If we are to believe old Lovecraft himself he has a family tree to give you nightmares. If you go far enough back you'll encounter various cosmic abominations in his lineage. Closer to our time, but still very far back in history, we find the name Yogash the Ghoul -apparently one of the first, if not the very first, of that very creepy breed of creatures.
You can study the Lovecraft family tree in one of the volumes collecting Lovecraft's countless letters. The tree was included in a 1933 message to James F. Morton. My fancy had been tickled by the name Yogash the Ghoul for a while since it was both very descriptive (It's a ghoul) and open to endless imaginative story possibilities.
For those of you who remember bits of my previous work, you'll recall that I did make a ghoul puppet way back in 2013 for a film called The Lovecraft Alphabet. The puppet was very detailed and as it happens also very expressive when animated. It was a combination of a sculpture that I was happy with and an armature that did the job.
In that film, the puppet is shown very briefly to illustrate old ghoul painter Pickman. His art comes alive, turns around, and makes a face at the viewer. That's all the puppet did, so I figured I should do something more with it before it started deteriorating, as all latex puppets eventually do. At this point in time, the puppet is in surprisingly good shape, so I thought I'd give it the starring role it deserved. Now, the making of the ghoul puppet has already been covered in an older blog post, so I'll direct you over to that one instead. You'll find it HERE.
The story I came up with for the film set out to show the horrific world the ghouls live in, but in that world, the ghouls themselves might not be all that bad. In Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath they're quite heroic characters.
To illustrate the weirdness of the ghoul world I added a few other creatures. First up is a transforming sorcerer the ghoul spies in a ruined temple. This puppet was inspired by a previous puppet/sculpture I built for an online game-maker. That character was a woman standing up. The sorcerer has traveled a bit further down the line in his transformation and is lying on the ground. I sculpted the puppet's torso in medium-grade Monster Clay to get the best and most exact detailing I could on the anatomy.
A dental plaster mold was made over the sculpture and tinted latex was added to the mold using sponges and q-tips. The dental plaster catches and keeps all the delicate textures and details, something that the cheaper and more easy to get hobby plaster usually doesn't. A total of four layers of latex were added, in some parts of the mold, it was ladled on thinly to give the rubber skin more flexibility.
The rest of the puppet was built up using a combination of soft polyurethane foam, cotton, yarn, and latex. The tentacles were aluminum wires covered with soft yarn, then dabbed with tinted latex. All moving parts had joints made from bundles of aluminum wires held together with polymorph thermoplastic. The teeth are paper dipped in latex. The red monster eye is a plastic pearl with a blue iris created by grinding down a section with a Dremel tool, then painting the concave surface blue and covering it with UV resin. The normal eye is a tiny doll's eye made from acrylic plastic. I bought a bunch of those from eBay years ago. The arm was gradually built up with thin layers of latex over an aluminum wire armature padded with thin strips of foam. The flower-like growths on the hip are cotton tufts dipped in latex and rolled between my fingers.
The finished puppet was dry brushed with tinted latex and given a light touch-up with acrylic airbrush colors. The hair is crepé hair, i e sheep's wool, normally used for stage production beards and mustaches.
As you can see, the back of the puppet isn't much to write home about. Since you'll never see that part of the character I just didn't finish it. You can see the tie-down point coming out of the back. It's a threaded bolt attached to a metal rod using super glue and baking soda to fix it in place.
Journeying further with Yogash we come to the valley of the behemoths, chubby vaguely humanoid giants. We see two of them in the film. I sculpted one with both face and torso, while the other only got a head sculpt. I re-used the flabby body of his friend for him as well when casting latex skins for the puppet bodies.
The puppets are fairly small, about eight inches tall. I forgot to snap photos of their armatures, but they're very simple constructions using aluminum wires and thermoplastic. The foam padding over the armatures was made using foam of various densities depending on where on the body they were placed.
The finished puppets are covered with patches of latex skin cast in skin texture molds, as well as latex casts made from the clay sculptures using plaster molds. They're painted with tinted latex and acrylic colors applied by dipping an old toothbrush in color and spraying it on by dragging my thumb over the bristles. The eyes are mother-of-pearl scrapbooking acrylic domes.
Eventually, Yogash comes to a human city and encounters a dying boy lying on the floor in a pauper's hut. Yogash asks the boy if he'll come with him to become a ghoul himself, or if Yogash should just leave him there to die. This little chap is Hannes Johansson, whom you've seen in a few of my other films by now. I just filmed Hannes lying on the floor in my buddy Andreas Petterson's flat. Hannes lives above it, so he just stopped by on his way home from school.
