Woodland Lurkers

The idea for Woodland Lurkers came about when I thought about doing a film about strange forest creatures that we've never heard of, that hide in the deepest areas of the woods. Originally, I would only have made one critter, but I came up with a bunch of them, so the menagerie grew. I even added yet another one when I had finished editing the film. Let's go through our fauna.

The first creature you see, or glimpse, is a Bigfoot-like figure that towers over the forest.

I reused an older puppet, the hulking creature from "The Path Through the Marsh," and if you're interested in how that puppet was built, check out my blog post HERE! 

I call this little fellow "spud guy", since, well, he looks like a potato. He was built up without me using any parts sculpted in clay and cast in plaster molds.

This is the very basic armature for the character. 2 mm aluminum wires were used for the arms and legs, with Polymorph thermoplastic (the white blobs) used to hold them all together. The upper lip is made from a steel wire wrapped in yarn and is rigid. The jaw is a 3 mm aluminum wire wrapped in soft yarn, and is flexible for animation. 

The midsection is totally rigid and made from a wooden tongue depressor reinforced with a large 

stainless steel nail and thermoplastic. 3 mm threaded bolts are attached to the feet using super glue and baking soda.

EVA foam was used for most of the padding, making the body solid but lightweight. Below the jaw and around the neck, I added a bit of soft polyurethane foam (not yet attached in this photo) to make the opening of the jaw easy. Hot melt glue was used to attach the bits of EVA foam.

Soft yarn was wrapped around the arms and legs, which were then dabbed with latex.

The torso was also wrapped in soft yarn to smooth out the slightly blocky shapes of the EVA foam.

The body and head were built up using cotton dipped in tinted latex. I used a pointy sculpting tool (a dental tool, actually) to create the wrinkles and other shapes by simply pressing down with the tool in the cotton and moving around the material.

The throat was covered with a patch of wrinkly latex skin cast in a texture mold.

The fingers were made by wrapping yarn around a toothpick, dabbing the yarn with tinted latex, and then slipping the yarn off the toothpick when the latex had cured. The fingers were attached to the cotton/latex hands using liquid latex as a glue.

The eyes were made from two small plastic pearls, with irises cast with UV resin.

The puppet was painted by dabbing tinted latex over it with a sponge. Various colors were applied with this method in thin layers to create a mottled look. 

Acrylic airbrush colors were used to add highlights here and there.

Teeth and nails were just blobs of latex tinted white applied to the puppet using a toothpick.

The tuft of hair on the head is from an old fur winter hat, from which I have cut bits over the years for a few of my puppets.

The living tree stump is a staple critter among Swedish illustrators of children's stories. Trees and stumps with eyes and faces add color to many books throughout the 20th century. Swedish illustrator Gustaf Tenggren worked on Disney's Snow White and created a bunch of truly monstrous trees for the flight through the woods. I grew up with the staring storybook trees and have been thinking about how to add the concept to one of my films. 

The main part of the body, the actual trunk, was made from a piece of thick, rolled-up EVA foam. I cut two holes for the irregularly placed eyes, which were made from two plastic pearls, and also inserted two 1 mm aluminum wires to work as eyelids.

Two blobs of silicone clay pressed down around the backsides of the eyes hold the plastic pearls in place, allowing them to swivel when poked on the outside of the trunk. Thermoplastic was applied over the silicone to lock it down. More plastic was used to line the insides of the trunk, making it very sturdy.

The trunk creature has three limbs for walking, made from folded 1,5 mm aluminum wires. I used this smaller gauge to make the feet as small as possible. Using 3 mm threaded nuts as tie-downs, the wires were attached with a mix of superglue and baking soda. Thick, soft yarn was wrapped around the wires to build up the rough shape of the legs, and then dabbed with latex.

The legs were attached to the trunk with thermoplastic.

Hot melt glue was used to piece together the EVA foam bits.

To create the bark-like texture on the trunk, I dipped cotton in latex and draped it over the foam trunk. With various tools, I could then shape the dough-like substance into the look I wanted.

The splintered bark on the top of the trunk, as well as the smaller roots at the bottom, were made from tissue paper dipped in latex and rolled into pointy shapes.

The finished puppet was drybrushed a few times using tinted latex and a foam sponge. Concave dips were reamed into the plastic eyes, and then painted to create the look of colored irises. Drops of UV resin filled out the dips to create a lens effect.

The eyelids were created by attaching patches of latex cast in a skin texture mold to the edge of the aluminum wires making up the lids and the trunk, using liquid latex as glue.

Texture mold latex patches were also attached to the legs, instead of using cotton and latex, as that would’ve made the legs too stiff for animation.

This creature makes a very brief appearance, but I tried to make it memorable. I wanted something that was both creepy and a bit goofy, and hopefully I achieved that.

The head and jaw were made completely from Cosclay, which is a polymer clay cured in my kitchen oven. In contrast to other polymer clays, Cosclay cures semi-flexible and feels more like a piece of plastic.

