You might find this little film familiar, and if you do it's most likely because you're very well read. If you didn't skip the end credits you saw that I based this project on Conan Doyle's short story "The Horror of the Heights." My film is basically that story, minus the last fourth, or so. If you haven't read it please do, it's excellent sci-fi horror.
I had pondered for years on how to realize the story as one of my film projects, and I've always known that no matter how I did it, I would end up with something I'd feel lacking. But adapting the tale as a faux silent movie (which is how films were made when Doyle wrote his story in 1913) could work.
Our intrepid aviator is played by Joakim Strömgren, who is also a member of the special needs people film group I've been running for a few years. He was decked out in a fake leather headgear bought from a dress-up shop, and a Rocketeer replica jacket found on eBay. The rudder he's holding on to is the handle of a dust broom. All his scenes were shot against my greenscreen.
The monoplane is a collection of photos snapped at a Swedish air show. I cut out the plane in Photoshop, skipping all the intricate wires, and adding them back in using the line tool in Photoshop.
All backgrounds were still images of cloudy skies downloaded from Depositphotos. I animated the images using the distortion tools in After Effects, making the clouds move slightly. Some bits of cloud were also cut out and placed in separate layers, so I could add the creatures and the plane between tufts of clouds.
Speaking of the creatures, they were all rather unconventional compared to what I usually make. The giant jellyfish were a combination of photos of real jellyfish combined with tentacles made in Photoshop. All parts were animated in After Effects.
The big bad of the film is another mixed media monster, with several animated parts.
My original plan was to make a big, complex puppet and animate it traditionally. In the end I went for a different approach. I sculpted the head for the monster in medium grade Monster Clay and took a bunch of photos of it with my phone.
This is how the monster looked after tinkering with it a while in Photoshop. The body is photos of an older puppet, the cosmic flute player from my film "Azathoth." I just snipped bits of this puppet, sections with various textures and Frankebstein'ed it together. The big ballon sacs on the monster's back are manipulated photos of jellyfish.
The two big tentacles are just the one tentacle, animated a couple of times. I actually built this prop for an upcoming project, where it'll be attached to a carnivorous plant.
The smaller tentacles on the monster's belly are just the tip of the big tentacled, photographed with my phone and animated in After Effects with the Puppet tool, making them sway slightly. The finished monster is pretty much how it's described in Doyle's story.
The only complete puppet I built for this film is the "air snakes", which is just the one puppet. It's really simple, just a length of 2 mm aluminum wire with a threaded nut attached to one end. A yarn wrapping dabbed with latex, plus some latex details added around the "head" by pressing the snake into clay and painting in details with latex and a pointy tool.
The actual head part was built up with cotton dipped in latex. Fast and simple.
The threaded bolt hidden in the head allowed the puppet to be attached to a simple flying rig. I didn't paint it, since I liked the bare, shiny look of it. It looked pretty good in black and white / sepia tone.
I thought I'd include a couple of artistic visions of the big monster from Doyle's story. It's been around for a while, and you can find it uploaded here and there. There are several really good audiobook versions on YouTube.
There is a weird offshoot from this story that I have to mention too. There is a theory that there are actually giant jellyfish monsters way up there in the various spheres. Some say they have, on occasion, been caught on film, so I'll end this post with a few purported real Horrors of the Heights.
It seems I just can't stay out of the abyss! A couple of months ago I made a video about "Abyssal Horrors", and in this film, I'm back in the deep again. Let's begin by talking about the inspiration for this project. I've always had a keen interest in cryptozoology, as I'm sure I've mentioned before. There's a story allegedly originating from a magazine article, but mostly known from being quoted in Eric Frank Russel's book "Great World Mysteries" (1967.) It tells of Australian diver Christopher Loeb, who in 1953 was testing out a new deep sea diving suit. The tale then unfolds exactly as in my little film. Creepy stuff, but Loeb isn't the only one claiming to have met a gigantic carpet-like sea monster.
Researcher Richard Winer and diver Pat Boatwright claim to have seen a similar huge creature crawling along the ocean floor in 1969 (sketch by Winer above.) They observed the animal from a diving bell in the ocean off Bermuda, and the incident was another brief, but memorable one. I don't doubt for a second that there are still huge unidentified creatures in the depths. As our technology advances, so do our means of exploration, and we will eventually find them if they are out there.
A lot of people commenting on my video on YouTube have mentioned Joseph Payne Brennan's short story "Slime," which features a similar monster that crawls up onto land and is eventually dispatched in true B-movie fashion by the military using flame throwers. This story was published in Weird Tales in 1953, coincidentally the same year as the Loeb observation. I read "Slime" in "Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum", a superb collection of monster tales, though I doubt Hitchcock had anything to do with it except licensing his name and image to the project. There was even an earlier story with a formless carpet creature; "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud, published in the very first issue of Weird Tales in 1923. To those stories, we can also add several shapeless movie monsters, from "The Blob" (1958) to "Caltiki -The Immortal Monster" (1959.) The best iteration of what I'm talking about is probably the oil slick monster from Stephen King's short story "The Raft" (1982), later included in the anthology movie "Creepshow 2" (1987.)
