Goblin Wood: The Goblins

Here's a little photo session showing, in some detail, how the goblin puppets for "Goblin Wood" were made. This is the way I make just about all of my puppets.

The heads of the goblins start off as sculptures in Chavant clay. The head to the right is actually the second attempt at "finding" the right character. Plaster molds were made for each head. Head no 2 had a two-part mold.

This is the head of one of the goblins cast as a loose latex skin. The latex was tinted before pouring it into the plaster mold. Red beads have been added for the eyes.

This is the insides of the latex skin and it might be a bit hard to see, but the red beads are attached to the latex using the thermo plastic Friendly Plastic.

The armature for the goblin head you've just seen the skin of. The "skull" is made out of Friendly Plastic. All jointed parts -brow, ears, jaw, upper lip and cheeks- are aluminum or copper wire covered with a string wrapping. The brow is also padded with thin foam rubber.

This is how the joints for low-budget stop-motion armatures are made. You stick two or three lenghts of aluminum wire together in a power drill and hold the other ends of the wires with a pair of pliers. Gently turn the drill and you've got instant braided aluminum wire. Braided because it will hold up much better under stress and it won't be as springy or wobbly.

The braided aluminum wire is has been covered with Friendly Plastic, working as skeleton bones. The fingers are made out of plastic-covered copper wire. As you perhaps can see, the left goblin has another head than the one shown as a sculpture earlier. This is the first, discarded attempt.

Goblin no 1 has been covered with a wrapping of soft wire, and then some foam rubber and latex. Eventually I removed the wire from the arms and put some cotton/latex muscles there instead.

The goblin has been covered with a skin of latex, also acting as a pair of trousers and a pair of (so far) very floppy shoes.

Goblin no 2 has had his arms and legs attached to his armour. This fish bowl-like chest and back piece was made out of a big acrylic ball (intended as a home-made Christmas decoration). It's been patched-up and had details added using Apoxie.

The head has been added along with some latex spikes and a covering of latex skin on the arms and legs. A studded band made as a Chavant sculpture and cast in latex has been attached along the middle of the armour. As you can see it's been painted a matte black as well. It's pretty much ready for the final paint job now. A small hat and some shoes were also added.

Armour and other details (such as leather straps) for goblin no 1 were sculpted in Chavant and cast in SmoothCast 325 plastic from silicone molds.

The boys are finally finished and ready for animation. They are a mixture of my own concepts and influences from other artists, primarily Arthur Rackham and Brian Froud. It's hard to escape your favourites. They work their way into your subconscious and usually does not make themselves apparent until the work is finished.

My Illustrious Illustrating Career

And now for something completely different. Life is not just about making jolly movies. Sometimes it's also about making money and trying to establish some kind of career. I have no illusions as to being able to make a living out of my animation or puppet building, but I have the intention of making it as an illustrator. I have started out quite modestly, but at least I'm on my way. I first published a couple of books in Sweden, but I really want to branch out in the US, where the big money and the big opportunities are.
I self-published Fearsome Critters at Lulu, a book about the sometimes outrageous creatures of lumberjack folklore. Then I got in touch with Kelly Christiansen at Cyberwizard Productions. She took a fancy to my art and comissioned some illustrations for the humorous fantasy/sci-fi anthology Strange Worlds of Lunacy. After that I did art for L. Frank Baum's American Fairytales (not yet published).

Just published, however, is Night Ship to Never, another anthology, collecting the sci-fi poems of David Kopaska-Merkel and Kendall Evans (some examples of the illos shown below).


All of that was in 2008. During 2009 I'll finish several book projects that I want Kelly to publish for me, and so far she seems to like what she's seeing. Cyberwizard Productions is a small company, but with big ambitions. Ideally I'd like to be picked up by a big publisher who can pay me big money, but since that hasn't happened yet I'll make do with what I can. Special make-up effects artist Tom Savini's motto is "The more you do, the more you get to do". I stand by that too -it is, in fact my experience that it is so. That's how the universe works. You have to show that you really enjoy your creativity and that you're going to keep going no matter what! Comic book creator supreme Alan Moore pointed out that the projects you do out of excitement, just for the fun of being creative without any thoughts of success or recognicion, are the purest acts you will ever perform in your life and those are the ones most likely to succeed. I try to make every work a work of love, weather it's commissioned or my own brainchild. With that attitude I know the result of my efforts will always be the best I can make it.

