It seems I just can't stay out of the abyss! A couple of months ago I made a video about "Abyssal Horrors", and in this film, I'm back in the deep again. Let's begin by talking about the inspiration for this project. I've always had a keen interest in cryptozoology, as I'm sure I've mentioned before. There's a story allegedly originating from a magazine article, but mostly known from being quoted in Eric Frank Russel's book "Great World Mysteries" (1967.) It tells of Australian diver Christopher Loeb, who in 1953 was testing out a new deep sea diving suit. The tale then unfolds exactly as in my little film. Creepy stuff, but Loeb isn't the only one claiming to have met a gigantic carpet-like sea monster.
Researcher Richard Winer and diver Pat Boatwright claim to have seen a similar huge creature crawling along the ocean floor in 1969 (sketch by Winer above.) They observed the animal from a diving bell in the ocean off Bermuda, and the incident was another brief, but memorable one. I don't doubt for a second that there are still huge unidentified creatures in the depths. As our technology advances, so do our means of exploration, and we will eventually find them if they are out there.
A lot of people commenting on my video on YouTube have mentioned Joseph Payne Brennan's short story "Slime," which features a similar monster that crawls up onto land and is eventually dispatched in true B-movie fashion by the military using flame throwers. This story was published in Weird Tales in 1953, coincidentally the same year as the Loeb observation. I read "Slime" in "Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum", a superb collection of monster tales, though I doubt Hitchcock had anything to do with it except licensing his name and image to the project. There was even an earlier story with a formless carpet creature; "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud, published in the very first issue of Weird Tales in 1923. To those stories, we can also add several shapeless movie monsters, from "The Blob" (1958) to "Caltiki -The Immortal Monster" (1959.) The best iteration of what I'm talking about is probably the oil slick monster from Stephen King's short story "The Raft" (1982), later included in the anthology movie "Creepshow 2" (1987.)
Loeb recalls about his 1953 incident that the carpet creature was huge, about an acre in diameter. I realized I didn't have to show all of it, so I decided my puppet only needed to be half the monster. I figured I'd make it an undulating flat mass, so it was the edge of the puppet that would be animated. Thus an unusual armature was made for it, using a length of 3 mm aluminum wire to create the basic shape of the puppet. At the base of it, I attached a wooden dowel using thermoplastic and secured two threaded nuts with super glue and baking soda to function as tie-downs for my animation stage. As I usually do, I wrapped the aluminum wire in soft yarn and dabbed it with latex, to give the padding materials a rougher surface to grab onto.
The first material applied to the armature was a sheet of very thin polyurethane foam soaked with latex and allowed to dry on a plastic tray. I then pressed the armature down onto the foam and applied a new layer of latex over both foam and armature to seal them together. The excess foam was later cut away.
I wanted the belly, the main part visible on the monster, to have some kind of texture. I decided on a surface of even-sized knobbly scales. To create this texture, I carefully melted the surface on a bit of styrofoam with my heat gun, rasing the many small cells of the material, and then slapped on a blob of hobby plaster over that.
I could then cast patches of latex skin from this plaster texture mold.
The whole surface of the latex-covered foam was covered with such patches, all of them blending together with additional drops of latex here and there.
The back side, actually the top side, of the creature was to be uniformly smooth. Sometimes when I create plaster matrixes for creating skin between armature parts, as in a wing for example, I get a very smooth back side of the plaster. I've saved a few of those plaster slabs and use the back sides for casting smooth latex pieces. I could, of course, apply latex to any smooth surface, but I've found that the plaster makes the latex dry faster and that it's also easier to maintain the thin edges of the latex patches on the plaster. Casting the latex on a slicker surface always makes the edges curl up in a fashion that makes the pieces harder to apply when adding them to a puppet. I simply use a bit of polyurethane foam to sponge on the latex, which in this case was tinted a dark, reddish brown.
To flesh out the puppet a bit more, a four mm bit of foam was attached to the back of the puppet. The foam was then dabbed with latex, so I could attach the latex skin patches.
The latex patches were attached one at a time, overlapping each other slightly. I used liquid latex as a bonding agent.
A final coat of tinted latex was applied to further smooth out the surface.
I wanted the monster to have a fringe around the edge of its body, something mentioned the purported witness encounters. I simply dipped my thumb and index finger I tinted latex and rolled a length of macrame yarn between them.
