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.
Someone in my YouTube comment section described this little short as "Metal Hurlant meets Lovecraft", and I think that's pretty apt. The French sci-fi comics magazine (better known in the US as Heavy Metal) had a lot of crazy content, and I certainly read the magazine and I'm sure I've been influenced by it. The Lovecraft part is the fact that I decided to join bits of his poems "Nemesis" and "Psychopompos: A Tale In Rhyme", which, in themselves are good, but I had my favorite parts and thought they'd go together very well. What I ended up with was, basically, a revenge tale of a single warrior taking out a planet-destroying giant monster.
So, let's start with the monster, as I usually do. My idea was to make a tentacled skull with a distinctly evil look. I started with a rough clay sculpture of a slightly cartoony and scowling skull. The skull and the jaw were made as two separate pieces.
However, I didn't make a plaster mold around the sculpture as I usually do, but I instead built up a skin over the clay using cotton and latex. I just addad one thick layer, and allowed to dry slowly.
The eyes were two glass blobs with flat undersides glued to a paper printout of photoshopped blood veins. I used transparent scrapbooking glue.
To make the skull and jaw sturdier, I mixed up some Rhino plastic, a fast-setting resin that I use for many things, and simply poured it into the hollow skull and jaw skins, slushing around the plastic to make it cover all spots. Tentacles made from aluminum wires covered with soft yarn soaked in tinted latex were attached by drilling holes in the skull and inserting the ends of each tentacle, attaching them with thermoplastic. I also made a bunch of horn-like protuberances by wrapping yarn around the tip of a pencil and painting tinted latex over the yarn.
I added teeth made from cotton dipped in latex, using liquid latex as a glue.
The eyes were stuck to the eye sockets with dabs of hot melt glue.
Patches of textured latex skin were cast in texture molds and attached to the puppet.
The finished puppet was painted with tinted latex and acrylic airbrush colors. A support rod was made from two thick aluminum wires wrapped in chroma key tape.
The ship seen in the film was a CGI stock footage animation downloaded from Videoblocks. In the clip I used various angles and movements were provided.
In After Effects I added the ship to various space backgrounds that were either Photoshopped or also downloaded from Videoblocks.
The vengeful pilot was an even bigger cheat. I simply used two still images of a dressed up person, found at stock image provider Depositphotos, and placed that guy in spaceship interior backgrounds, also a mix of stock photos and Photoshopped details.
I'm sure my interpretation of Lovecrafts poetry differs wildly from the intent of the old guy himself, but as it is, I had fun doing this film. It was a quick and creative project.
I can't recall who came up with the idea, but I'm sure someone suggested to me, at some point, that I should do a video where we observe fantastic things happening without any cuts. I like a book by Edward Gorey called "The Untitled Book", where every page is an illustration of a garden where first very little happens, then all sorts of strange things start to happen.
Another Gorey book, "The West Wing" is probably also an inspiration. The reader walks through a stately but empty house, sometimes seeing bits of weirdness.
The room in my film is inspired by a room in my grandmother's old country house, a guest room that was seldom used with an old carpet and old wallpaper. It is, however, not haunted in the slightest. I furnished my haunted room with various props that I could animate during the brief running time. The grandfather clock has a time-lapsed dial, which speeds up, and then stops to start going backward. There's a ball and a rocking horse moving on their own accord, a bloody handprint, and a CGI spider crawling down the wall. The one thing happening throughout the video, though very slowly, is the framed portrait of the young man. He turns from a handsome chap into a decomposing corpse.
This was very easily made by having the original photo dissolve into a Photoshopped corpse version. Inbetween frames I also added bits of distortion to make the hairline recede and his mouth frown up a bit. It's not a perfect morphing effect, but I think it did the trick.
The video ends with a small demon crawling out from behind the clock and invading the rest of the house, indicating that the haunting has now spread.