Goblin Wood Image Enhancements

All of the live-action footage for Goblin Wood was shot in one afternoon. It was a quite sunny day and the image quality turned out OK. But not very fantasy-like. So since then I've been trying to improve the footage according to my tastes. I wanted a softened, almost hazy look to most of the shots. This meant the applying of filters in After Effects and also the adding of stuff that wasn't there when the film was shot, like large fungi, animals and fog.

The story starts out in elf-land, where everything is bright and green. There are mostly trees with leafy foliage. We brought some smoke effects to the woods, but it was impossible to get the damn things working properly. I wanted some hazy sunlight "drapes" billowing in the background, but since the smoke effects wasn't cooperating I added the sunlight afterwards in After Effects instead. I also brightened the image and made it softer.

Our elfin heroine enters the goblin wood. There was no dark spruce forest near where I shot the "elf-land" footage, so that had to be added later as well. The goblin wood-part of the shot is simply a combination of photos that were combined and spliced into a part of the image Anjelica (the elf) didn't enter. In the middle of the shot you can glimpse a winged shadow lifting from the ground. This is a flying bird of prey from Eadweard Muybridge's collection Animals in Motion. I just scanned the photos, coloured them and made a flying cycle that was then imported in the software StopMotionPro and animated.

When the elf enters the goblin wood the mood and the look of the film changes. Everything gets darker and murkier. I added some fog shot against a black screen, downloaded from Detonationfilms.com and a nasty, mole-like animal peering up from his den beneath a rotting tree stump. After that was done I rendered the shot, imported it again and duplicated it in two layers. The top footage was blurred using Gaussian Blur and the blending mode "Multiply" was chosen. This made the image very dark, musty and atmospheric. A bit too much, actually, so the transparency of the top layer was amped up a bit. All of the goblin wood-shots were processed in this way.

The mole-like animal that is briefly visible in the above shot is an old puppet I built for a disastrous film project called Virgin Tears. It actually started life as a musical version of Lord of the Rings! For real! At first we got permission from the publisher Harper Collins and the Tolkien estate to do an amateur version of the story. Then New Line Cinema pulled all the worldwide rights to protect their interests and the film mutated into something different and quite unwatcable. I produced some stop-motion for the project, including shots of the mole monster that was added to scenes previously depicting the encounter between Frodo and a barrow-wight.

Another example of the original shot having the "goblin filter" added, along with some oversized fungi.

More photos of fungi, toadstools in this case. A puppet of a walking toadstool was also included.

More smoke effects from Detonationfilms.com. The eye appearing in the mossy rock was a glass eye in a cardboard socket, that I animated and keyed into the shot.

The elf triumphantly puts her foot on the fallen monster she's just vanquished. We simply put a big stone on the ground where the creature would be placed, and the keyed-in pupped was aligned with Anjelicas foot. Easy-peasy!

Goblin Wood Firefly Puppet

I had high hopes to finish the film Goblin Wood (see earlier posts), shot this past summer, before the end of 2007. I realize now that that was incredibly optimistic (as always), so let's say instead that it'll be finished during the spring of 2008.

In this film the elfin heroine fights a firebreathing, flying dragon-insect-something -a "dragon fly", quite simply. Previously I have built all my animation puppets using latex, sometimes reinforced with cotton to achieve a leathery, shell-like feel to certain parts of a puppet's anatomy. I've used this particular technique for insect-like or crustacean creatures. For the dragon fly I decided to cast the hard parts of its body in plastic and cover the joints with latex.

This monster was sort of inspired by the works of Swedish horror/fairy tale artist Hans Arnold. Check out his web page and you'll see what I mean.

The head of the dragon fly was sculpted in Chavant and a mold in Dragon Skin Q silicone rubber was created for it. The head was cast in SmoothCast 325 plastic. Spikes were added to the back of the head using Apoxie sculpt and a flexible lower jaw was built up with wool string and latex over aluminum wire.

The body was done the same way as the head, with holes drilled out for attaching the legs and the wings. The tail was created by wrapping yarn around aluminum wire and adding cast patches of latex skin from existing skin molds over that. The horns were also cast in latex from different old "monster" plaster molds. Recycle if you can; it saves both time and money!

The wings were a bit of a bother to make. I had to sculpt them as thin as I possibly could and create a silicone mold for them. I say "them" but of course I mean "it". I only sculpted one wing and cast four duplicates in plastic.

The legs were easier to do (I think I did all six in about twenty minutes) and created the way I do all puppet armatures -braiding aluminum wire attaching one end to a power drill and holding the other with pliers. The stiff parts of each leg was built up with Friendly Plastic. Normally this construction would then be covered by foam rubber, latex and paint.

