Last month I wrote about "Scrap Metal" on my blog, which had animation footage originally made for James Balsamo's film "Alien Danger 2". The project in question this time is my animation created for Balsamo's movie "It Wants Blood" (2019), where a monster representing national interests, the Native American folklore creature the Piasa, battles a monster representing foreign interests, the African Grootslang.
There are many strange sights in "It Wants Blood", among them Oscar-nominated actor Eric Roberts (brother of Julia), who's had an interesting career during the last decade, to say the least. His aim seems to be to blow up the IMDb credits list since he makes about a hundred movies a year.
Besides my puppet representations of the monsters, there are also full-scale heads popping into the happenings every once in a while.
These very fetching creations were made by make-up expert Joe Castro, who built them in what seems an impossibly short time and also impossibly cheap.
As for my contributions, I actually made a behind-the-scenes video about building the Grootslang monster, so please have a gander at that. I didn't film any documentation on the making of the Piasa, so here follows a written account of that.
This is what the Piasa looks like painted on one of the limestone bluffs along the Mississippi River in Alton. There's always been a debate about whether the story of the Piasa is actually from Native folklore, or a construction made by the first teller of it, Professor John Russel. Look it up, if this sounds interesting. Anyway, the image painted on the limestone rock became my template for the Piasa puppet.
As you can see, the Piasa has a human-like face. I sculpted two versions, but wasn't happy with either of them, mainly because I made them too large. The body size that would've followed would've been impractical to animate on my smallish puppet stage.
This is the face I eventually ended up with. It was the right size but also had a decent amount of detailing.
The face was reproduced as a latex skin from a dental plaster mold created over the sculpture.
The wings were constructed from two mm aluminum wires, joined together with a mix of super glue and baking soda.
To build up anatomical shapes on the wings, I wrapped soft yarn over the aluminum wires.
I've shared my wing-making method many times before, but the main crux of it is to embed the wing armature, covered with yarn and latex, about halfway down into soft plaster. When the plaster has set, I can etch various details such as veins into the plaster, and then cover the areas between the "fingers" of the wing to create wing membranes. The whole wing is then simply pulled out of its plaster matrix.
The tail was built up with lots of yarn over a 3 mm aluminum wire. A thin layer of latex holds it all together.
The armature is a mix of 2 and 3-mm aluminum wires, padded with bits of EVA foam and yarn. The face has been given an aluminum wire-jointed jaw, plus eyes made with plastic pearls placed in silicone sockets so they can swivel. The face is reinforced with thermoplastic, which also holds the jaw and eyes in place. The horns were made from thin steel wires covered with cotton and latex.
Snippets of foam from old cushions served as muscle padding. They're held in place with flexible contact cement.
Right before the base of the tail, I added a 3 mm t-nut so I could attach a flying rig to the puppet. I needed to do this for the flying and jumping shots.
The scales covering the body of the Piasa, as per the limestone illustration, are quite stylized and ornate, sort of heraldic in a way, and I decided to keep them that way. I sculpted three rows of different sizes on a flat slab of clay.
A hard dental plaster mold was made over the sculpture, and tinted latex was pointed into the mold.
Here's what the rows of scales looked like when they were pulled from the mold.
Using liquid latex as a glue, the rows of scales were layered from front to back, overlapping each other.
The Piasa also has a row of smaller fin-like shapes along its neck. These were created the way the wing membranes were made, but using soft clay instead of plaster.
Here's the finished covering of the scales. Now for the paint job. You can see a tongue here as well. It's a piece of aluminum wire wrapped in sewing string and covered with tinted latex.
The Piasa was painted with tinted latex and touched up with acrylic airbrush paints. I mixed some thinned metallic paint into latex and brushed that over the scales with a sponge to create a more shining, glittering effect.
The tusks and claws are cotton and latex, and the beard was cut from an old synthetic fur coat. The Piasa and the Grootslang were two of the biggest puppets I had built up to that point, and they proved to be a bit of a bother when animating them on my cramped puppet stage. But, in the end, it all worked out. All the animations took about two weeks to finish.
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.
This little film is an adaptation of Leah Bodine Drake's poem "Changeling", which was published in Wierd Tales, in September 1942. She's quite an interesting character, with an equally interesting family tree that includes Sir Francis Drake, Davy Crockett, and Jean Bodin. Drake was a poet, author, editor, and critic, and she's probably best known for her first book, published by Arkham House, "A Hornbook For Witches."
It seems the book didn't sell all that well when it was published. Now, of course, it's a valued collectible. Among the poems in the book is "Changeling."
Some of her poetry is probably better known for being included in the record "A Hornbook For Witches", narrated by Vincent Price. Even this item is becoming something of a collectible, but you can find the whole thing uploaded on YouTube.
So, what is actually a changeling? According to folklore, it's a fairy child placed in a human home. In my native Sweden it's the trolls who take a human newborn and replace it with one of their own babies. Why do they practice this custom? Nobody seems to know, but the general idea seems to be a lust for knowledge of human secrets, such as iron-making, butter-making, and similar things. The fairy or troll child is a kind of infiltrator, in other words. The changeling is mostly an unhappy creature, neither fairy nor human, which is something Drake touches on in her poem. My grandmother's uncle claimed he was a changeling.
My puppet changeling started life as a medium-grade Monster Clay sculpture. I made the head and the torso.
The sculpture was placed on a clay base and a dental plaster mold was built up around it.
I added tinted latex to the plaster mold to create a sturdy skin. This forehead was reinforced with a mix of latex and cotton. Other parts of the head were padded with strips of polyurethane soaked in latex. The body was padded with layers of soft foam.
The armature for this character is very simple; a humanoid frame made with aluminum wires and Polymorph thermoplastic. I used very thin polyurethane foam wrapped around the armature to build up the shape of the body. The very thinnest foam is square bits you buy in large bulk packages from a drugstore. They're washcloths used in health care.
The head was attached to the neck part of the armature with thermoplastic. The foam padding was glued down to the armature padding with contact cement. More padding was added to smooth out the transition between latex skin and foam.
The same night I finished him, I found the little blighter running around one of my bookshelves. Changelings, whatever their origin, are never up to any good!
In my film, you first see the changeling riding on a white owl. As I was a bit pressed for time finishing this film as a bonus for my Patreon supporters I didn't make an owl puppet, which would've taken a bit of time (longer than making the changeling). Instead, I found a couple of stock footage clips of a CG animated owl and stuck the changeling puppet on its back in After Effects. The background stormy clouds are two other stock clips I've used a number of times in my films.
The weasel and fox footage are also two stock video clips found on Videohive.com. Again, it's a bit of cheating, but all in the tradition of how movies have been put together through the ages.
The backgrounds are, unless something's moving in them, still images downloaded from depsoitphotos.com. Smoke, fireflies, and similar ethereal substances are also stock clips, usually placed on black backgrounds, leaving it up to me to choose the right kind of transparency for the layers in which they are placed.
I thought Leah Brody Drake's poignant poem was a good subject for a bit of animation. We all feel like outsiders at some point in our lives, and the changeling is one of those ultimate outsiders that human imagination has provided us with through storytelling, like characters such as Gollum or the Frankenstein monster. The poem also has a bit of nature romance to it, which I always enjoy indulging in.
