I keep returning to H P Lovecraft's sonnet cycle "Fungi From Yuggoth", but I'll probably never adapt all of the pieces. Late in May I adapted "The Howler" from this collection. It's a moody tale about the bitter fruits of traditional witchcraft.
The shooting of the live action was easy enough. I recruited my pal Andreas Nordkvist, now a staple in my video projects, and shot the forest road scenes in an afternoon just up the road from where I live. The witches cottage was another matter, though. I found a good representation of what I kind of wanted over at Depositphotos (where I have a subscription). After some work in Photoshop the house started to look a bit more decrepit, but I had a bigger issue to solve. It was blowing quite hard the day we shot the live-action scenes, so all the ivy I had Photoshopped in over the cottage had to move. Fortunately, just another stone's throw away from my home lies the local church yard, which is infested with ivy. A couple of days after filming the scenes with Andreas there was another windy day, and I simply shot bits of ivy waving around, and used the masking tool in After Effects to cut out pieces of this footage, adding it on top of the cottage image.
Of course, there's also always a monster in my projects. This time around it's "a certain monstrous aftermath", according to Lovecraft. Let's say it's some kind of familiar called up by the witch, or some kind of experiment that went wrong. At any rate, this creature is still living in the abandoned house and is sometimes heard, and even glimpsed through the windows.
As usual I started with sculpting the head, to get a grip on this character. The creature is basically a four-legged thing with a human head. The clay is my preferred material; medium grade Monster Clay.
As you can see, the armature was simple, but functional. I added some hard metal wires to create a sort of rib cage to fill out the chest area and make that section sturdy.
The chest and belly area was sculpted to get exactly the fleshy look I wanted. A latex skin with sections of varying thickness was cast in a dental plaster mold.
I looked at muscle diagrams from dogs to create the overlapping foam muscles over the armature.
It's not often I make a puppet with a human skin color, but this time I thought it was vital to the character. Patches of tinted latex was cast in rubber texture mold to create a skin that looked porous and pock-marked.
The finished puppet had shiny plastic pearls for eyes, and tufts of hair pulled from an old fur coat. The bear-like claws were cut from cardboard and painted with tinted latex. The teeth were yarn dipped in latex.
Funnily enough, most reactions for this video is actually about the end credits, which seemed to tickle everybody's fancy!
Welcome again to the wacky world of H P Lovecraft! This time I've tackled a real classic, his early and game-changing tale "Dagon". You could say that this short story defines most of his work that comes after it. It introduces that most parodied Lovecraftian cliche: the narrator who keeps writing down what happens up to and including his own demise, death screams and all.
Let's start with the title. Since monolithic imagery is such an important part of this story I decided to expand this theme to the titles. I sculpted the letters of the name "Dagon" in clay and cast a plaster mold around them. This allowed me to cast extremely light weight versions of the letters in latex, reinforced with cotton, and then paint them with a mix of latex and various tinting mediums. The letters were placed on a green screened turntable and then filmed one by one. The separate letters were then lined up against a black background in After Effects and synchronized to turn all together.
The story takes place at the beginning of WW1, and I decided to try and stick with that period. I think I managed to scrape by just about when trying to maintain the credibility. I recruited my stalwart filming buddy Martin Merkel to play the narrator. It was a no-brainer to engage him in the project since he, besides being ever reliable, also had a decent collection of costumes and props from the WW1 era, coming mostly out of his cosplaying and historical reenactment interests. I filmed all of Martin's scenes outdoors against a green screen. Well, almost all, because I needed some shots of him walking at a distance, and my screens weren't big enough to handle that.
To get those shots we found a slope of short grass, and Martin simply walked in front of it.
This may look primitive, but with the aid of an AE plug-in called Smooth Screen I could transform the grass into a more unified green background. This allowed me to pull Martin out of the green as with any ordinary green screen shot.
But to get rid of most of the background I also had to draw a "garbage matte" around him, and changing the shape via keyframes I could track his walk with a minimum of background showing.
Martin was then sandwiched in between two Photoshopped background images, allowing him to walk into the rather nauseous landscape of the dry ocean floor.
Lastly, the green around him was removed, and the rendered shot was treated with atmospheric filter effects and then rendered out again.
These backgrounds were all created in Photoshop using photos of ebb and tide beaches combined with hundreds of images of stranded sea creatures. Sometimes, like in the top image, I've added a tracking camera move to add some depth, creating a 3D effect with artificial means.
It's done rather simply by marking all the layers of the shot as 3D layers, and then adding a distance between each layer. Depending on how big that distance is, the perspective effect is more or less accentuated when a camera move is animated in the shot. It's kind of crude, but it certainly helps sell the illusion if you do it well enough.