Here are the finished legs and wings attached to the body. I really should do something about the floor in my workshop!

A view of the belly.

A black base coat has been added to the puppet. But how come it's got no head?

Because in the film the monster blows its own head off at the end. I attached a short screw to the end of the puppet's neck, so I could screw its head on and off the body (the creature being headless after the explosion). The eyes are bought from a taxidermist's supply house.

The finished puppet was painted with acrylic airbrush paints. The joints for the wings and the legs were covered with sewing string and tinted latex.

For animation the puppet was mounted on a flexible support rod. It was simply two thick pieces of aluminum wire braided together and stuck to a block of wood. The wire was covered with thick, soft string painted blue. Thus the support rod could be keyed out with the background.

Two stills from the film showing the fire fly on the prowl in the woods where I shot most of this project. Atmospheric filters and motion blur have also been added. In the last photo the heroine has shot a pine cone-tipped arrow into the snout of the monster, which acts practically like a flame thrower, and jamming it. So I guess you can figure out what happens next. KA-BOOM!

From globe to helmet

Jumping back to my contributions to my friend Daniel Lenneer's film Wavebreaker I thought it could be interesting to chronicle the tranformation of a terrestrial globe into a steampunk diver's helmet. Danny wanted a classical surface supplied diver, or "hooka diver", for his underwater epic. This meant either buying, borrowing or making a big, clunky diving helmer. The two first options quickly went out the window, which meant it was up to me to construct a fake version. All of the underwater footage was to be shot against a greenscreen, so the helmet just had to look good enough.

I started off with a globe I bought at a garage sale for a trifle. Dismantling it was an easy task, but getting rid of the printed paper wrapping was not. It took several days to clean everything off.





I placed the cleaned globe on a hard polyfoam bust I always use for maskmaking, and built up the shoulder and neck areas in Chavant clay. There was a visible seam between the two plastic halves of the globe so I covered that with Apoxie.

The shoulder / neck part was cast in latex, reinforced with cotton until it took on a leathery feel. It was then reinforced with hot-melt glue. I would've liked to cast it in plastic instead, but there were no money for the necessary materials. But this solution worked out fine. The portholes in front, at the top and at the sides were plastic saucers made to hold water for flower pots. I cut holes in them and built up the grids in the portholes using Apoxie sculpt over cardboard frames. Other stuff added was a plastic medicine jar as a valve, and the lid from a container of vaseline. This particular diver had the look of a hooka diver, but in fact he had a steampunk air supply solution in the shape of air tubes on his back, hence the small pipe in the back of the helmet.

When all the details were added and secured the whole helmet was spraypainted flat back.

And here's the finished helmet, painted in brass and aluminum with airbrush to give it a mottled, worn look. I also added a real brass valve to the right (your right) of the helmet.

Danny tries it out and seems pleased with the result.

A couple of frame-grabs for Danny's first composite try-out. I also made some underwater plants/animals/fungi/whatever in rubber, for the divers to pick when they go hunting for food on the ocean floor.

Props and costume for "Slayers of Evil".

When my LARP friend Martin and I decided to produce our own little fantasy epic, we immediately settled on having it look like it jumped out of a 1970's Dungeons & Dragons rule book. Which meant that the wizard should have a pointy hat, the elf must wear Robin Hood tights and the barbarian princess must have a very skimpy outfit.
All of this also meant another call to my invaluable dress-making friend Liz Mattsson, who's provided clothes for both actors and puppets in a number of my films. Nothing is impossible for her to make and if she doesn't know how to make it straight away, she'll figure it out. There is a great freedom, and I have to say relief, not having to rely on what you might find in a theatre wardrobe. Sometimes you strike gold there, but more often you get something that is kind of, sort of what you have in mind. It is a hundred times better to be able to design the entire look of a character from scratch and then be able to stick to it. It's an added cost of buying material for the costumes, but it's worth it.



For our wizard, Aronaxx (played by Rolf Berg) I bought bright red cloth and painted hundreds of astrological and alchemical symbols over it with gold textile paint. It took two full days to do that. Then Liz pieced it all together in the form of a typical wizard's robe. Easy to put on and get out of, and Rolf could even go and have a wee-wee while wearing it.





The wizard's pointy had was made out of a kind of soft, but sturdy cardboard with glue on one side of it. You remove a protective paper covering from the glue side and press the cardboard down on a piece of cloth. In this case I painted on the symbols after I had attached the cloth and assempled the cone.

