Abyssal Horrors

I think we can all agree that the really deep, dark ocean depths are a scary place. We don't know what's down there -what we DO know is that we don't know. It's a perfect place to set a scary story, and many authors have. I'd been eying H G Wells´ short story "In the Abyss", where a scientist in a bathysphere encounters amphibious humanoids, indeed; he's shown their whole civilization on the sea floor. Eventually, I decided to cook up my own tale exploring Talassophobia, which as phobias go, seems to be a trendy one. A lot of people have it. It's basically the fear of the deep ocean, but could just as well say that it's about being averse to dark, unknown places. I decided to make the monsters of my story enlarged versions of real deep sea fish. All the fish I based my puppets on are quite small in real life. Making them bigger turned them into creepy monsters.

This fish is based on the "Humpback Blackdevil", or Melanocetus johnsonii Ghunter; an angler fish with a huge mouth full of nasty teeth. All my fish puppets were made the same way, so I'll use this one to describe the majority of the process. I turned to my trusty medium-grade Monster Clay for the sculpture. I only did the head in clay and cast a dental plaster mold over the sculpture.

Here's the latex casting I pulled from that mold. I added four layers of tinted latex to get a good, sturdy thickness. The "angling" protrusion on the nose is a thin, but stiff metal wire with a plastic drop shape super glued to the top of it. The plastic shape is a pearl found on a box of jewelry-making hobby supplies at a garage sale. The wire is wrapped in soft yarn and dabbed with tinted latex.

Most of the inside of the latex casting was lined with a mix of cotton and latex, which then dried into a leathery material. It's perfect for making a latex casting keep its intended shape. After that, Polymorph thermal plastic was melted and pressed into the head to make it really sturdy. The plastic also holds the "angling" tool in place. The piece of flat lolly stick was attached so the body armature could hold onto something.

And speaking of that, here it is. It's a 3 mm aluminum wire with one end bent into a hook, so it can grab the lolly stick. More Polymorph was used to secure it.

Thick yarn dabbed with latex was used to bulk up the aluminum wire. The coarse texture of the yarn was a perfect grab-on surface for when the next material was added.

Bits of soft polyurethane foam were cut out and glued down over the padded wire using contact cement.

I wanted a very subtle skin texture for this puppet, but I realized I had to have something. I made this small silicone mold by pressing down dental silicone clay over a car dashboard surface. Tinted latex was then sponged into the mold to create patches of latex skin.

The rubber skin bits were glued onto the foam padding with liquid latex. Tinted latex was then applied along the edges of each piece with a pointy dental tool to make all bits blend together.

The fins of this fish are quite strange-looking. They consist of rib-like structures with skin in between. To create these ribs, I dabbed bits of kitchen tissue paper with latex and rolled them into thin, pointy shapes.

Each rib was attached to the puppet using liquid latex as a bonding agent.

When the ribs were firmly attached, I pressed down a piece of Monster Clay over each fin section until the ribs went halfway down into the clay. Latex was then applied over and in between the ribs. When two layers of latex had dried, the clay was peeled off, and a pretty decent, semi-transparent fin was the result.

The long teeth were also made from tissue paper and latex. The eyes were made with scrapbooking pearls with flat backsides. The body of the puppet was dabbed with tinted latex using a sponge. I forgot to say that where the jaw joins the body I added a threaded 3 mm nut, so I could attach my animation flying rig.

The other fish puppets had smaller heads, so I lined up a bunch of them on a slab to cast them in one plaster mold. As you may be able to see, one fish has a detached jaw, which will be cast as a separate piece.

Dental plaster was again used, and brushed on to avoid air pockets during the casing process.

These sculptures had a fair few nooks and crannies, so to make sure the tinted latex got in everywhere, It was applied with Q-tips.

Here's the latex fish head with the loose jaw, now with it attached to the head with two 2 mm aluminum wires ceating a joint on each side. This particular puppet is based on the Viperfish (Chauliodus sloani).

