Last year I discovered American author and poet Madison Cawein, nicknamed The Keats of Kentucky since much of his output centered around his native state. I turned 50 this year, and I haven't exactly been a lazy wastrel, but Cawein, who passed away at 49, had at the time of his death 36 books and 1500 poems to his credit. I wilted a bit when I found that out, looking back at my life thus far and finding my output depressingly poor by comparison. His poem "Will-O-The-Wisp" is haunting, creepy, and a bit melancholy, and I thought it would make a good project for my YouTube channel.
Cawein has a very detailed description of his Will-O-The-Wisp character, which I found wonderfully eccentric. It's a goblin-like creature with webbed hands and feet, with additional whippoorwill features (which I might have added through a personal interpretation). This is the clay sculpture I ended up with. The milky plastic balls (or pearls) used for eyes here also ended up as the actual eyes in the final, finished puppet.
I used dense dental plaster to make a mold for my sculpture. Sometimes I use white hobby plaster, which is softer and cheaper, but for sculptures I've spent a bit of time on I use the denser dental plaster, so I know the mold will last for a while.
By now, you're already familiar with how I make bat-like wings, pressing down my armature in plaster and "painting" in the web sections with latex over both the armature and the plaster surface. The webbing between the fingers and toes was made this way, only I used clay instead of plaster.
I made a very simple aluminum armature, held together with blobs of thermoplastic. Another blob was stuck to the bum of the puppet, where I inserted a square nail to create an attachment point for a flying rig. I've been recommended for years to turn from using a threaded bolt in the puppet and a flying rig arm with a threaded rod, and instead use a square rod and a square hole. That's all fine and dandy like sugar candy, but it's proven impossible for me to find square rods small enough to work for puppets, OR if I've found them, the materials have been prohibitively expensive. For example, you can buy a professional flying rig with the square rod solution, but the cost for that is currently beyond me. So, I figured I could do my own homemade version. However, the plastic attachment point proved to become slightly ground away by the metal nail inserted into it after a while, making the connection between the two parts quite loose. So, that was one experiment that turned out to not work as hoped.
The light yellow bits on arms and legs are thin polyurethane foam soaked in latex, and the green and darker yellow sections are ordinary foam.
Here's the puppet covered with patches of tinted latex cast in skin texture molds.
Here I've dabbed the puppet with tinted latex. It got a few more thin coats until it had a pale blue look.
I added a few bits of cotton dipped in latex to the mouth to make it look a bit more like the beak of a whipporwill. That strange bird also has some sort of bristles around its mouth so I added something like that too. The fetching hat and loincloth are made from "chunks-o-flesh" using latex tinted bone white -better explained it's latex applied to a flat surface, torn up when dry and allowed to bunch up into clumps of web-like material. 1 mm aluminum wires are hidden in the clothing items to make the flap in the wind during animation.
The backgrounds are a mixed bag of stills and footage, all of it from various stock media sources. For example, the background in the shot above is a close-up of real reeds slowly moving, while the reeds in front are CG animated.
The last shot is of a sickly-looking swamp, where the Will-O-The-Wisp encounters the spirit of a drowned man (the man is another stock image), is actually my first AI-generated image, made with Adobe AI. I think it worked out pretty well.
I enjoy making videos based on poems, especially if they're moody and within the horror or fantasy genre. There's a bunch of them out there, so this one won't be my last adaptation.
In 2021, the copyright Disney had usurped for the Winnie-the-Pooh property since 1961 expired. I was among the people who had hopes for other creators coming in and adapting the stories in their own way.
Alas, what we did get was the "satirical" horror movie "Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey." This disappointment got me thinking about what I could bring to the table, and I thought of an episode in the tales where Piglet dreams of Heffalumps.
Nobody really knows what a Heffalump is, except for it being huge and scary. Pooh illustrator E. H. Shepard portrays the Heffalump as a big, angry elephant, and Disney interpretations have gone that route too, in a way.
So, for my project, I needed a version of Piglet and a version of the Heffalump. Starting with Piglet, I went back to Shepard's original illustrations. Color versions show Piglet's vest (or whatever the garment is supposed to be) being green, so that's what I stuck with too.
