Nightcrawlers

 This video is another one concerning the so-called unexplained, believe it or not. Quite a few of my viewers comment and suggest that I tackle more cryptozoological subjects, i e strange creatures people claim to have seen.

In the world of paranormal research and cryptozoology, the case of the Fresno Nightcrawlers stands out because of how bizarre it is. Back in 2007, what looks like a pair of white pants walking about on their own was caught on a nighttime security video recording in Fresno, California. A while later two pants, now dubbed "Nightcrawlers" were filmed at night in Yosemite National Park and another bit of footage came out of Poland. The latest sighting is another home surveillance video from Billings, Montana, in 2020. So, are these sightings just crazy hoaxes? Probably. However, nobody has come forward, admitting to the pranks, and nobody has been able to exactly reproduce the Nightcrawlers. 

As you can see the Fresno Nightcrawlers have inspired people to get creative (I'm not the only one.) Besides various t-shirt prints, there are also a number of crafts pieces sold on Etsy and other places. Fun stuff!

As you might expect a stop-motion Nightcrawler is a very simple puppet. The feet are two threaded 3 mm nuts attached to a folded 2 mm aluminum wire with a mix of super glue and baking soda. The head is a small paper ball. I find that having a bit of unjointed aluminum wire makes it wobbly and difficult to animate. To fix that problem I added three toothpick pits along each length of wire and wrapped soft yarn over it all.

The padding of the body was equally simple. A wrapping of soft polyurethane foam to make out the general shape, and then more smooth foam shapes added over that.

I covered the foam with patches of latex patches cast on the smooth backside of an old plaster mold. As you can see the colors of each patch differed a bit since I used leftovers from small batches of tinted latex from other projects.

The finished puppet was dabbed with latex tinted white, applied with a sponge.

We have one human character in the story, a boy played by Hannes whom I've used a few times before. Our young hero spies the Nightcrawlers striding through his back garden, being zapped by a UFO, and nobody will believe him, of course.

Speaking of the UFO, it's really this CG blob, downloaded as a stock video clip from one of my various stock media subscriptions. I created a mask around it in After Effects to get rid of the black background. All backgrounds of the neighborhood locations are also stock images found at DepositPhotos.com.

To have the Nightcrawlers walk behind plants and objects in these backgrounds I created two layers for each background that would be used in such scenes.

The easiest way (for me) to do this is to open the image in Photoshop and use the masking tool to draw over every bit that I want to go in front of my animated puppets.

The masked area can then be copied and saved as an image of its own. In After Effects, I then sandwich the puppets in between these layers.

So that's my Nightcrawler video, short and sweet. There will be more films based on unexplained phenomena, probably the more fun and bizarre subjects.

Abandoned Places

The concept for this one is very simple and even seems to be a bit trendy at the moment: Making videos about creepy places where unexplained events have taken place or are taking place. I did one earlier called The Haunted Room, and this project is a development of that idea, you could say.

So, I'll go through each scene and make some comments on it. I probably shouldn't, since it's really up to the viewer to make up his or her own mind about what has happened in those abandoned places. Most of the content in this film is cobbled together from still stock images and videos, but there is some animation here and there.

I've downloaded all my stock photos from Depositphotos, and then made a few tweaks to them in Photoshop. This old place is obviously haunted by a girl who seems to be stuck in a single window pane. the girl, like most of the stock videos used here, comes from Videoblocks.

My idea here was that some government experiment went to heck and this energy sphere is still around causing havoc. Again, a blend of stock effects and animations.

An old abandoned classrom with an unplugged TV that turns on anyway. A satanic ritual of some sort is displayed on the screen. the screaming noises I used are supposedly "real" sounds from Hell, picked up by drilling crews. It can't get more authentic than that!

This shot is, of course, alluding to H P Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." The crosses and the well were added in Photoshop and the green energy is a stock CGI effect tweaked in After Effects to look a bit more organic.

The abandoned asylum is a must, and I found a very nice stock CGI zombie girl which I stuck into the dark doorway.

This field is a stock video -you can see the grass moving slightly which I thought was nice. I replaced the original, very blue and calm sky with a CGI cloud vortex. The writing on the silo was there in the original stock footage,

The two bat-like creatures circling the cloud funnel are a single puppet once built and animated for my film "Azathoth." It was pressed back into action here.

A once-nice drawing room invaded by giant slugs. I thought about having dead people sitting on the furniture, but decided against it, as the place would look more abandoned without them.

The giant slugs were simple photos of the brown "Spanish" garden slug. My garden is, unfortunately, full of the pests. I moved them about in After Effects using the Puppet tool.

The scene of some industrial accident, though it might have occult overtones, as you can glimpse gigantic tentacles looming out of the mists behind the buildings. I re-used old animations of a tentacle prop.

A farmhouse afflicted by some sort of pulsating alien fungi. Again, a bit of Lovecraftian overtones. The fungi are actually some sort of ocean anemone creature.

Some sort of stately building where a zombie-like creature sits on a ceiling corner and then scuttles off into a hole. 

The creature is a zombie puppet I've used a few times over the years. It was actually animated upside down since that was easier for me, and then flipped in After Effects.

This shot is actually a complete stock footage clip, so kudos to whoever came up with it.