Like with the anglerfish, this puppet has Polymorph lining the inside of the head, with a wooden dowel placed across the head as an attachment point for the aluminum wire going through the body.

I used thin polyurethane foam to pad the body over the 3 mm aluminum wire.

I wanted a smooth surface for the body and dabbed the latex on the texture-less backside of a plaster mold to create a piece of skin covering one side of the puppet's body.

The Viperfish has a hexagonal scaly texture along its body. I didn't go for that but used a texture from another deep sea fish, looking like slabs overlapping each other. I sculpted this texture flat on a piece of clay.

I used cheap hobby plaster to create a simple mold over the sculpture. Tinted latex was applied to the mold with a sponge and a Q-tip.

Liquid latex was used as a glue to attach the texture piece to the rest of the puppet.

Both this fish and some of the other creatures have thin, semi-transparent fins. I created these by "etching" the patterns of the fins on a piece of smooth clay using a pointy sculpting tool. Latex was painted into these shapes with a Q-tip.

Before removing the latex fins I powdered the pieces with talcum powder, to make them dull and safe to remove. Had I not done this, the shiny latex bits would've stuck to each other.

The finished puppet has a "beard" made from cotton dipped in latex. The teeth were made the same way. The body is painted with tinted latex and touched up with acrylic airbrush colors. More scrapbooking pearls were glued to the body to simulate the look of organic lights, common in deep sea fish. The eyes were clear acrylic domes with photoshopped images glued to the flat backside using transparent glue. Again, this puppet has a flying rig attachment point just behind its jaw.

This odd-looking fellow is an Inflated Whiptail (Macrouroides inflaticeps), a member of the very diverse rattail family. The real fish has a shorter body, but I decided to make it longer for the sake of the animation. The 3 mm aluminum body armature wire has been attached to the head and padded with soft polyurethane foam.

The threaded bolt here marks the attachment point for the flying rig. The bolt is there to allow me to cover the puppet with latex skin without cover up the attachment point hole. 

This puppet has the same thin latex fins that I put on my Viperfish. The shiny blue eyes are drops of UV resin put on metallic candy wrappings. 

Here's one of the most bizarre deep sea fish; the Pelican eel (Eurypharynx pelecanoides). It's basically a giant head, or mouth, with a very slinky body attached to it.

I cast the whole head as one single piece of latex from a single plaster mold. Again, a single aluminum wire makes out the body, padded with a wrapping of foam.

The eyes are just painted onto the flat areas on the sculpted head representing the eye areas. I then added drops of UV resin to create a transparent lens.

So, what about our intrepid explorer, then? Well, he's me stuck inside a 2D digitally rendered illustration of a retro style diving bell.

I found a whole bunch of rendered CG images on Depostphotos.com. Originally I'd planned to build a model diving bell from a plastic lamp globe. But when I found these CG images I thought they were already so perfect I really didn't have to build that model.

To place me inside the diving bell I just filmed me in front of my puppet green screen tage. I was so lazy I couldn't even be bothered putting up my regular green screen, but it worked out perfectly in the end. In Photoshop I cut out the front-facing window in the CD diving bell images, stuck me behind that layer in After Effects, and then stuck yet another layer behind me, showing the inside of an old submarine, with pipes, levers and stuff.

If the final giant fish swallowing the diving bell seems familiar it's because it's my "Dagon" monster puppet, or rather a photographic representation of it, 2D animated in After Effects. I actually don't have that puppet anymore, I sold it to a collector in California a couple of years ago.

I really enjoy making these shorter, atmospheric films, especially with a little bit of silliness added. The music was composed my my friend Marco Zanelli. It's not our first, nor our last collaboration. Fortunately for me, a big enough number of my YouTube audience seems to be suffering from Talassophobia to have been both creeped out and entertained by this little film.

 

Grootslang vs Piasa!