I sculpted a piglet head in Monster Clay, having the notion to reproduce the sculpture as a latex skin, as I usually do. In the end, I only used a portion of it.
This simple armature made the basis for the puppet. Not seen in this photo, there is an attachment point on the armature's bum for a flying rig.
The arms and legs were wrapped with soft yarn, and the rest of the puppet was padded with soft foam.
Here's the finished Piglet puppet covered with latex skin. I did consider making Piglet a felt puppet, which would've looked better. But since I was more familiar with latex and foam padding I went that route. The eyes and buttons are scrapbooking half-pearls glued on.
My idea for a Heffalump was realized a bit earlier than my planning for this film. I made this drawing just for fun and posted it on DeviantArt. I thought it'd make a good animation puppet.
I started with making the face in medium-grade Monster Clay. I simply made the face a bit too big, which meant that the rest of the puppet would have to be bigger than I usually make my puppets.
The face was cast in tinted latex from a dental plaster mold created over the sculpture. I made two eyes from a couple of very colorful plastic pearls and drilled a concave surface into them to create irisis. Each iris was painted and filled in with UV resin. The eyes are placed in silicone clay sockets held in place with thermoplastic. Three and four millimeter aluminum wires were added for the ears, the eyebrows, and the jaw. As you can see I removed the latex eyebrows. I sometimes do that to improve on the flexibility of that part of the face. The white stuff you can see on the inside of the latex skin is Polymorph thermoplastic, adding support for the head. I also added a rigid plastic tube as extra support for the mid-section of the face.
New eyebrows were built up with soft foam.
I decided to make a trunk with a grasping hand at the end. Fingers were built up by wrapping soft yarn around aluminum wires, while the trunk had a base of yarn, with foam on top of it. The yarn wrapping at the base makes the trunk less wobbly and more organic-feeling.
I also sculpted a foot and cast four hollow latex versions of it, using a blend of latex and cotton lining the inside of each cast to make it extra sturdy.
This turned out to be a huge puppet, the biggest I've ever built, standing a little over 16 inches tall. Each leg had a bundle of 4 mm aluminum wires for its joints. The body piece is a bit of plywood.
Lots of padding for this puppet. It really wouldn't flex its midriff, so I just built up a big blob of foam, making it both bulky and slightly gangly-looking with its long legs.
Lots of latex patches cast in skin texture molds were draped over the foam. All the patches were tinted when cast, which gives a very fleshy look.
The base color was applied using a sponge and tinted latex. Over this, I worked up hues of purple and blue, with red shadows in creases and folds.
Here's the finished Heffalump. The hair is dark grey fake fur dabbed with tinted latex. This made the hair stiff and easy to control. The nails and teeth were made from tissue paper and latex. Even the tusks were made this way. I rolled long strips of tissue paper soaked in latex and pressed them together until I had a tusk-like shape.
The backgrounds were all digital 2D images. Piglet's bedroom was cobbled together in Photoshop using various stock image elements. I found an old photo of a teddy bear and placed it in a frame, making a portrait of Winnie-the-Pooh. Piglets pillows and bedclothes were bits of felt and cloth I had lying about. I animated Piglet saying "Bother!" when he woke up, but then remembered that it's Winne-the-Pooh who says that -Piglet says "Oh dear!" But when I dubbed in my Piglet voice (which I did myself) "Oh dear!" fitted anyway.
Piglet's nightmare forest was downloaded from depositphotos.com, where I have a subscription, and I'm assuming it's AI art.
So, that's my contribution to the pop culture universe of Winnie-the-Pooh and friends. Some kind people have suggested I should do more of this, but at the moment I'm happy with this short excursion. I love the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and though it would be fun and a privilege to adapt them, I also feel I want to leave them alone and not add on my interpretations.
For ages and ages, I've been planning to do an adaptation of William Hope Hodgson's epic novel "The Night Land." There's nothing like it before or since in pop culture. It's teeming with weird monsters and it's copyright free -perfect for my purposes. Also, it's mostly about just a single character wandering like a knight errant through a wild wasteland, just waiting to be Photoshopped together using various strange textures. So, why haven't I gotten around to adapting it? Well, mostly it's about boiling down 584 pages of verbose narrative and archaic prose to something that could be told in around 20 minutes. But there is actually a solution for that because there's a shorter version of the novel, which I'll get back to shortly.
