Carcosa Project: The Finished Film

After working on this project for over a year, here's the finished film. I hope you'll enjoy it.

Now here's the story behind it. In 2015 I bought Chaosium's collection of Hastur-related tales, and found among them Lin Carter's poem "The King In Tatters." I thought it was very atmospheric, and offered many interesting visuals, if one were to adapt it as a film. I contacted Robert M Price, who is the manager of the Lin Carter estate, and he generously gave me the permission to make a filmed version for YouTube.

Originally "The King In Yellow" is a book by Robert W Chambers, first published in 1895. For a book of that age it's very modern, and collects a number of more or less weird stories. Some of them circle around a fictional play, "The King In Yellow", a work said to drive people insane with its second act. The text alludes to a place called Carcosa, and a mysterious king with a pallid mask.

Other writers after Chambers have expanded the rather impenetrable hints given by the original author, and the world of Carcosa and its inhabitants have been gradually fleshed out. It has been given a mythos of its own, though it is sometimes included into the Lovecraftian Cthulhu mythos, basically created by Lovecraft's protegé August Derleth, and not always for the best. In the same way Chambers´ mysterious dreamlike references to Carcosa and the King In Yellow has been given a tad too much clarity sometimes. Not surprisingly, this mythos has been incorporated into RGPs, just like Lovecraft's world.

The King In Yellow also pops up in various other pop culture phenomena, most recently in the first season of "True Detective." There have also been comic book adaptations, and various amateur film efforts.

My version of the world of Carcosa began taking shape last September, when I filmed Samuel Lange, the friend of a friend (but now also my friend) as the narrator of the poem; a man who seeks forbidden knowledge through arcane practises. As the weather was fair we shot all of his scenes outdoors, with my greenscreen slung over a light erector set.
Samuel costume was pieced together from a number of things. The boots are riding boots bought at a garage sale. His pants were salvaged from a closed-down stage wardrobe. The red robe is a gospel choir robe bought from the Swedish equivalent of eBay; Tradera. And the sword is a Greek "kopis" or "falcata" made from aluminum and brass by my blacksmith buddy Martin Merkel.

The only thing created especially for this project is the pendant, sculpted in clay and cast in 325 SmoothCast plastic from a silicone mold. It sports the classic Hastur sign, made popular by Chaosium's RPGs and then other illustrators. It was silly going for the most well-known version of "The Yellow Sign." I should've made my own version, which I eventually did for the Hastur puppet. Let's just say that its inclusion in the film is because Samuel's occult cultist is a fan boy, and that he, like me, didn't know any better.

What I had no idea about when asking Samuel to join my project, was that he actually had two big occult tattoos on his body; a pentagram on his chest, and an image of black magic bad boy Aleister Crowley on his back! I guess fate was in play, or as the poem says: "Fate, or my stars, or some accursed pride had brought me here."

The only complicated shot in the film (which wasn't really complicated) is when the character mounts his interstellar ride, the Byakhee. Samuel just straddled a bar stool covered with green screen fabric, and I was later able to place him on the back of the Byakhee puppet. Some masking in After Effects placed him behind the neck of the monster, though he was really superimposed on top of it.

When the Byakhee is in flight and seen from afar I just printed out a small still image of Samuel, cut it out and taped it down onto the back of the puppet. The simplest solutions are always the best.

The only exception to this is this shot, where the Byakhee has a paper cut out of Samuel's legs on its back, while the torso of the live-action Samuel is keyed in on top of the cut out legs. I did this in order to have some subtle movement in his robe and from his head during the shot. It's there, though hardly noticeable. I'd like to think it still helps sell the illusion. I hand tracked Samuel's torso in After Effects, also using the masking tool to place him behind the neck of the puppet.

As usual, I'm shamelessly using tons of stock footage from Videoblocks and Pond5. They have a wealth of atmospheric nature footage, which can be dropped into my film with hardly any additions, except for a few filters. I'm subscribing to Videoblocks yearly, and it's so much quicker and easier for me to log in, find what I need and continue editing, than going out with my own camera, trying to film the backgrounds that I want.

I do, however, piece together my own "matte paintings" in Photoshop. The example above shows the palace of the King emerging from the Lake of Hali (another name-drop from the Carcosa mythos). There is about eight layers to this shot. All the cliff faces are photos I took of rocks by the sea in the south of Sweden, the castle is a mix of stock photos of various ruins, and the tree is another stock photo. The sky is a mix of a Nasa space photo and stock footage time-lapse clouds. The lake itself is footage from a sewage plant, with stock smoke shots added around the base of the castle cliff, with fires shot against black from Detonationfilms coming out of the castle towers. All of it is, of course, brought together in After Effects.