Probably the toughest shot in the film, the little challenge I try to put into all my projects so I'll grow and learn something new with each effort, is when Yogash leaves the town carrying the boy. It's a combination of Photoshop and After Effects trickery.
To place Hannes in the arms of the puppet I picked him up and twirled around in front of my video camera, to get views from all angles.
Pulling stills from the video footage, I then cut out Hannes in Photoshop and added another photo of the ghoul puppet with its arms in the right position. I animated the puppet walking towards the "camera", cut away the top half of the animated ghoul with the masking tool, and added the Photoshopped image instead. The trick to making this work was to use keyframes at certain points to make the Photoshop image follow the animated lower half of the body. It's a short enough clip that I think I made it work -barely. There is a tracking tool to make one image layer follow the movements of another layer, but I've never been able to make it work satisfactorily.
All the settings of Yogash's world are various stock photographs pulled apart and re-assembled in Photoshop, usually to work in a number of layers in conjunction with stock video effects such as fog or fireflies. I thought this building looked sufficiently crypt-like to work as Yogash's abode. A guy on YouTube called me out on it and explained it's part of an old waterworks complex just s stone's throw from where he lives.
The graveyard around Yogash's crypt is, I believe, an old French graveyard. I had a stock video of a squawking crow shot against a green screen, so I added that to one of the tombstones.
The town itself was a gaggle of photos of the old Mongolian town Sarai-Batu. I thought it had a vaguely Asiatic or eastern look, which would go well with the esthetics of the proto-fantasy tales that Lovecraft and his pals, like Robert E Howard.
All in all, Yogash the Ghoul got a very good reception on YouTube, which delights me. In fact, people have asked for a sequel. They want to see more exploits of Yogash and "ghoul boy", as they've nicknamed Hannes. And I have given that some thought. Hannes is certainly up for it, and the ghoul puppet is still looking well enough. I'd also like to give other characters from the Lovecraft family tree a spin, such as K'baa the serpent, or Goth the Burrower.
"Silly Asses" was adapted from a short story by Isaac Asimov published initially in Future Science Fiction, # 35, 1958. It has slipped into the public domain since, and I thought it would make a short, fun project for my YouTube channel. All of the story is there, basically. I have changed parts of the text that work better as imagery on film.
There are two main characters in the story. Let's start with this one, which I call "Shrimp Guy."
His most distinguishing feature is probably his head. It's actually the nose section of a different puppet made for a different project. Way back in 2014 I was involved in the pre-production for a rock opera adaptation of H P Lovecraft's "The Dreams In the Witchhouse." The monster designs were made by my DeviantArt buddy King OvRats and I was responsible for translating his drawings into puppets. We put quite a bit of work into the project, but nothing came of it in the end. I finished one of the puppets, but I haven't used it for any of my own films. I still have the mold made from the nose and thought I could at least put that to good use.
Here's my original sculpture for the nose, one of the first I made in Monster Clay. Turned upside down it would be used as the head of Shrimp Guy. If you want to read the full story of the Witchhouse project, or as far as it got you can read all about it HERE.
I cast the headpiece in tinted latex, making it as pink as I could. The inside of this latex skin was lined with a latex/cotton mix to make it sturdy and to make it hold its shape. I also added thermoplastic to create a sort of skull inside it. The thermoplastic also worked as an attachment for the two eyestalks and the pincer-like mouth of the character. The body is a paper ball covered with thermoplastic. Tail, arms, and legs were made from aluminum wires wrapped in soft yarn dabbed with tinted latex. The limbs don't have any "bones" in them. They're jointless and move about very much like the limbs of cartoon characters in old animated films using the so-called "rubber hose" animation style. The claws on the feet are also latex cast in an old plaster mold for horns and such, made many years ago.
A bit of polyurethane foam padding puts more flesh on the torso and tail. The skin textures are latex casts made from molds for older puppet projects. The combination of textures and latex casts is a real mishmash.
Here the puppet has gotten its base coat of pink paint, which is made from tinted latex. Detailing with acrylic airbrush paints now awaits.
Here's the finished puppet. The eyes are photoshop print-outs stuck to the backside of clear acrylic domes. These domes as well as the transparent glue used on them were bought from a local scrapbooking shop.
The device he's holding is a plastic cast taken from a silicone mold made over a model kit part. I think it's a motor part or some kind of hatch from a Klingon ship.