Loeb recalls about his 1953 incident that the carpet creature was huge, about an acre in diameter. I realized I didn't have to show all of it, so I decided my puppet only needed to be half the monster. I figured I'd make it an undulating flat mass, so it was the edge of the puppet that would be animated. Thus an unusual armature was made for it, using a length of 3 mm aluminum wire to create the basic shape of the puppet. At the base of it, I attached a wooden dowel using thermoplastic and secured two threaded nuts with super glue and baking soda to function as tie-downs for my animation stage. As I usually do, I wrapped the aluminum wire in soft yarn and dabbed it with latex, to give the padding materials a rougher surface to grab onto.
The first material applied to the armature was a sheet of very thin polyurethane foam soaked with latex and allowed to dry on a plastic tray. I then pressed the armature down onto the foam and applied a new layer of latex over both foam and armature to seal them together. The excess foam was later cut away.
I wanted the belly, the main part visible on the monster, to have some kind of texture. I decided on a surface of even-sized knobbly scales. To create this texture, I carefully melted the surface on a bit of styrofoam with my heat gun, rasing the many small cells of the material, and then slapped on a blob of hobby plaster over that.
I could then cast patches of latex skin from this plaster texture mold.
The whole surface of the latex-covered foam was covered with such patches, all of them blending together with additional drops of latex here and there.
The back side, actually the top side, of the creature was to be uniformly smooth. Sometimes when I create plaster matrixes for creating skin between armature parts, as in a wing for example, I get a very smooth back side of the plaster. I've saved a few of those plaster slabs and use the back sides for casting smooth latex pieces. I could, of course, apply latex to any smooth surface, but I've found that the plaster makes the latex dry faster and that it's also easier to maintain the thin edges of the latex patches on the plaster. Casting the latex on a slicker surface always makes the edges curl up in a fashion that makes the pieces harder to apply when adding them to a puppet. I simply use a bit of polyurethane foam to sponge on the latex, which in this case was tinted a dark, reddish brown.
To flesh out the puppet a bit more, a four mm bit of foam was attached to the back of the puppet. The foam was then dabbed with latex, so I could attach the latex skin patches.
The latex patches were attached one at a time, overlapping each other slightly. I used liquid latex as a bonding agent.
A final coat of tinted latex was applied to further smooth out the surface.
I wanted the monster to have a fringe around the edge of its body, something mentioned the purported witness encounters. I simply dipped my thumb and index finger I tinted latex and rolled a length of macrame yarn between them.
The yarn was cut up into tiny pieces and stuck to the puppet by grabbing each piece with tweezers, dipping one end into liquid latex, and pressing it down against the edge of the puppet.
The final puppet stands a little over a foot tall and was animated by bending sections of the edge in a uniform manner, creating a series of bulges that were moved along the edge.
I decided early on that the diver in the story would be a puppet, too. Although I had many years ago actually built a full-size diving helmet out of an old earth globe, I didn't want to go through the hassle of finding the rest of the stuff to create the costume and then booking a shoot against a green screen with a friend. For me, it was easier and faster to build a puppet. To make a helmet for my miniature diver I used a crystal ball pressed down a few millimeters into a slab of clay, and I then built a silicone mold around it.
I lined the inside of the mold with metal powder and roto-cast Burry plastic into it, creating a hollow semi-ball.
Other details were made in clay or repurposed from old washers and paint jar lids. another silicone mold was made for these. I could then cast as many copies of these details as I needed. The strange item at the bottom right is a led plate used by deep sea divers to make them sink better.
The porthole windows in the helmet were cast in Onyx resin from the silicone mold and small roundels of transparent plastic were glued onto them to simulate glass. Clear varnish was used as glue.
The collar supporting the helmet was built up using EVA foam, super-glued together. Additional details were achieved using scrapbooking pearls, other small plastic scrap parts, and aluminum wire bits.
The whole helmet was spray-painted with matte black base color. The plastic "windows" were covered by sticky tape to isolate them from the spray paint. Unfortunately, by now the clear varnish used to glue the plastic roundels onto the porthole sections had dried into a white sliver in the front, making it look like a crack in the helmet glass. When the puppet was animated it wasn't so bad and actually looked more like a part of the diver's face.
The armature for the diver was simple enough, using 4 mm aluminum wires held together with thermoplastic. The armature was then padded with 4 mm polyurethane foam.
The diving suit or overalls, or whatever it's called, was made by painting latex onto the matte backside of a cutting mat -I didn't have a flat plaster mold big enough. As you can see, the basic pattern was really simple; just one painted on twice, one for the front and one for the back.
The finished diver was painted with liquid latex and Metallique Brushed Iron metallic wax. The belt is EVA foam, as is the lamp carried by the diver, and his shoes.
The air hose is a discarded air hose from an old airbrush. The sections of rope and the lamp cable are the macrame yarn painted with tinted latex.
I had planned to build a shark puppet and animate it, but I happened to find a stock CG shark among the stock film services I subscribe to. I thought I might as well go with that one, which I did. Eventually, I'm sure I'll make a shark puppet for one of my projects, or for someone else's.
When the carpet monster grabs the shark I used the masking tool in After Effects to make the edge of the carpet fold over the shark. A copied layer of the shark created the shadow cast by the diver's lamp.
Well, that's about it. I provided the narration, which is almost verbatim from Loeb's written account. This short tale, true or not, makes an almost perfect horror short story with inevitable Lovecraftian vibes. I might tackle something similar in the future.
