Nightcrawlers

 This video is another one concerning the so-called unexplained, believe it or not. Quite a few of my viewers comment and suggest that I tackle more cryptozoological subjects, i e strange creatures people claim to have seen.

In the world of paranormal research and cryptozoology, the case of the Fresno Nightcrawlers stands out because of how bizarre it is. Back in 2007, what looks like a pair of white pants walking about on their own was caught on a nighttime security video recording in Fresno, California. A while later two pants, now dubbed "Nightcrawlers" were filmed at night in Yosemite National Park and another bit of footage came out of Poland. The latest sighting is another home surveillance video from Billings, Montana, in 2020. So, are these sightings just crazy hoaxes? Probably. However, nobody has come forward, admitting to the pranks, and nobody has been able to exactly reproduce the Nightcrawlers. 

As you can see the Fresno Nightcrawlers have inspired people to get creative (I'm not the only one.) Besides various t-shirt prints, there are also a number of crafts pieces sold on Etsy and other places. Fun stuff!

As you might expect a stop-motion Nightcrawler is a very simple puppet. The feet are two threaded 3 mm nuts attached to a folded 2 mm aluminum wire with a mix of super glue and baking soda. The head is a small paper ball. I find that having a bit of unjointed aluminum wire makes it wobbly and difficult to animate. To fix that problem I added three toothpick pits along each length of wire and wrapped soft yarn over it all.

The padding of the body was equally simple. A wrapping of soft polyurethane foam to make out the general shape, and then more smooth foam shapes added over that.

I covered the foam with patches of latex patches cast on the smooth backside of an old plaster mold. As you can see the colors of each patch differed a bit since I used leftovers from small batches of tinted latex from other projects.

The finished puppet was dabbed with latex tinted white, applied with a sponge.

We have one human character in the story, a boy played by Hannes whom I've used a few times before. Our young hero spies the Nightcrawlers striding through his back garden, being zapped by a UFO, and nobody will believe him, of course.

Speaking of the UFO, it's really this CG blob, downloaded as a stock video clip from one of my various stock media subscriptions. I created a mask around it in After Effects to get rid of the black background. All backgrounds of the neighborhood locations are also stock images found at DepositPhotos.com.

To have the Nightcrawlers walk behind plants and objects in these backgrounds I created two layers for each background that would be used in such scenes.

The easiest way (for me) to do this is to open the image in Photoshop and use the masking tool to draw over every bit that I want to go in front of my animated puppets.

The masked area can then be copied and saved as an image of its own. In After Effects, I then sandwich the puppets in between these layers.

So that's my Nightcrawler video, short and sweet. There will be more films based on unexplained phenomena, probably the more fun and bizarre subjects.