Strange Aeons

My main Love for the prose and poems of H P Lovecraft comes from his unparallelled talent for generating mood or atmosphere. Whatever I do in my video adaptations of his texts I'm always chasing that mood. Sometimes I stumble over another work of art that has managed to generate those qualities.

A while back I bought the CD "Strange Aeons", which is produced by British musician and artist Steve Lines. Besides his own work the CD also contains contributions by Childe Roland, The Zoogs, Black Monolith and other bands, as well as spoken word pieces by Lovecraftian authors like Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell and Robert M. Price. Highly recommended! The opening track is also called "Strange Aeons" and is written and performed by Steve Lines himself. It sums up what Lovecraft's cosmic horror is all about, and I thought it would make a great subject for a YouTube video. I contacted Steve and he gave me permission to use the track.

My plan was to mainly show prehistoric Earth during the reign of the various evil entities that arrived here before the advent of humans. I wanted to put some of the older puppets back into action before they became too brittle to use for animation. I also had some new ideas for a few new puppets.

I thought that Ramsey Campbell's monstrous space slug Glaaki would make a novel stop-motion monster, and started off with sculpting the underside of the creature in medium grade Monster Clay.

The armature for this puppet was super simple, just a bundle of aluminum wires, with a t-nut foot at the rear for tie down purposes. The eyes are plastic balls on aluminum wire eye stalks. The round mouth also has a band of aluminum wires to allow it to open and close like an orifice. The black chunks on the armature are bits of dense foam, added to build up bulk without impeding the animation (like thick foam would've).

The body was padded with balls of cotton encased in a "suit" of thin, soft polyurethane.

I used an old plaster skin mold to cast the knobbly skin of the slug covering the foam body. The whole thing was then dry brushed with tinted latex.

Glakki is covered with metallic spike which it uses to infamously impale human victims. These victims then turn into Glaaki's zombified servants. The spikes were bits of cotton dipped in latex and then rolled between my fingers to create the spiky shapes. Silver latex tinting powder was used with the latex to add the metallic effect.

The finished Glaaki had airbrushed eyeballs covered with air drying scrapbooking plastic to create a gelatinous lens-like effect.

The other thing I wanted to do was to illustrate the line "Wantonly they trod the dark ways, cavorting in the steaming fens, until all the planet had known the touch of the Great Old Ones", by having two of Cthulhu's star-spawn -basically his minions- play wrestle in the primordial swamps. A star-spawn is more or less a smaller replica of Chtulhu. It's the sort of form that can be endlessly varied and still be recognized. I made two sculptures of the front of the heads where the eyes would be located and the tentacle beards would hang down.

I made the armatures out of several bundles of aluminum wires, making them very sturdy. Arms and legs were padded with hard foam and the tails were given shape with soft string wrappings covered in latex. The wings were my usual constructions of string-wrapped aluminum wires, submerged in soft plaster with a latex wing membrane build-up.

The padding of the main bodies was achieved with cotton balls. Since I wanted these creatures to look flabby, with folds of warty skin covering their bodies I didn't spend a lot of time creating foam shapes to indicate muscles. Instead a fairly basic foam wrapping made up the general shape of the bodies.

Lots and lots of patches of tinted latex skin was cast in several old molds and attached using liquid latex as a glue.

The finished star-spawn were dry brushed with tinted latex, and touched up with acrylic airbrush paints. The eyes were the usual reflecting scrapbooking beads I use to make glowing eyes for my puppets.

This guy was also an original puppet made for this project. Despite its likeness to the infamous penisaurus of porn comedy "Flesh Gordon" it's actually another Great Old One called Gobogeg.

Other creatures in the film, like this one, were created using only partly animated elements. The fringed eye is a Photoshop creation..

..While the tentacles are just the one tentacle, animated a few times and clumped together in After Effects.

The apocalyptic end times were realized using different techniques altogether. I wanted the return of the Great Old Ones and their destruction of our world to appear in ultra slow-motion, to show the inevitability of it -or something like it. I can't really describe the effect I was after, but I think I achieved it.
 These shots were all created using photos animated in After Effects using the puppet tool. Smoke, falling ash and various digital effects were superimposed, and the whole finished film was color graded and various filters were applied to create an otherworldly look. The prehistoric scenes in the beginning were also mainly made with Photoshopped images, animated in After Effects.

I think the most powerful effect Lovecraft achieves in his writings is the concept of "deep time", which is about vast stretches of time so far in our planet's past that we can't really comprehend it. This film was an experiment of sorts, trying to chase that concept with moving images.