And as usual, the narration for the film is provided by my trusty voice-over guy John Hutch, recorded while on vacation in Spain, no less.
After I had shot the footage with Samuel, which only took a couple of hours, and had to let go of the project for quite a while. I was at the time working on a media project for disabled people, which started to eat up almost all of my time, even on supposedly off work hours. As this project wound down in April I found myself hurled out into the world of unemployment again, and vast vistas of free time opened up before me. Still, putting together all the bits of the film, building the puppets and animating them, dealing with wonky technology and other issues, made this production a very lengthy one. again, I've learned a lot from it, and I'll take it with me to the next film.

Carcosa Project: The Faceless Guide

"Down the dark street of monoliths I passed
The shambling, faceless figure of my guide
A voiceless thing that beckoned at my side
And to the dreaded gate I came at last."

So says the Lin Carter poem "The King In Tatters", which I'm working on adapting. The poem is set in the fantasy world of Carcosa; a place that I, as well as the rest of the world, imagine to be a twisted place, a shadow parallel to our own reality. The guide in the above quoted passage was in my mind a great opportunity to show just how twisted life in Carcosa could be, and yet retain certain common features from our shared consciousness.

This is how my original design for the guide looked. It did change a bit along the way, but the main concept remained. I almost always find that new ideas make themselves known when I actually start building the puppet.

I chose to sculpt the bigger part of the torso, mostly the front, in Chavant clay. Big fleshy sockets were built up around the horns, which we'll get back to shortly.

The horns were removed for the casting of the torso, and a simple containment wall made from soft hobby clay was built up around the sculpture.

This produced a single-piece plaster mold into which a thick latex skin was cast. The latex was tinted with Monster Maker's excellent latex pigments.

So what about the horns, then? Well, they're probably the only big innovation on this puppet. A while ago I sculpted a Chavant version of how I imagined a proper Raptor claw should look. It was made for a project that hasn't materialized yet, though the claws have been cast and used for other stuff, including LARP events. I made a DragonSkin FX Pro silicone mold around the sculpture into which various plastic materials could be cast. For the guide puppet I used a material called Feather Lite from SmoothOn. It's a plastic that's supposed to weigh so little it floats on water. I made two Feather Lite castings of the Raptor claw, and cut one of them down to be slightly shorter. Two simple screws act as attaching points, something that Friendly Plastic, the material used to join together the puppet, can grab hold of.

Feather Lite sets up a cream color, which was perfect for the horns. I used acrylic airbrush paints to give the horns depth and weathering. I simply used a hobby paint brush and painted on the colors in washes. Fixativ fixing spray sealed the paint job.

I could get away with a really simple armature for this puppet. Nothing for the face, and not really any joints necessary for the torso. Only the legs needed to be strong, and the arms suitable articulated for some simple gestures and arm swinging.

The torso was filled up with soft polyurethane foam, and the back was shaped out of a slightly denser foam piece to give it stability. The fingers are covered with soft croquet string dipped in tinted latex.

I made sure the arms had a proper network of foam muscles, as they would be in plain focus in the animations. By this point, however, I had made different plans for the legs, and bulked them up by just wrapping thin strips of foam around them. I probably doesn't show very well in this photo, but I've shaped blobs of Friendly Plastic thermoplastic into cloven hooves over the feet.

Thin textured patches of latex skin cast in older texture plaster molds now cover the arms as well as the back, and the fingers have been given latex talons cast in plaster molds I use to produce horns, claws and similar shapes. A layer of PAX paint has been stippled on using polyurethane foam sponges.

Acrylic airbrush paints are applied quite liberally on this puppet to give a dimensional fleshy look. I gave the torso special attention, since it would be the most prominently featured part of the character. Acrylic airbrush paints usually bond very well with the acrylic-based PAX paint, but I also give the paint job a dash of an airbrush sealer used for art applied to leather and other flexible surfaces.

During the work on the puppet I decided to make it a kind of twisted satyr or minotaur, and have the legs be covered with fur up to the waist. I used contact cement to glue bits of fake fur around the legs, which only took a moment, but I then spent considerable time cutting small tufts of hair from the fur fabric and using Pros aide prosthetics glue to lay down a few hairs at a time to create a more natural-looking progression of hair from the waist up the torso a few centimeters.

Some shaggy hairs on the arms were applied in a much quicker fashion using black and brown crepé hair blended together and glued down with Pros aide.

I also added two naked and gnarly knees by cutting away patches of the fake fur, and gluing down two small pieces of cast latex skin.

By this point I had also decided that the creature should be adorned in some way, though not have any clothes or armor. In my box of good-to-eventually-have stuff I found a motley collection of cheap jewellery, and thought that I could probably string some of it together to have a small metallic-looking set of bodily adornments.