The yarn was cut up into tiny pieces and stuck to the puppet by grabbing each piece with tweezers, dipping one end into liquid latex, and pressing it down against the edge of the puppet.
The final puppet stands a little over a foot tall and was animated by bending sections of the edge in a uniform manner, creating a series of bulges that were moved along the edge.
I decided early on that the diver in the story would be a puppet, too. Although I had many years ago actually built a full-size diving helmet out of an old earth globe, I didn't want to go through the hassle of finding the rest of the stuff to create the costume and then booking a shoot against a green screen with a friend. For me, it was easier and faster to build a puppet. To make a helmet for my miniature diver I used a crystal ball pressed down a few millimeters into a slab of clay, and I then built a silicone mold around it.
I lined the inside of the mold with metal powder and roto-cast Burry plastic into it, creating a hollow semi-ball.
Other details were made in clay or repurposed from old washers and paint jar lids. another silicone mold was made for these. I could then cast as many copies of these details as I needed. The strange item at the bottom right is a led plate used by deep sea divers to make them sink better.
The porthole windows in the helmet were cast in Onyx resin from the silicone mold and small roundels of transparent plastic were glued onto them to simulate glass. Clear varnish was used as glue.
The collar supporting the helmet was built up using EVA foam, super-glued together. Additional details were achieved using scrapbooking pearls, other small plastic scrap parts, and aluminum wire bits.
The whole helmet was spray-painted with matte black base color. The plastic "windows" were covered by sticky tape to isolate them from the spray paint. Unfortunately, by now the clear varnish used to glue the plastic roundels onto the porthole sections had dried into a white sliver in the front, making it look like a crack in the helmet glass. When the puppet was animated it wasn't so bad and actually looked more like a part of the diver's face.
The armature for the diver was simple enough, using 4 mm aluminum wires held together with thermoplastic. The armature was then padded with 4 mm polyurethane foam.
The diving suit or overalls, or whatever it's called, was made by painting latex onto the matte backside of a cutting mat -I didn't have a flat plaster mold big enough. As you can see, the basic pattern was really simple; just one painted on twice, one for the front and one for the back.
The finished diver was painted with liquid latex and Metallique Brushed Iron metallic wax. The belt is EVA foam, as is the lamp carried by the diver, and his shoes.
The air hose is a discarded air hose from an old airbrush. The sections of rope and the lamp cable are the macrame yarn painted with tinted latex.
I had planned to build a shark puppet and animate it, but I happened to find a stock CG shark among the stock film services I subscribe to. I thought I might as well go with that one, which I did. Eventually, I'm sure I'll make a shark puppet for one of my projects, or for someone else's.
When the carpet monster grabs the shark I used the masking tool in After Effects to make the edge of the carpet fold over the shark. A copied layer of the shark created the shadow cast by the diver's lamp.
Well, that's about it. I provided the narration, which is almost verbatim from Loeb's written account. This short tale, true or not, makes an almost perfect horror short story with inevitable Lovecraftian vibes. I might tackle something similar in the future.
One of my all-time favorite authors is Clark Ashton Smith, a buddy and a contemporary of H P Lovecraft. They both contributed to the same magazines and developed the genres we now call sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. In their days it was all more or less simply "weird fiction." Smith invented his own bestiary of strange and terrifying beings, one of them being Ubbo-Sathla, basically a primeval soup of DNA with some kind of sentience. Well, I won't go into too many details. Hopefully, you've by now watched the video clip posted above, and you know everything you need to know on the subject.
I have many CAS (as Smith is often abbreviated) projects in the pipeline. Some of his writings are by now in the public domain, but I took the precaution some years ago to contact his stepson, head of the CAS estate, explaining my intentions and requesting permission to adapt his stepdad's work for my YouTube channel. He didn't have any problems with that, so off I went! "In the Ooze of Ubbo-Sathla" is the first of these projects I've managed to finish.
The main character is the wizard Zon Mezzamalech. For this role, I called upon my old buddy John Hankins who is looking more and more like a wizard for every passing year. You might recognize him as the doomed hero (sans beard) in the film "Feather of Owlbear." John has a green screen and a plethora of home-made fantasy outfits, so he could provide me with footage of Zon staring into the crystal orb of the story. He drew some shapes with blue paint on his face, which allowed me to remove the blue and add a digital effect of swirling lights onto his head, showing the being a wizard and staring into unwholesome objects might change you gradually.
