The King Who Sought Immortality: Sumerian Dragons and Clay Snakes

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.

Lovecraftian Horrors of Clay

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.