Among other things I wanted to have a nasty-looking piece of piercing dangling from one of the monster's man boobs. This, of course, meant that I had to make something that could be animated. A bit of thin chain with a weight attached to it seemed hardcore enough to my lily-livered sentiments. I came up with the idea to use a pipe cleaner stripped of its fur covering, and slightly twisted so it opened up just a little bit without falling apart. Now it looked enough like a chain for me to get away with the concept.

A small hole was drilled into the boob using my Dremel tool, and the cavity inside the latex casting was filled up with a mix of cotton and flexible super glue. One end of the naked pipe cleaner was then inserted into this goop and held in place until the super glue had set up (a matter of minutes). A small nickel ball was attached to the end of the "chain", and a mix of cotton and PAX paint sealed up the entry hole to simulate some suitable droopy and wrinkly skin. Now I had a length of chain links that could easily be animated swinging back and forth as the puppet was walking.
I also attached an ear piece with pendants to the puppet's crotch, but noticed that the dangling pendants mostly rested against the legs, so I wouldn't have to make those animate-able too.

I'm generally happy with how the Carcosa guide creature turned out. It looks very top heavy, but thanks to the Feather Lite plastic it isn't. It stands a little over a foot tall. I hope I can make a nice impression with this character and its short appearance in the film. Overall, my aim is to give this film a visually arresting and interesting feel.

Carcosa Project: Weekend Built Mini Monsters

By now more people than ever seem to have heard about "Carcosa" or "The King In Yellow" due to the "True Detective" TV show. These names have their origin in a literary mythology that is similar to H P Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, though it is far from that extensive. In essence it was all created by author Robert Chambers in his 1895 book "The King In Yellow", which is almost unrivalled in its weirdness. I'll come back to the Carcosa mythos in later blog posts as this project evolves, but like in the case of Lovecraft's tales, other authors have continued building upon them. One of them was Lin Carter (1930-1988) who wrote an elaborate poem about the strange world of Carcosa, and what happens when an Earth sorcerer attempts to enter it. I recieved permission last year from the Carter estate to adapt this poem into a film, and that's where these two puppets will appear as background characters.

These two characters will be almost nothing more than ambience in the film, they'll help establish the world of Carcosa as a place of truly strange life forms, though the creatures will hopefully also connect with the viewer to remind them of various styles of art and design from bygone eras. My idea was to build a couple of puppets just over the weekend, and have fun with the design and creation of them. Let's start with the critter I call "the goblin worm". I used Monster Clay to sculpt a head, which I suppose represents the traditional goblin or witch-like features.

I placed the finished face on a bed of more Monster Clay, and also added additional clay to secure the sculpture to this base, and remove the most glaring undercuts in the back of the sculpture. Dental plaster was then poured over the clay, and a latex copy of the sculpture was produced from the plaster mold.

Here's the cast latex face attaeched to an aluminum wire skeleton wrapped in soft polyurethane foam. The back of the head is built up with cotton dipped in tinted latex.

Patches of variously textured wrinkly and warty skin is quickly created by re-using old plaster molds. I use a small bit of polyurethane foam as a sponge to lay on the latex.

And after just a few hours I have this strange fellow added to the puppet cast. The spiky things on his head and the fangs are both created by dipping cotton in latex and simply rolling it between my fingers. The puppet will be animated wiggling across a stone floor. It had some problems with staying upright while animated, so I attached a piece of greenscreen-painted card to the belly of the puppet, and now it's working just fine.

The second stop-motion critter produced this weekend is the one I call "the foreskin monster". The original idea was to make a head on legs, probably inspired by similar creatures in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516). It did end up a head on legs, but with a wrinkly body and a general appearence that a friend of mine likened to the male genetalia. Again, it's a Monster Clay sculpture with an undetailed area underneath, where the legs will be.

To make this casting work I had to create a two-part plaster mold, which is usually a quick job when working with sculptures as small as this one. A softer hobby clay (the reddish one) was used as a deviding wall between the two halves of the body. The other clay-encircled mold in the above images is the head mold for the goblin worm.

The head and body has been cast in latex reinforced with cotton, and with the help of a shoe drying machine the materals have set up within the hour and can be removed from the mold.

The legs are each made out of four strands of aluminum wire with a wing nut attached to each foot. Tough cotton string is holding together the wires.

 To add muscular shape and bulk to the legs I use thin polyurethane foam.

The legs are attached to the inside of the body using Friendly Plastic thermoplastic. This material is very light and adds very little to the weight of the puppet. In the above photo I've built up shoes of a kind with cotton and tinted latex, and the overall puppet has been given a base coat of PAX paint (Prosaide glue mixed with acrylic paints).

The final puppet has, just like the goblin worm, been detailed with acrylic airbrush paints.

None of these two puppets can emote with their faces, and to have them basically be walking and slithering sculptures make these puppets fast and cheap to make. And that's really all they should be if they're background characters.