This photo is taken at the end of the last day of shooting for Rolf, and as you can see he sweated quite a bit!















The wizard's staff was a very simple construction. The staff itself was a wooden rod used for hanging curtains and the top was a styrofoam ball, covered with latex and spraypainted gold. The detaling on the orb was made from latex castings of clay sculptures. It was all made very quickly the day before shooting started.

Rolf was wearing a beard made out of human hair. I bought it a coulpe of years back and originally used it for a film called The Haunted Mill, but since the beard is attached to lace fiber, it can be reused again and again. Which is a good thing since it was really, really expensive.












The character who needed the most elaborate props and costume was probably Vulvia, the barbarian princess (played by Malin Hermansson). Malin was chosen for a number of reasons; she has the looks, the figure and the humor for the job. She can also act and dance, the latter being a plus when fight choreography is used.

Vulvia is certainly the toughest in the bunch of heroes, so we decided to juxtapose this by giving her a taste for pink. Actually (not referred to in the film), the pink fur comes from a bear-like monster living in the wild mountains that are her home.

Parts of her outfit, the cape, the shoulder pads and the boots are taken from a costume made a few years back. The leather arm braces were made by a friend of Martin's. At the time of filming this project, Malin was a brunette and we felt she didn't look Scandinavian or valkry-ish enough. So I bought a blonde wig.




Vulvia's necklace was inspired by barbarian bling-bling seen in Frank Frazetta's Conan paintings. I sculpted the skull of an unidentified nasty little animal in clay, made a silicone mold and cast the finished skull in plastic. It was the painted and stuck on leather-imitation thread with four latex bear claws.

Vulvia's helmet was also sculpted in clay and cast in latex from a plaster mold. I wanted something soft and comfortable for Malin to wear. After I had painted it in dark grey PAX and aluminum paint, Liz dressed it up with pink fur.

The cups Vulvia's bra were made in the same way as the helmet. They were stuck onto one of Malin's own bras. The straps were hidden under some fake leather strips.

Vulvia's sword had to look powerful, but needed to be light and easy to wield. I recycled the blade of an old sword made many years back and used in many projects. The hilt was, again, inspired by a Frazetta painting of Conan resting against his sword. I sculpted the crossguard and the pommel in clay and cast plastic copies from a silicone mold. The parts were painted a dark black/iron and stuck onto the tang of the blade using more plastic as a fixing glue.


The grip was covered with more plastic, and PVC leather imitation was wrapped around it. At the time I didn't have any real leather thin enough for the job, so I had to make do with what was avaliable. It worked out fine and the sword came out as a very sturdy, well-balanced prop. The blade is made out of aluminum stock and was tuned and bevelled for me many years back by a friend's dad, who had a machine-shop. I engraved Norse runes along the fuller of the blade. It's a big sword, but quite light.

The sheath had been made many years earlier and was created out of sturdy cardboard, wrapped in duct tape and the covered with leather imitation (because it was cheap). The metal details on the sheath were cast in plastic. The belt is a garage sale find.

Martin played the dapper elf Falgolan, who likes to dress up in Robin Hood or Peter Pan fashion. Liz made the tunic from my specifications (one of them being a photo of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood). The shirt, the belt and the boots are Martin's own. The mint green tights are ballet tights for men and were bought. They were probably the hardest item to find for the costumes! I also bought a Prince Valiant-style wig. Martin provided the bow and quiver. I made flower-stick arrows with plastic heads, and Martin spent a morning adding "feathers" made out of sticky tape, folded, cut and glued in place.

My co-worker Agneta Rapp-Svensson played the Sorceress, named Lamaria in the script but actually never adressed by name in the film. I bought her dress straigh off a Halloween costume page on the web. I figured we couldn't dream up something as tasteless ourselves. It fitted Agneta like a glove, too!

I did make a couple of things for her character. I sculpted a snake diadem, cast it in plastic from a silicone mold, painted it and and added a glass ruby.



The sorceress also carried an evil-looking pendant. The little horned skull was sculpted in clay, a silicone mold was created and plastic cast in that mold. After spraypainting it with a high-gloss aluminum paint it was attached to a necklace chain.

What we wanted to do was to go in the opposite direction of how things look in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, and I think we succeeded with that. Our hope is that at least some people will experience a feeling of nostalgia when looking at this stuff. It's from a time when fantasy was less textured and could even be allowed to indulge in some silliness.