Last month I wrote about "Scrap Metal" on my blog, which had animation footage originally made for James Balsamo's film "Alien Danger 2". The project in question this time is my animation created for Balsamo's movie "It Wants Blood" (2019), where a monster representing national interests, the Native American folklore creature the Piasa, battles a monster representing foreign interests, the African Grootslang.

There are many strange sights in "It Wants Blood", among them Oscar-nominated actor Eric Roberts (brother of Julia), who's had an interesting career during the last decade, to say the least. His aim seems to be to blow up the IMDb credits list since he makes about a hundred movies a year.

Besides my puppet representations of the monsters, there are also full-scale heads popping into the happenings every once in a while.

These very fetching creations were made by make-up expert Joe Castro, who built them in what seems an impossibly short time and also impossibly cheap.

As for my contributions, I actually made a behind-the-scenes video about building the Grootslang monster, so please have a gander at that. I didn't film any documentation on the making of the Piasa, so here follows a written account of that.

This is what the Piasa looks like painted on one of the limestone bluffs along the Mississippi River in Alton. There's always been a debate about whether the story of the Piasa is actually from Native folklore, or a construction made by the first teller of it, Professor John Russel. Look it up, if this sounds interesting. Anyway, the image painted on the limestone rock became my template for the Piasa puppet.

As you can see, the Piasa has a human-like face. I sculpted two versions, but wasn't happy with either of them, mainly because I made them too large. The body size that would've followed would've been impractical to animate on my smallish puppet stage.

This is the face I eventually ended up with. It was the right size but also had a decent amount of detailing.

The face was reproduced as a latex skin from a dental plaster mold created over the sculpture.

The wings were constructed from two mm aluminum wires, joined together with a mix of super glue and baking soda.

To build up anatomical shapes on the wings, I wrapped soft yarn over the aluminum wires.

I've shared my wing-making method many times before, but the main crux of it is to embed the wing armature, covered with yarn and latex, about halfway down into soft plaster. When the plaster has set, I can etch various details such as veins into the plaster, and then cover the areas between the "fingers" of the wing to create wing membranes. The whole wing is then simply pulled out of its plaster matrix.

The tail was built up with lots of yarn over a 3 mm aluminum wire. A thin layer of latex holds it all together.

The armature is a mix of 2 and 3-mm aluminum wires, padded with bits of EVA foam and yarn. The face has been given an aluminum wire-jointed jaw, plus eyes made with plastic pearls placed in silicone sockets so they can swivel. The face is reinforced with thermoplastic, which also holds the jaw and eyes in place. The horns were made from thin steel wires covered with cotton and latex.

Snippets of foam from old cushions served as muscle padding. They're held in place with flexible contact cement.

Right before the base of the tail, I added a 3 mm t-nut so I could attach a flying rig to the puppet. I needed to do this for the flying and jumping shots.

The scales covering the body of the Piasa, as per the limestone illustration, are quite stylized and ornate, sort of heraldic in a way, and I decided to keep them that way. I sculpted three rows of different sizes on a flat slab of clay.

A hard dental plaster mold was made over the sculpture, and tinted latex was pointed into the mold.

Here's what the rows of scales looked like when they were pulled from the mold.

Using liquid latex as a glue, the rows of scales were layered from front to back, overlapping each other.

The Piasa also has a row of smaller fin-like shapes along its neck. These were created the way the wing membranes were made, but using soft clay instead of plaster.

Here's the finished covering of the scales. Now for the paint job. You can see a tongue here as well. It's a piece of aluminum wire wrapped in sewing string and covered with tinted latex.

The Piasa was painted with tinted latex and touched up with acrylic airbrush paints. I mixed some thinned metallic paint into latex and brushed that over the scales with a sponge to create a more shining, glittering effect.

The tusks and claws are cotton and latex, and the beard was cut from an old synthetic fur coat. The Piasa and the Grootslang were two of the biggest puppets I had built up to that point, and they proved to be a bit of a bother when animating them on my cramped puppet stage. But, in the end, it all worked out. All the animations took about two weeks to finish.