Let's talk briefly about the background of the book. It was the last work written by hunky Victorian fantasy author Hodgson, who had been a sailor in his early years and was one of the first bodybuilders in the UK, but the first of his books that were published. Hodgson would go on to join WW1 and eventually be blown to smithereens by an artillery shell at Ypres, cutting a career of completely original horror fantasy tales tragically short.
Above is my edition of The Night Land, published in the 1970s by Ballantine books in their Adult Fantasy series (edited by Lin Carter). They split it up in two volumes, as you can see. To protect copyrights in the US, Hodgson boiled down his 200 000+ word epic to a shortened 20 000-word novelette, published in the USA as The Dream of X, thus establishing, kind of, his novel as having a copyright status and protecting it against pirate publishers. However, the risk of someone stealing and publishing the enormous The Night Land was slim indeed, but there you have it. I actually read The Dream of X in a Swedish translation before I could get my hands on The Night Land.
In short, the premise of The Night Land is that the story is set on Earth millions of years in the future. The sun has died but the desolate landscape is partially illuminated with fire and lava from the ground and from mysterious lights sometimes appearing. The remnants of humanity are huddled together in a gigantic pyramid called The Last Redoubt. Around this fortress is the Night Land shrouded in perpetual darkness, but teeming with monstrous lifeforms. Some are huge as mountains and loom threateningly along the horizon. Others are man-sized and quite human-like. A blue flame of mystical earth currents surrounds the pyramid and keeps the nightmarish vermin at bay. Futuristic knights each armed with a "diskos", a sort of spear ending with an electrically charged razor-sharp rotating disc, guard the refuge.
However, one such man receives a telepathic distress call from a Lesser Redoubt, that nobody in the great pyramid has heard of. Our hero sets out alone to rescue the inhabitants of The Lesser Redoubt, since their earth current is failing, and travels across the bizarre world of the Night Land, encountering mysteries and fighting monsters.
The Dream of X tells the same story but pretty much snips out almost all of the travel bits. There's also a bizarre framing story set in the 1600s concerning a narrator who dreams the whole tale but is convinced it is a true vision of the future. This narrative device is enthusiastically presented at the beginning, even providing a romance for the narrator, but it's all soon forgotten when we leap millions of years ahead in the story.
For a few years, I've been contributing illustrations to Graeme Philips' excellent fanzine Cyäegha, but he's also published other collections pertaining to the "Lovecraft Circle" of writers, as well as peripheral authors. Included in the collection Forbidden Dreams is The Carpathian Codex, written by Cardinal Cox. It's a collection of poems inspired by the writings of Lovecraft and others. Among these poems is Night Land, a text summarizing the set-up for the plot and concept of Hodgson's The Night Land. I figured that would be a fun way of tackling the world of the Night Land and doing a very compact meditation on the subject rather than tackling that big project just yet. I got permission from Cox to adapt his poem, and off I went.
If you've followed my YouTube videos the past few years you know that my preferred filmmaking style is to use still images, adapt them in Photoshop, and use those as backgrounds/foregrounds. For the Night Land landscape, I used images of lava fields from Iceland. Digital effects like animated smoke, fire, and lightning were pulled from various open-source CGI clips.
The Great Redoubt pyramid was made from a single stock CG image found at Depositphotos.com duplicated many times and arranged as two sides of the pyramid. I wanted a tile-like texture, inferring that the pyramid is a patchwork of generations worth of repairs. The small pinpoints of light were added in Photoshop with the drawing tool.
The skies were made from more stock images of CG clouds, animated with distortion tools in After Effects, and also with altered colors.
The monsters of the original novel are too numerous to give a due appearance in a short video, but I picked a couple of favorites. "The Yellow Thing" is a four-armed humanoid creature the hero encounters and fights at one point when he's lit a campfire. "The Humped Men" are a race of squat creatures that seem to be very populous, so I figured I'd better include one of those too. I included a scene where a Yellow Thing tries to catch a Humped Man.
As I usually do I sculpted the head and torso as a single piece in medium grade Monster Clay, adding a couple of plastic pearls for the eyes.
I made the puppet's armature slightly disproportionate and irregular. I wanted to imply that the Yellow Thing is some kind of mutant abomination, not something that evolved with a symmetrical body.