The monolith of this story is a very famous Lovecraftian artifact, which needed all my attention. But at the same time it's impossible to create the definite version of such a thing, so I just went with trying to literally recreate what the text says about the artifact. It has peculiar carvings depicting humanoid monsters that look like a cross between a fish and a frog. One of them is battling a whale. So that's what I went with. The images are depicted as bas reliefs, which meant they had to protrude out from the stone surface; a tricky bit of time consuming sculpting. I wasn't up for that, so I used a technique from my early days of prop-making. Instead I carved out the details, in reverse, so to speak, on a flat clay surface.
When I poured hard dental plaster onto this surface, the dry plaster cast revealed just the kind of bas relief I wanted. Again, crude but effective. This plaster cast was joined with three clay walls to create the actual monolith. Over this I applied four layers of DragonSkinFX silicone to shape a flexible mold.
SmoothCast 325 was poured into the silicone mold and roto casted to create a hollow plastic copy of the monolith sculpture. This casting was painted with washes of bronze, blue and green acrylic paint, and the whole thing was attached to a rudimentary but sturdy wooden stand.
The Dagon monster hugging the monolith was a foot tall puppet, built with my usual materials and techniques. I started off with a head and torso sculpture in medium grade Monster Clay. Like the monolith, this creature has achieved mythic proportions and there's a ton of art out there depicting it. How to make a version that's wholly original and yet familiar enough? The only way was to make it look like I think it should look, which is probably a distillation of loads of images from other artists, as well of real world fish and amphibians.
The armature was very simple; aluminum wires held together with thermoplastic, and reinforced with bits of metal rods to make the hard parts of the "skeleton."
The head and torso was cast in tinted latex from a plaster mold built up around the sculpture. An aluminum wire angler fish rod was added, along with fangs made from yarn dipped in latex.
Very soft polyurethane foam (the yellow bits) was mixed with denser foam (the green bits) to create a muscle padding, which was then covered with scaly patches of latex skin.
I wanted the monster to have fin-like outgrowths that looked worn, befitting an ancient sea giant. After attaching spikes made from cotton and latex to parts of the puppet, soft Monster Clay was pressed up against these spikes and tinted latex was brushed over both spikes and clay. When the latex had set, I had achieved that look of worn skin that I wanted.
The finished puppet was painted with acrylic airbrush paints, including the eyes, which were then covered by Glossy Accents scrap booking plastic to create that deep sea fish look to the eye lenses. The angler outgrowth has a glass pearl at its end.
That's all folks! My take on Dagon has been generally well received, though there have been a few angry people letting me know what they think of this mangled version of one of their favorite tales. But that's how it goes. The more famous the tale you adapt, the more criticism you'll get.
Last month I posted a video based on H P Lovecraft's poem"Star-Winds" from his sonnet cycle "Fungi From Yuggoth". It's one of my favorite pieces, and as with many of my projects, I've been wanting to adapt it for a while.
There's not much to tell about this production, actually. Most of it is 2D animations in After Effects, with various digital stock footage effects spliced in. Lovecraft himself appears in the film as a Photoshopped still. I used a couple of photos that I liked and spruced them up in Photoshop. There aren't that many photos of HPL, and most of them are of a rather poor quality, being taken by his friends using the consumer cameras of the time.
As you saw in the film, there are two stop-motion sequences. The first deals with the inhabitants of the distant planet Yuggoth (Pluto), which were represented by an old puppet built for my film "The Lovecraft Alphabet". It's a Mi-Go carrying a brain cylinder, and it was pressed into service again for this short sequence.
The other sequence is set on Yuggoth's verdant moon Nithon, and features one of its strange inhabitants (you can also see some of my trademark stop-mo tentacles wiggling about.) The Nithonian was based on a drawing made by Lovecraft's buddy Clark Ashton Smith. In fact, I tried to emulate the look of CAS's colorful images in the landscape of Nithon.
I made three sets of sculptures to create the puppet. The first was the head, as I usually do to get a grip on the character.
I also did a bunch of small roundels that would eventually become the patchwork of plates covering the body of the creature. In all castings I applied the first layer of dental plaster using either a soft brush or, as in this case, a fluffy pipe cleaner.
The third set of sculptures was this collection of tiny buds. They were later cast in latex as hollow shells and stuck together to cover the lanky arms of the Nithonian.
The armature was super simple, basically just a thick aluminum wire with the arms attached and a single foot with a t-nut (not shown in the photo.)
From a dental plaster mold I cast a bunch of small latex plates, that were individually attached to the puppet body using liquid latex as a glue.
The finished puppet also had a pair of eyes on stalks and a small trunk, both supported by copper wires encased in soft plastic. It's also been painted with acrylic airbrush paints.
The landscape on Nithon was cobbled together in Photoshop using photos of various colorful corals, with a CGI animated backdrop for the weird-looking sky. The plant the Nithonian picks is a latex prop from my Star Trek-related film "Darmok & Jalad."
This project isn't the more familiar bombastic end-of-the-world scenario that Lovecraft has become known for, instead it's about his lesser-seen lyrical side, which I think he would've liked to be more remembered for.
