The King Who Sought Immortality: Crocodogs and Scorpion Men

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.

Editing "The King Who Sought Immortality",

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:

The Filming of "The King Who Sought Immortality", part one.

We shot all of the live-action material for this film in one single day, most of it indoors in front of a blue screen. It was all a strange mix of strict discipline and a cavalcade of dirty jokes. There were three people in front of the camera; Dag, who played the king of the story, Liz, who portrayed the godess Ishtar, and Rolf, who played the one man in existence who had cracked the secret of immortality. I stayed behind the camera with Björn and Niklas, who were our grips. They later turned into exiled princes during our evening shoot in a deserted sand-pit. More about that in a coming blog.

My costume-maker Liz Matsson, this time IN costume as the godess Ishtar. If she looks a bit shiny here it's because she's covered in fine gold powder. When the film is edited she will have the color of her eyes changed to purple (probably) and a hazy glow will envelope her.

Our very simple set-up. My blue screen is a 4 x 4 meter long / wide cloth and hangs over a big screen, used for making temporary walls during stage plays. The blue cloth is lit by a couple of stage lamps and some lights on the cieling.

Rolf Berg; the man who's been in almost all of my film projects. I realized that this film is our 10th film together! Rolf turns 79 on January 1 2009.

Oh, the joys of adolescent humor! Björn, actor and grip, tries to impress the women with his big tentacle.

I had made a paper "flame drum" for an earlier project and I decided to use it again for a scene in this project. Basically, it's a paper tube with flame-shaped holes covered with red and yellow acetates. You turn the drum and shine light through it, thus achieving the effect of moving "fire" showing against your preferred background. However, we ended up not using it on this film and Dag decided to wear it on his head between takes. Don't really know why.

Dag is holding a tentacle of an attacking octopus. He just chopped it off with his copper sword (actually made out of plastic). He's also holding his breath and pretending he's on the ocean floor. We used a graden leaf-blower to simulate wind in clothes during the filming and we also used it for these faux underwater scenes, to make hair and cloth wave around a bit. It made a hell of a racket while we used it, though.

Niklas is holding the leaf-blower that provided a little wind for us this day. You can stop holding your breath now, Dag. We've stopped filming.

Film project 2: The King Who Sought Immortality

This film I had been wanting to make for some time. I concieved the idea around Christmas last year, as a project with simple props, telling a mythological story with a voice-over, storyteller style. Eventually I decided to use the end of the Gilgamesh epic and compose a tale of my own with some kind of morale at the end of it. The finished script had a nameless king seeking the one man who had achieved immortality in order to find out how to be immortal himself. The story was told by a guy in the desert, claiming he was this king. The tale is full of heroic deeds; The king fights demons, challenges dragons and eventually enters the underworld with the aid of the godess Ishtar. I wanted the look of the film to be quite simple and difficult to place historically. It's a tale set in a world of loincloths, copper swords and sandals. I did sneak in some Sumerian references here and there, such as certain symbols in jewelry, backgrounds and even the monsters, that look like demons and dragons on old Sumerian tablets.





























I knew exactly who to ask to play the king -Dag Persson, poet, actor, musician and strong-willed individual. We had collaborated on many projects when we were both members of an art society that went belly-up a few years back (more about that sorry story later). However, Dag is a very busy man, so the date I had planned for shooting, sometime in April, was hastily postponed. I called Dag again in May and we decided to give it a try in July. Problem was I had another film project already booked in July, but as I knew it would be difficult to get Dag's attention again I decided to go, go, go -even if it meant a lot of unplanned, extra work.




So go, go, go we did and taped the entire live-action part of the film in one exhausting day! I'll get back to that day in a post entirely dedicated to the shooting of the film. Against all odds it all turned out well. The entire film (save a few minutes here and there) were shot against a blue screen, meaning that I can put the actors in any environment I choose. More about the blue screen work too in a while.