecting the sci-fi poems of David Kopaska-Merkel and Kendall Evans (some examples of the illos shown below).

All of that was in 2008. During 2009 I'll finish several book projects that I want Kelly to publish for me, and so far she seems to like what she's seeing. Cyberwizard Productions is a small company, but with big ambitions. Ideally I'd like to be picked up by a big publisher who can pay me big money, but since that hasn't happened yet I'll make do with what I can. Special make-up effects artist Tom Savini's motto is "The more you do, the more you get to do". I stand by that too -it is, in fact my experience that it is so. That's how the universe works. You have to show that you really enjoy your creativity and that you're going to keep going no matter what! Comic book creator supreme Alan Moore pointed out that the projects you do out of excitement, just for the fun of being creative without any thoughts of success or recognicion, are the purest acts you will ever perform in your life and those are the ones most likely to succeed. I try to make every work a work of love, weather it's commissioned or my own brainchild. With that attitude I know the result of my efforts will always be the best I can make it.

Goblin Wood Image Enhancements

2009-01-21T23:52:00.000-08:00

All of the live-action footage for Goblin Wood was shot in one afternoon. It was a quite sunny day and the image quality turned out OK. But not very fantasy-like. So since then I've been trying to improve the footage according to my tastes. I wanted a softened, almost hazy look to most of the shots. This meant the applying of filters in After Effects and also the adding of stuff that wasn't there when the film was shot, like large fungi, animals and fog.

The story starts out in elf-land, where everything is bright and green. There are mostly trees with leafy foliage. We brought some smoke effects to the woods, but it was impossible to get the damn things working properly. I wanted some hazy sunlight "drapes" billowing in the background, but since the smoke effects wasn't cooperating I added the sunlight afterwards in After Effects instead. I also brightened the image and made it softer.

Our elfin heroine enters the goblin wood. There was no dark spruce forest near where I shot the "elf-land" footage, so that had to be added later as well. The goblin wood-part of the shot is simply a combination of photos that were combined and spliced into a part of the image Anjelica (the elf) didn't enter. In the middle of the shot you can glimpse a winged shadow lifting from the ground. This is a flying bird of prey from Eadweard Muybridge's collection Animals in Motion. I just scanned the photos, coloured them and made a flying cycle that was then imported in the software StopMotionPro and animated.

When the elf enters the goblin wood the mood and the look of the film changes. Everything gets darker and murkier. I added some fog shot against a black screen, downloaded from Detonationfilms.com and a nasty, mole-like animal peering up from his den beneath a rotting tree stump. After that was done I rendered the shot, imported it again and duplicated it in two layers. The top footage was blurred using Gaussian Blur and the blending mode "Multiply" was chosen. This made the image very dark, musty and atmospheric. A bit too much, actually, so the transparency of the top layer was amped up a bit. All of the goblin wood-shots were processed in this way.

The mole-like animal that is briefly visible in the above shot is an old puppet I built for a disastrous film project called Virgin Tears. It actually started life as a musical version of Lord of the Rings! For real! At first we got permission from the publisher Harper Collins and the Tolkien estate to do an amateur version of the story. Then New Line Cinema pulled all the worldwide rights to protect their interests and the film mutated into something different and quite unwatcable. I produced some stop-motion for the project, including shots of the mole monster that was added to scenes previously depicting the encounter between Frodo and a barrow-wight.

Another example of the original shot having the "goblin filter" added, along with some oversized fungi.

More photos of fungi, toadstools in this case. A puppet of a walking toadstool was also included.

More smoke effects from Detonationfilms.com. The eye appearing in the mossy rock was a glass eye in a cardboard socket, that I animated and keyed into the shot.

The elf triumphantly puts her foot on the fallen monster she's just vanquished. We simply put a big stone on the ground where the creature would be placed, and the keyed-in pupped was aligned with Anjelicas foot. Easy-peasy!

Goblin Wood Firefly Puppet

2009-01-20T22:45:00.000-08:00

I had high hopes to finish the film Goblin Wood (see earlier posts), shot this past summer, before the end of 2007. I realize now that that was incredibly optimistic (as always), so let's say instead that it'll be finished during the spring of 2008.

In this film the elfin heroine fights a firebreathing, flying dragon-insect-something -a "dragon fly", quite simply. Previously I have built all my animation puppets using latex, sometimes reinforced with cotton to achieve a leathery, shell-like feel to certain parts of a puppet's anatomy. I've used this particular technique for insect-like or crustacean creatures. For the dragon fly I decided to cast the hard parts of its body in plastic and cover the joints with latex.

This monster was sort of inspired by the works of Swedish horror/fairy tale artist Hans Arnold. Check out his web page and you'll see what I mean.

The head of the dragon fly was sculpted in Chavant and a mold in Dragon Skin Q silicone rubber was created for it. The head was cast in SmoothCast 325 plastic. Spikes were added to the back of the head using Apoxie sculpt and a flexible lower jaw was built up with wool string and latex over aluminum wire.