Let's get to the backgrounds right away. They were all made in Photoshop using stock images downloaded from Depositphotos. This shot with John as Zon was made up of 12 elements pieced together in After Effects: The background, real candle flames, John, the flickering lights in his face (a stock CGI animation), the stone table, the orb, and the light shapes in the orb. John is in the USA and I'm in Sweden, but I could mail him instructions and he would mail me the filmed results.
This shot is another bit of trickery; it's a still image of John combined with a stock image och a guy in a wizard's robe. It's so short that using stills worked OK in this case.
The sonorous narration was performed by another American buddy, Fabian Rush. I helped out Fabian with a bit of stop-motion animation for his film "Forsaken: Rock Opera of Chaos", and he happily contributed his voice talents to my project. Fabian is in his own right a very interesting creator, a hard-rockin' musician and filmmaker, and, like me, a big fan of the work of H P Lovecraft and Ray Harryhausen. We plan to have more collaborations in the near future.
The city of Mu-Thulan, where Zon Mezzamalech has his tower of sorcery, was also created with layers of stock photos of various buildings. The people moving about in the shot were leftover takes from a production of "Aladdin" that I made with a group of special needs people some years ago. These takes were all shot in front of a green screen. Applying the 3D effect to each layer allowed me to do a fake pan through the city up to the tower.
There are other people in the film, but they're all either stock photos manipulated with the puppet tool in AE, or stock video. I experimented with transitions quite a bit in this project. I wanted to add organic transitions between the shots and achieved this look by applying shots of black ink dissolving in water and using the black and white contrast of those shots to create a matte effect in AE. That was a bit of a learning curve, but it garnered a very useful result in the end. I try to do something new with AE in every new project.
Now let's go on to the creatures. The text describes Zon Mezzamalech's descent into primeval brutehood in detail. One of the first stops in this downward spiral is a "man-beast." I wanted to make this puppet as something inspired by the often weird-looking ape suits of studio-era Hollywood. I took specific inspiration from the suits worn by ape performer Ray "Crash" Corrigan, which were bulky, very hairy, and with a peculiar-looking face.
The only part of this puppet I sculpted was the face, using medium-grade Monster Clay. Two metallic red pearls served as eyes.
The armature was simplicity itself. I didn't add any articulation to the face except for the jaw, which was in keeping with the rather unexpressive 1940's ape suits. The red pearls are stuck to the backside of the latex face using latex eye sockets. They can be animated by inserting a pin into the hole in each pearl and swiveling the eyeball around. As usual, I'm using aluminum wires and thermoplastic for my armatures.
The padding was also very simple, just a few layers of thin and soft polyurethane foam wrapped around the armature.
Real bulk was achieved with fluffy fake fur, a nightmare for any animator by the way, as you keep moving it around every time you touch the puppet. The teeth were made from toilet paper and latex and the exposed parts of the skin were dry brushed with tinted latex. I also did two hardly noticeable breasts with cotton and latex peering out from the fur, again in imitation of the Corrigan suits.
This puppet is quite big, around 16 inches tall. I placed the puppet for scale next to my main coon cat Ludwig, who's huge. Ludwig, by the way, had a fling with the cat variant of the Coronavirus in November. He's just recovered from his ordeal and his usually bright yellow eyes are still stained a bloodshot red in this photo.
The pterodactyl, a Pteranodon to be specific, was built for an as-of-yet unrealized project, a King Kong fan film that I helped out with during the planning stage. You can read all about the making of this puppet HERE.
The Ichthyosaurus was simply a 2D animated stock illustration. The animation was achieved by splitting up parts of the image in separate image files -the beak and the fins- so they could be animated separately and integrated with the body. The fleeing squid was a stock CGI animation.
Eventually, Zon Mezzamalech devolves into a "forgotten behemoth". I based this puppet on the Permian reptile Ophiacodon. Like with our man-beast, only the head was sculpted in clay. The upper part and the jaw were cast separately for easy mold-making.
Again, a very simple armature. The puppet wasn't required to do much more than walk around and bellow at the moon.
I did spend a bit of time doing a decent muscle build-up in foam. The sinewy parts on the legs were achieved using very thin foam soaked in latex and rolled into the desired shapes.