The jaw was attached to the rest of the head by a single 2 mm aluminum wire running from the back of the head to the underside of the jaw. A mix of superglue and baking soda was used to fix the wire in place. The neck and torso have 4 mm aluminum wires running through them, and the legs have three 3 mm wires. Polymorph thermoplastic holds the armature together. Thick and soft yarn pads out the neck and thinner crochet yarn pads out the arms. I used soft polyurethane foam for the legs.

More soft foam was used to pad out the whole body, except for the arms, which I wanted to look feeble and scrawny. The dark grey section on the back is a piece of EVA foam, which is tougher, and was OK to use here, since I didn’t plan on bending the midsection of the puppet when animating.

The body of the puppet was covered with patches of tinted latex, which were cast in various skin texture molds. Wrinkly skin covers the join between the head and the jaw. This was also made from latex using the ”chunks-o-flesh” method, where latex is stippled onto a flat surface, allowed to dry, and then rubbed off the surface, creating a bunched-up, organic-looking texture. While the body was painted with tinted latex using a sponge, the Cosclay head was painted using water-based hobby paints.

The eyes are two plaster half-spheres with a mother-of-pearl effect, bought at a local scrapbooking shop. The flimsy hair is crepé hair (sheep’s wool) attached to the head using Pros-Aide prosthetic adhesive. The back spikes are tissue paper dipped in latex and rolled between my fingers into thin, pointy shapes. They were attached to the puppet’s back using liquid latex and glue. Highlights and other additional details were added with acrylic airbrush paint.

This scene was the first one conceived, and would, at one point, have been the entire film.

The largest puppet from my film is what I call the ”big mouth.” You only see him from a distance, but I still wanted to add a fair amount of details. A big chunk of medium-grade Monster Clay was shaped into the character.

Dental plaster was applied over the sculpture to create a durable mold, and three layers of tinted latex were cast into this mold. The latex skin was also reinforced with thin pieces of polyurethane foam soaked in latex, which were pressed into the mold over the latex surface. The head was reinforced with a mix of cotton and latex.

Here’s a better view of the insides of the latex skin. The cream-colored material is foam padding. The white stuff up in the head is thermoplastic, which adds extra sturdiness as well as provides a fixing point for the aluminum wires working the nose and the jaw. Two wooden ice cream sticks provide extra support for the head, helping it keep its shape.

The legs were actually created for the pig demon in my film ”Snail Wizard”, but they turned out a bit weak for that large puppet. I saved the original legs and put them to good use here instead. 3 mm aluminum wires are used to create the armature for the puppet. Thin metal rods are tied down against portions of the wire using yarn to create hard sections simulating a skeleton.

Soft polyurethane foam is wrapped around the armature, creating a pudgy look for the puppet.

Teeth and claws are made with tissue paper dipped in latex.

The finished puppet is painted with tinted latex and detailed with acrylic airbrush paints.The eyes are Photoshop print-outs of goat’s eyes, with drops of UV resin applied to create a lens.

The trunks are aluminum wires with yarn wrapped around them to create both the shapes as well as wrinkly skin. 

Clear varnish was painted onto the mouth and the nostrils to create a wet look.

Here’s the smallest puppet from ”Woodland Lurkers.” 

I forgot to snap photos of the clay sculpture, but the image above is pretty much what I sculpted. This creature is basically just a big head with legs and a tail.

The head was cast in tinted latex from a plaster mold. The eyes are two acrylic half-spheres with Photoshop print-outs attached to the flat backsides using transparent glue.

The mouth has a 1 mm aluminum wire looped around it inside the latex skin.

All the limbs for the puppet were made from 1 mm aluminum wires and wrapped in soft yarn. Liquid latex sealed the yarn.

Thermoplastic holds together the head and the limbs. Right under the second leg pair there's a small dark area. This is an attachment point for a flying rig.

Soft polyurethane foam was attached to fill up the back area.

The finished puppet is around

3 inches long. It’s painted with tinted latex and acrylic airbrush colors.

Here’s how the scene where the big mouth monster eats the tree grabber was made. A flying rig arm (far right) is joined to the attachment point on the side of the grabber puppet facing away from the camera, holding it aloft when the puppet is animated. Beside this is another flying rig arm, made from a 5 mm aluminum wire, working as a substitute for the tree the creature is grabbing. The green sticky tape makes both arms invisible when shot against my green screen puppet stage background.

When the shot is static, I'm using still images of mossy woodlands from Depositphotos. When the camera is moving, I'm using stock footage from Storyblocks or Videohive. I could've gone out in the forests where I live and gotten the kind of shots I wanted, but being quite lazy now in my old age, I went for stock options instead. 

My first idea was to make a fake nature documentary about these creatures. As the project evolved, it began to take on a more found footage-like quality. At least, the whole series of events is observed by someone walking through the woods, as we can hear his / her footsteps and breathing.

I am tempted to make a similar video in a different setting, but my aim is always to try and vary my content  -we shall see what turns up in the future.

Encounter In the Abyss

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.