The body was done the same way as the head, with holes drilled out for attaching the legs and the wings. The tail was created by wrapping yarn around aluminum wire and adding cast patches of latex skin from existing skin molds over that. The horns were also cast in latex from different old "monster" plaster molds. Recycle if you can; it saves both time and money!

The wings were a bit of a bother to make. I had to sculpt them as thin as I possibly could and create a silicone mold for them. I say "them" but of course I mean "it". I only sculpted one wing and cast four duplicates in plastic.

The legs were easier to do (I think I did all six in about twenty minutes) and created the way I do all puppet armatures -braiding aluminum wire attaching one end to a power drill and holding the other with pliers. The stiff parts of each leg was built up with Friendly Plastic. Normally this construction would then be covered by foam rubber, latex and paint.

Here are the finished legs and wings attached to the body. I really should do something about the floor in my workshop!

A view of the belly.

A black base coat has been added to the puppet. But how come it's got no head?

Because in the film the monster blows its own head off at the end. I attached a short screw to the end of the puppet's neck, so I could screw its head on and off the body (the creature being headless after the explosion). The eyes are bought from a taxidermist's supply house.

The finished puppet was painted with acrylic airbrush paints. The joints for the wings and the legs were covered with sewing string and tinted latex.

For animation the puppet was mounted on a flexible support rod. It was simply two thick pieces of aluminum wire braided together and stuck to a block of wood. The wire was covered with thick, soft string painted blue. Thus the support rod could be keyed out with the background.

Two stills from the film showing the fire fly on the prowl in the woods where I shot most of this project. Atmospheric filters and motion blur have also been added. In the last photo the heroine has shot a pine cone-tipped arrow into the snout of the monster, which acts practically like a flame thrower, and jamming it. So I guess you can figure out what happens next. KA-BOOM!

From globe to helmet

2008-12-04T22:35:00.001-08:00

Jumping back to my contributions to my friend Daniel Lenneer's film Wavebreaker I thought it could be interesting to chronicle the tranformation of a terrestrial globe into a steampunk diver's helmet. Danny wanted a classical surface supplied diver, or "hooka diver", for his underwater epic. This meant either buying, borrowing or making a big, clunky diving helmer. The two first options quickly went out the window, which meant it was up to me to construct a fake version. All of the underwater footage was to be shot against a greenscreen, so the helmet just had to look good enough.

I started off with a globe I bought at a garage sale for a trifle. Dismantling it was an easy task, but getting rid of the printed paper wrapping was not. It took several days to clean everything off.

I placed the cleaned globe on a hard polyfoam bust I always use for maskmaking, and built up the shoulder and neck areas in Chavant clay. There was a visible seam between the two plastic halves of the globe so I covered that with Apoxie.

The shoulder / neck part was cast in latex, reinforced with cotton until it took on a leathery feel. It was then reinforced with hot-melt glue. I would've liked to cast it in plastic instead, but there were no money for the necessary materials. But this solution worked out fine. The portholes in front, at the top and at the sides were plastic saucers made to hold water for flower pots. I cut holes in them and built up the grids in the portholes using Apoxie sculpt over cardboard frames. Other stuff added was a plastic medicine jar as a valve, and the lid from a container of vaseline. This particular diver had the look of a hooka diver, but in fact he had a steampunk air supply solution in the shape of air tubes on his back, hence the small pipe in the back of the helmet.

When all the details were added and secured the whole helmet was spraypainted flat back.

And here's the finished helmet, painted in brass and aluminum with airbrush to give it a mottled, worn look. I also added a real brass valve to the right (your right) of the helmet.

Danny tries it out and seems pleased with the result.

A couple of frame-grabs for Danny's first composite try-out. I also made some underwater plants/animals/fungi/whatever in rubber, for the divers to pick when they go hunting for food on the ocean floor.

Props and costume for "Slayers of Evil".

2008-12-03T23:39:00.001-08:00

When my LARP friend Martin and I decided to produce our own little fantasy epic, we immediately settled on having it look like it jumped out of a 1970's Dungeons & Dragons rule book. Which meant that the wizard should have a pointy hat, the elf must wear Robin Hood tights and the barbarian princess must have a very skimpy outfit.
All of this also meant another call to my invaluable dress-making friend Liz Mattsson, who's provided clothes for both actors and puppets in a number of my films. Nothing is impossible for her to make and if she doesn't know how to make it straight away, she'll figure it out. There is a great freedom, and I have to say relief, not having to rely on what you might find in a theatre wardrobe. Sometimes you strike gold there, but more often you get something that is kind of, sort of what you have in mind. It is a hundred times better to be able to design the entire look of a character from scratch and then be able to stick to it. It's an added cost of buying material for the costumes, but it's worth it.