I used a subtle but bumpy skin texture for this creature. All the textures were pulled from the same texture mold. Additional bumps and warts were drops of latex applied with a pointy tool. The crest on the back was made from tissue paper dabbed with latex.
Teeth and claws were tissue paper and latex. The eyes were painted on and covered with Glossy Accents scrapbooking plastic.
On to the serpent people, which turned out t be the most popular part of my film. In fact, quite a few people have suggested I should make a film just about them. I split up the head pieces in two parts again, which always makes the mold-making bit much easier.
Again another simple armature. The jaw is provided with a single aluminum wire. I debated wether or not I should give the puppet a tail, but adding one made it much more snake-like, of course. I wrapped the neck and tail in thick, soft yarn soaked in latex instead of padding these parts with foam. This makes these parts wrinkle less like a rubber toy and more like the bodies of real snakes.
The job of the padding in this case was to make the body very sleek. I only added some muscle details on the arms and legs.
For the latex skin I used a texture mold I made years ago for some kind of dinosaur or dragon. It's a basic scaly pattern, which doesn't exactly imitate the overlapping scale pattern on snakes. I think it gets the look right when you look at the puppet from a distance. The belly was covered with a texture that was actually sculpted a while back to look like the belly skin of a snake.
The serpent man was painted with PAX paint (Prosaide glue and acrylic colors) using a sponge, with airbrushed details. To create the very small teeth I just added tiny drops of tinted latex onto the jaw with a pointy tool. The eyes were painted onto the latex with Warhammer model paints. The forked spear the puppet is holding here was made for one of my older films, "The King Who Sought Immortality."
For the serpent war shot I dressed up the puppet in leathery armor created from latex castings in molds made for various puppets. Since I only made one puppet (lazy!) I had to animate this single puppet a few times to portray a number of characters. The most complex animation had two serpent men sword fighting. I first dressed up the puppet in one type of armor and had it perform the choreographed movements with his sword. I then re-dressed the puppet in the other armor and animated the corresponding choreography. The timing of the puppets was achieved thanks to a function in the animation software Dragoframe, which allows the animator to upload a videofile that can be played one frame at a time as a transparent guide to the motion animated by the filmmaker and his puppet. Thus I could upload the previous bit of animation and time the impact of the swords striking together without any problems. These sword also came from "The King Who Sought Immortality" and were made from wooden spatulas ground down with a Dremel tool and decorated with Milliput epoxy.
The short serpent war shot was another rather complex composition in AE, with 20-ish layers stacked on top of each other.
Ubbo-Sathla itself was a digital animation created in AE, as was actually most of the environment around it.
I first made a textured layer using the displacement map tool in AE with other effects such as "Glass" and "Tint" added on top of that. What I got was a nasty-looking bubbling, fleshy stew. I rendered out 15 seconds of this.
That shot was then transformed by cutting out a mass of the texture with the rotoscope tool and then using the distortion grid tool to create an undulating animation. I rendered out a bunch of various animations against a transparent background, which allowed me to drop Ubbo-Sathla into any scene I wanted.
The spawn of Ubbo-Sathla were created pretty much the same way, except that I used still images of human veins added on top of a organic texture I made in Photoshop. The spawn shapes were again animated with the distortion grid tool.
And an even simpler version of this technique was used to create the sea of slime in which Ubbo-Sathla reposes. He's joined in the muck by the tablets of star-quarried stone carrying the forgotten wisdom Zon Mezzamalech covets.
These tablets were another simple Photoshop creation, using a font simulating a made-up alphabet to create the writing. I made this writing transparent and placed a digital animation of shiny shapes behind each tablet to make the writing seem truly alien.
CAS´ strange epic "Ubbo-Sathla" is an example of another concept I keep getting back to, the notion of "deep time" -that awe can be supplied by contemplating the sheer vastness of the number of years our planet has existed, how pathetic we and our civilization can appear in comparison to the life cycle of our world. Lovecraft was a master at this type of fiction, but another famous example is Olaf Stapledon's "The Last and the First Men."
I'll certainly return to the mid-boggling fantasy worlds of CAS -I already have a couple of new projects in the works- but I'll also tackle other authors of the so-called Lovecraft group. There's a lot of wonderful weirdness to be mined there, and much of it is in the public domain.