I actually built this puppet so quickly that I didn't snap any photos of the making of it, but it's basically the same basic puppet I make when no extra bells or whistles are necessary.
If you're a horror fan you're probably acquainted with the monstrous character of Clive Barker's "Rawhead Rex", either from his original Books of Blood story or from the flawed 1986 movie adaptation of that story. Either way, Barker's Rawhead is a primal creature with a penchant for biting some people's heads off and baptizing others by pissing on them. Without a doubt, Barker was inspired by the folkloric character of Rawhead and Bloody Bones, a very nasty boogeyman from Great Britain who appears in a variety of guises, as well as a monster in North American folklore. Generally speaking, Rawhead and Bloody Bones eats kids and has googly eyes, big teeth, and big claws. His origin and physiognomy vary depending on from where a particular story comes. For my adaptation, I chose to use an English nursery rhyme, adding a verse of my own to make it slightly longer for my video.
My design of Rawhead's head was a mix of various animalistic features. I looked at skulls from horses, dogs, and apes, and this is what I ended up with. The crest on top of the head comes from the gorilla, an anatomical feature to which the jaw muscles are attached for extra chomping power. Bigfoot, by the way, is also said to have this crest. All sculptures were made in my preferred medium of medium-grade Monster Clay. I used two plastic pearls for the eyes.
I sculpted the torso as looking like it was both powerful but decaying or flayed. I don't really know where I was going with that one, but I like how it turned out.
I cast the head in tinted latex, adding teeth made from cotton dipped in latex. The two red pearls have now been finished as eyes with blue irises, covered by a lens of UV resin. They're placed in sockets made from silicone clay. The armature was very simple. It doesn't really show in this picture, but the forearms are split into two bones, like on a real skeleton. I wanted that feature to be visible in the finished puppet to make the character look a bit zombie-like.
You can see that split forearm better here. The muscles on the arms were a mix of thin polyurethane foam soaked in latex and a cotton-latex mix. The rest of the body was padded with layers of soft foam. I didn't bother with adding detail to the legs as they would be covered with fur.
The finished Rawhead has a latex skin, in parts cast from old skin texture molds. The body was painted with a mix of dry brushing on tinted latex and then adding details using acrylic airbrush colors. The fur on the legs comes from an old winter hat. The straggly bits of skin covering the back and the arms were made with the "chunks ó flesh" method, where tinted latex is stippled with a bit of foam onto a flat surface and then scratched apart with my fingernails and pulled off the surface into chunky organic-looking bits.
I get both praise and critique for my "collage" method of creating shots in my films. Some really like the look of it, others find it fake and distracting. It's the way I make my films and I'll keep making them like that. I used a couple of stock footage shots featuring people in this film. One is a scared man in bed, and the other is this good girl diligently doing her homework. Apparently, and according to the nursery rhyme, Rawhead has no interest in good kids, so she's in no danger. This composition is made up of the following twelve layers in After Effects: A stock photo of a wintry garden outside the window, an animation of Rawhead, the steam on the window, the wallpaper, the bookshelf, the window with curtains, the floor, the cat, the shadow under the cat, the girl at the table, the shadow under the table, and lastly an adjustment layer which adds a unifying color grading.
Hannes Karlsson, who gets eaten by Krampus in my Krampus film, and fights the two-headed monster in that video returns as a nasty kid here. I simply re-used a take from Krampus.
I like doing projects inspired by folklore, but my YouTube audience seems a bit divided in their opinions. I try to diversify as a content creator and, most important of all, follow my own desires, making what interests me personally. And how else can I create good films if I don't do that? So much of folklore borders on horror, if not being straight-up horror, and the subject also offers endless possibilities for creating moody, atmospheric shots showing "real" places like the countryside, with old buildings, bogs, and forests. I say "real", because most of it will still be still images and stock videos composed in Photoshop and After Effects to create my ideal environments.
There's a big chance that old Rawhead will return and star in a feature-length film produced by my maverick movie buddy James Balsamo.