Of course, you need some creepy toys when doing a video about haunted places. I re-used a couple older puppets that still held up quite well despite being over ten years old by now.

A commentator on YouTube noted that it was obvious that the cymbal monkey would come to life, and he's right -why put it in there and not have it bang its cymbals?

The clown puppet might've been a better surprise, but a clown puppet is a rather obvious addition to a cast of haunted toys, right?

In this shot, I added the jars and bottles with freaky contents. The beating heart is a stock animation placed inside its jar with some After Effects trickery.

I thought the last shot would be a bit humorous, with a hairy arm grabbing a bug scuttling by on the floor.

The arm came from another old puppet, a devil puppet that has popped up here and there in my films. Again, despite being over a decade old, he's held up quite well.

This film was another little experiment in creating mood. I'm quite pleased with it, but it's not something I can do too often or the idea will wear very thin indeed. I might return to it eventually.

The Conqueror Worm

"The Conqueror Worm" was, of course, written by Edgar Allan Poe. It's a poem allowing for all sorts of interpretations, but an overall apocalyptic theme is certainly obvious. I've been planning on adapting Poe for quite a while and I actually made an adaptation of "The Facts In the Case of Mr. Waldemar" in high school, back in the very analog video days of the 1990s. I was Mr. Waldermar and melted at the end of the film, having custard running down my face.

And, as I'm sure you know, Poe movie adaptations have been around almost as long as cinema has existed. "The Conqueror Worm" has also had its adaptation, though it's a cheat of sorts. Michael Reeve's excellent "The Witchfinder General" (1968) was distributed in the US by AIP under the title "The Conqueror Worm" to include it in the AIP cycle of Poe films, mostly starring Vincent Price.

To adapt something as symbolically themed as Poe's poem invited an opportunity to create surreal visuals of a kind I hadn't approached yet. A throng of angels watches the spectacle of humanity on a cosmic stage until the conqueror worm appears and at the end of the show is revealed to be the master of all. I plundered my usual resource, Depositphotos.com, for stock images I could revise in Photoshop. A couple of HD photos of a dilapidated theatre served as the playhouse where the angels gather. I cut holes here and there in the images so I could place CG animations of a swirling cosmos behind that layer in After Effects.

The angels were represented by stone statues prepared in Photoshop. I also found stock images of veils shot against a black background. Those were added over the heads of the angels, with some tweaking with distortion tools in After Effects.

God was a mishmash of stock footage from Videoblocks.com: A cloudy background, smoke animations arranged to create a triangle, a close-up of a man's eye, and CD lightning bolts.

Most shots are a collage of photos and stock footage from Videoblocks.com. In this shot, the mime is live-action stock footage, as is the animated background. The falling girl (along with other various things passing in and out of the shot) is a stock photo slightly animated with the AE puppet tool.

The cavalcade of horrid things humanity is guilty of is represented by plain stock footage shots of various historical violent scenes. I only added a filter over them and had them transition into each other using black ink added in water as a matte.

The very apocalyptic shots showing the appearance of the worm were, again, built using stock images. I found a few photos included in my stock photo collection showing behind-the-scenes shots from some zombie movie, where "dead" people were stacked upon each other. Perfect for my intentions.

The final shot of the angels shows one of them opening its eyes. That was simply made by using another stock shot of a woman opening her eyes, cutting out that section of her face in After Effects, and applying the footage over the face of the stone angel. The soft edges of the matte tool cut-out, some color grading and the veil in a layer over the angel hopefully helped sell the illusion. 

So, now over to "our hero; the Conqueror Worm." I actually started planning this film last year and made a worm puppet, that I ended up not being happy with. I thought this lean beast didn't exactly represent the gorged monstrosity that fed on mankind. Instead, I included this puppet in my film "The Elder Pharos."

On to Conqueror Worm 2.0. I built this puppet pretty large, so I could animate it making very slow movements. As I wanted it to look like a fat maggot, I knew it needed lots of padding, something that always gets in the way of smooth and easy animation. I included a kind of rib cage in the armature to fill out the body of the puppet and create the desired bulk. The tiny legs were also attached to these ribs. I only made a section of the worm, needing just the part seen above the heaps of bones and bodies.

I used very soft polyurethane foam to pad the worm's body. I put on layer after layer very loosely. Soft yarn was wrapped around the legs and covered with latex.

To create a segmented look for the chubby body I simply wrapped yarn around the parts where I wanted to pull in the foam. Thin latex patches cast in a skin texture mold covered up the body.

The finished puppet was painted with tinted latex. The claws and teeth were made from tissue paper dipped in latex. A single t-nut stuck to the bottom of the armature secures the puppet to the animation stage.

Lastly, I have to mention my UK buddy John Hutch, who, like many times before, provided the narration. We've collaborated quite a few times by now, and will continue doing so for the forseeable future. I really wish he'd get a break as an actor. He's done bit parts here and there in various British TV shows including the fantasy series "Merlin" (where he gets knocked out by prince Arthur in one scene.) For now I'm planning on adapting Poe's "Dreamland" with John narrating.

Do I have a Poe dream project? Yes; it's animating "The Raven" narrated by Nicholas Cage.