Now for Shrimp Guy's impatient boss. He's actually an older puppet used once for a film called "Beans." I touched up the puppet a bit and added a chest plate made from latex and silver paint. He also got plasticene eyebrows and a plasticene lower lip and teeth, so I could animate him talking and add a few bewildered expressions to his face. It's cartoon acting of the lowest order. You can read all bout how this puppet was made and the "Beans" project HERE:
The Galactic Federation planet is populated with many alien races, some of which are briefly glimpsed in one shot as they're walking past the "camera" in a corridor. For this, I only used old puppets from various projects, and I also stuck an old toy robot in there - an R2-D2 knockoff bought for me at the end of the 1970s. The city and its densely trafficked skies are a blend of CG stock footage and CG stock images, animated by me in layers in After Effects.
The same goes for the office of the boss. I found a few CG images of a spaceship interior on Depositphotos.com and adapted them in Photoshop, changing the perspectives and adding or removing details. The computer graphics floating around the room were also stock media found of Videoblocks and Videohive, and again adapted in After Effects to suit my needs. I did the voices for both characters, and my Italian friend Marco Zanelli provided the trippy music.
I really like Sci-Fi, probably more so than fantasy, so I'm planning on doing more projects in that genre.
"Spider Mites" is adapted from a poem I found on a website listing creepy Halloween-appropriate poems. I thought it was really to the point and imaginative. I contacted the author, Max Scratchmann, via Facebook and found him to be a quirky, very interesting guy. He kindly gave me the go-ahead to let me do my stuff with his text.
So let's start with our little titular monsters. There are clues to what they look like in the poem, mainly their clicking, clacking legs. I started with sculpting their heads in medium-grade Monster Clay. I placed them side-by-side on a slab of clay and cast a plaster mold over the heads.
I poured tinted latex into the plaster mold to create two flexible skins. The latex was tinted a pale blue. They will be painted white, so I thought that color would make a good base hue.
To give the skins some better stability I soaked thin bits of polyurethane foam in latex and pressed them into the skins. This helped make them sturdy without compromising the flexibility of the latex. In this photo, you can perhaps also see that the top fronts of the heads have been lined with white Polymorph thermoplastic. This is so I'll have a hard part of the heads I can grab hold of when animating, and the plastic also grabs hold of the aluminum wires moving the jaws.
The legs are a mix of many materials. Mainly they're built out of aluminum wires, wooden ice cream sticks cut and sanded into various shapes. There are also bits of pens, glue tube caps, and small scrapbooking gems. The green girder-looking bits are rolls holding plaster bandages. Each leg has a foot with a small threaded nut attached to aluminum wires with a mix of super glue and baking soda.
As I'm building two Spider Mite puppets I made two sets of legs. They were attached to a base made from thermoplastic and ice cream stick parts.
Besides having the reinforced, hard foreheads as a hold-on point when animating I also added a short bit of plastic piping to add extra stability to each puppet.
The pulpy bodies were bits of soft polyurethane foam, with yarn wrapped around parts of the foam to give it some extra shapes. You can also see here that I've painted the legs. I've used a black base color spray paint.
To build up the skin on the body I added patches of latex skin cast from skin texture molds. When that looked ok I dry brushed on latex-tinted white using a foam sponge until I had a good balance between the white paint and the blue base paint.
Under the body and between the legs I wanted something looking like scrap metal clumsily riveted together. I use EVA foam for that. It's a very popular material for model makers and cosplayers. I cut lots of tiny rivets out of the foam using a leather hole cutter.
The EVA foam build-ups look pretty good, especially when the metal pain went on. EVA foam is pretty cheap and when working with puppet scales it lasts forever. You get a lot of material out of a single A4 size sheet.
The legs were dry brushed with a metallic waxes, mainly copper color. The teeth are snippets of tissue paper dipped in latex and shaped with my fingers. They're attached to the gums using liquid latex as a glue.
The settings and backgrounds are a mix of photos and stock videos. The photos have been cut up and prepared in Photoshop so the puppets can move around in these 2D environments, sometimes in front of parts of them and sometimes behind. All shots were put together in After Effects, as I usually do.
Hannes Karlsson, who's now been in a few of my films, played a scared kid who gets visited by the Spider Mites. I shot the scene in the bedroom of my friend Andreas Pettersson (also a frequent actor in my projects). We used ordinary daylight, with some help from a floor lamp. the color temperature was changed in After Effects. Lastly, I added a stock video of an old projected film, with catches dust and all that stuff. I just thought it would go with the jangly, scrappy nature of the little monsters.
It's quite possible I'll contact Max Scratchmann about adapting another of his works because this one was great fun to work on.