For our wizard, Aronaxx (played by Rolf Berg) I bought bright red cloth and painted hundreds of astrological and alchemical symbols over it with gold textile paint. It took two full days to do that. Then Liz pieced it all together in the form of a typical wizard's robe. Easy to put on and get out of, and Rolf could even go and have a wee-wee while wearing it.

The wizard's pointy had was made out of a kind of soft, but sturdy cardboard with glue on one side of it. You remove a protective paper covering from the glue side and press the cardboard down on a piece of cloth. In this case I painted on the symbols after I had attached the cloth and assempled the cone.

This photo is taken at the end of the last day of shooting for Rolf, and as you can see he sweated quite a bit!

The wizard's staff was a very simple construction. The staff itself was a wooden rod used for hanging curtains and the top was a styrofoam ball, covered with latex and spraypainted gold. The detaling on the orb was made from latex castings of clay sculptures. It was all made very quickly the day before shooting started.

Rolf was wearing a beard made out of human hair. I bought it a coulpe of years back and originally used it for a film called The Haunted Mill, but since the beard is attached to lace fiber, it can be reused again and again. Which is a good thing since it was really, really expensive.

The character who needed the most elaborate props and costume was probably Vulvia, the barbarian princess (played by Malin Hermansson). Malin was chosen for a number of reasons; she has the looks, the figure and the humor for the job. She can also act and dance, the latter being a plus when fight choreography is used.

Vulvia is certainly the toughest in the bunch of heroes, so we decided to juxtapose this by giving her a taste for pink. Actually (not referred to in the film), the pink fur comes from a bear-like monster living in the wild mountains that are her home.

Parts of her outfit, the cape, the shoulder pads and the boots are taken from a costume made a few years back. The leather arm braces were made by a friend of Martin's. At the time of filming this project, Malin was a brunette and we felt she didn't look Scandinavian or valkry-ish enough. So I bought a blonde wig.

Vulvia's necklace was inspired by barbarian bling-bling seen in Frank Frazetta's Conan paintings. I sculpted the skull of an unidentified nasty little animal in clay, made a silicone mold and cast the finished skull in plastic. It was the painted and stuck on leather-imitation thread with four latex bear claws.

Vulvia's helmet was also sculpted in clay and cast in latex from a plaster mold. I wanted something soft and comfortable for Malin to wear. After I had painted it in dark grey PAX and aluminum paint, Liz dressed it up with pink fur.

The cups Vulvia's bra were made in the same way as the helmet. They were stuck onto one of Malin's own bras. The straps were hidden under some fake leather strips.

Vulvia's sword had to look powerful, but needed to be light and easy to wield. I recycled the blade of an old sword made many years back and used in many projects. The hilt was, again, inspired by a Frazetta painting of Conan resting against his sword. I sculpted the crossguard and the pommel in clay and cast plastic copies from a silicone mold. The parts were painted a dark black/iron and stuck onto the tang of the blade using more plastic as a fixing glue.

The grip was covered with more plastic, and PVC leather imitation was wrapped around it. At the time I didn't have any real leather thin enough for the job, so I had to make do with what was avaliable. It worked out fine and the sword came out as a very sturdy, well-balanced prop. The blade is made out of aluminum stock and was tuned and bevelled for me many years back by a friend's dad, who had a machine-shop. I engraved Norse runes along the fuller of the blade. It's a big sword, but quite light.

The sheath had been made many years earlier and was created out of sturdy cardboard, wrapped in duct tape and the covered with leather imitation (because it was cheap). The metal details on the sheath were cast in plastic. The belt is a garage sale find.

Martin played the dapper elf Falgolan, who likes to dress up in Robin Hood or Peter Pan fashion. Liz made the tunic from my specifications (one of them being a photo of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood). The shirt, the belt and the boots are Martin's own. The mint green tights are ballet tights for men and were bought. They were probably the hardest item to find for the costumes! I also bought a Prince Valiant-style wig. Martin provided the bow and quiver. I made flower-stick arrows with plastic heads, and Martin spent a morning adding "feathers" made out of sticky tape, folded, cut and glued in place.

My co-worker Agneta Rapp-Svensson played the Sorceress, named Lamaria in the script but actually never adressed by name in the film. I bought her dress straigh off a Halloween costume page on the web. I figured we couldn't dream up something as tasteless ourselves. It fitted Agneta like a glove, too!

I did make a couple of things for her character. I sculpted a snake diadem, cast it in plastic from a silicone mold, painted it and and added a glass ruby.

The sorceress also carried an evil-looking pendant. The little horned skull was sculpted in clay, a silicone mold was created and plastic cast in that mold. After spraypainting it with a high-gloss aluminum paint it was attached to a necklace chain.

What we wanted to do was to go in the opposite direction of how things look in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, and I think we succeeded with that. Our hope is that at least some people will experience a feeling of nostalgia when looking at this stuff. It's from a time when fantasy was less textured and could even be allowed to indulge in some silliness.