For the arms and legs, I used exclusively cotton dipped in latex and thin polyurethane soaked in latex to shape very sinewy muscles.
The rest of the body was padded with thin polyurethane foam to achieve a knotted, but softer muscle look.
I cast patches of latex skin from a variety of old plaster skin texture molds, again to try and achieve a varied, deformed look to the body.
The head only has a single aluminum wire loop for the mouth. I retained the pearls from the sculpture as eyes. The skin was painted in a dirty yellow using tinted latex and touched up with numerous passes of airbrush colors. The teeth were tissue paper dipped in latex.
I decided the Humped Man would be symmetrical, but anatomically different from humans in many ways. It sort of came out looking a bit like a hairless Ewok.
Very simple padding on this puppet. I wanted a softer, chubbier look to the body.
For some reason, most of the photos taken with my phone turned out blurry, but hopefully, you can see some details. Like the Yellow Thing, the Humped Man only has articulation in the jaw regarding the face. Both these puppets make very quick appearances and weren't required to do much. The Humped Man was only painted with tinted latex.
I'll talk a bit about my plans for making a longer Night Land adaptation at the end of this post, and if that comes to fruition I'll re-design these monsters and make puppets with more articulation.
I also built a puppet that doesn't have a direct analog in the book. I just wanted to include a creepy monster with humanoid features, and this is what I came up with. I wanted the critter's eyes to be grown shut and the neck to have a tumorous texture.
Basically, this creature has the look of a human spider or insect, so the legs were made to be long and spindly. Cotton dipped in latex was used to shape muscles and tendons.
The latex head was attached to a long neck made from a single aluminum wire wrapped in soft yarn. I used a paper ball dipped in latex to prop up the back of the head. The snaking tongue is just a very thin aluminum wire wrapped in sewing yarn and painted with tinted latex. A couple of nails joined together with thermoplastic make up the center of the body.
The bulk of the body was shaped with two pieces of dense foam plucked from a package I got a while ago. Whenever I get useful package material it goes into the handy-to-have-some-day box.
A prominent monster character in The Night Land is The Silent Ones, so I felt I had to include those. They are a group of hooded beings who emerge from The House of Silence and travel on the few roads still remaining. It's very bad luck to encounter a silent one. It's never really revealed who or what they are, but the reader gets the feeling that they are among the top power players in the Night Land. For my Silent Ones I found a stock image of four hooded capes. I cut them out in Photoshop and added a few other changes before importing the images into After Effects and keyframe animated them to glide over the crusty ground. I added a CG animation of a wiggling squirmy shape in a layer under each cape, so you can just see something nasty peeking out under the cloth.
I wanted to focus on the actual Night Land landscape, following the text of Cox's poem, so the people of the pyramid are only glimpsed briefly. There is a version of an old Italian "peplum" or sword & sandal movie called The Giant of Metropolis, which is in the public domain. I used still shots from the movie where people are dressed in various retro-futuristic costumes, cutting out the people and adding them in layers in After Effects. The raging thunderstorm outside the pyramid is CG stock footage and the inside pyramid "set" is a modified stock image from Depositphotos. I made it a keyframed tracking shot, having the various elements in layers move a bit as the "camera" tracked in.
There is a bunch of so-called watchers in the Night Land; huge mountain-like monsters that move so slowly that the observers of the phenomena need millennia and generations to track any movement at all. One thing is certain, though -they're all moving towards the Last Redoubt. I use two old puppets to portray a couple of the watchers, each with its own characteristics. I took two photos of the puppets and 2D animated them. My idea was to show the monsters finally bearing down on the pyramid, making -for them- very quick movements.
Even the brave knights of the pyramid were still images. Again, I found useful material on Depositphotos and created the spinning diskos using a Photoshopped image of a glowing wheel with lots of spokes, animated to rotate very fast.
And that's about it for my Night Land video. I did the narration myself and used music by YouTube composer Sir Cubworth, who offers a collection of his work among the free YouTube resources.
Will I do another version? Yes, that is the plan. I want to basically do The Dream of X, but with more monster encounters, so it'll be a mix of the two versions of the story. When I'll be able to do it is up in the air for the time being.
