Building an Oliphaunt

I’m sure most of you know what an oliphaunt is by now. Or Mümakil, as they’re also called. If you haven’t read J R R Tolkien’s poem, then you have seen oliphaunts stomp around in the two last Lord of the Rings movies. They’re big, mean elephants, basically.

I like Tolkien’s poem “Oliphaunt”, or I should say Sam’s poem, as Tolkien credits Sam Gamgee as its actual author. I’ve wanted to make a short-short animated video clip based on it for years. In fact, I started sculpting an oliphaunt puppet three years ago, but got no further than the head. But a while ago I decided to finish the puppet nad animate it, urged on by 10-year old Joel, who has a soft spot for the monstrous elephants. So, a short description of my oliphaunt puppet.

As I mentioned, this sculpture was begun three years ago. I made a plaster mold and sort of forgot about the project.

Recently I cast the skin of the head in tinted latex, sort of creating a mini-muppet.

The armature was really simple, using pieces of very hard cardboard for larger body sections, and thick aluminum wire, untwisted, for the joints. This made the joints less “springy”, and in theory that means easier to animate. As I’ve started animating now I’ve found it to be quite true, but only quite.

 First muscle foam padding of the body…

And then some additional padding to smooth things out.

 The eyes are home-made; plastic beads painted and dipped in Crystal Clear plastic to get a nice shine.
 

The tusks are paper clay and not as brittle as you might then think. They’re painted and airbrushed. They’re also NOT as white as my camera flash makes them out to be.

 

The trunk, ready to be attached to the skull, which, by the way is made out of Friendly Plastic thermoplastic.

Trunk attached and covered with latex skin.

Head attached to body, ready for it’s latex skin covering.

I cast about 40 or more smaller latex skin pieces to allow for better stretch and movement. All skin pieces were dyed black.

 Having the latex dyed black meant that I could get away with a very quick paintjob, namely just some drybrushing, using acrylic paint and ProsAid make-up glue.
 

And here’s the big boy ready for the camera. This puppet is actually pretty big, over a foot tall. It’s not at all heavy, though. I’ve started animating him now, and as with all puppets he’s got shortcomings that you don’t find out about until you start bending and twisting the joints. Still, so far he’s behaved pretty well. My idea was to create a slightly surreal elephant, something that would look a bit funny, but also a bit scary. I based most of my design on Mammuthus imperator, a really huge relative of the Wooly mammoth, and then tried to make the finished look a tad cartoonish.

The Mewlips

As a huge Tolkien fan I also became an instant fan of Colin Rudd's music, since I believe it's the closest to sitting in an Middle-Earth inn and listening to a bard as we'll ever get. So I contacted him in June 2007 and asked for permission to use one of his songs, which illustrated Tolkien's "hobbit" poem "The Mewlips", to make a movie. He heartly agreed and off I was to the workshop and animation room... And I was pretty much off for a long while. All sorts of other jobs and problems to solve popped up one by one, so it's not until last week that this project was finished and posted on YouTube. Happily, Colin was happy with the result and now I'm working on the next project, "Ent Song".

The Mewlips are nasty creatures that hobbit parents scare their children with, so the kids don't wander off with foolish ideas of adventure. I had no idea how the puppets would look as I started sculpting them, but here's how they turned out.

Armatures for the puppets were made in my usual, cheap-but-sturdy way. The joints are braided aluminum wire and the "bones" are melted and shaped Friendly Plastic.

One of the mewlips has been covered in latex skin.

But his butt and back still needs to get dressed. As you can see there's some simple muscle shapes made out of foam rubber. The yellow sort is the softer one.

The boys are finished and ready to get moving.

The castle of the mewlips does not suffer any rodent-infestation, but rather an infestation of mudskippers. This tiny puppet is about 8 cm long and was animated separately on a blue screen set, so I could shrink it down when adding it to scenes with the mewlips. Had I built it in scale with the mewlip puppets it would've been pretty difficult to animate.