The Flower Devil

This film was long in the making. I think I started dabbling with the puppets almost two years ago. Then it just got put on the back burner, mostly because I had a bit of a hard time figuring out how everything should look. That happens sometimes. In such a case it's better to leave it alone for a while and get back to the project every now and then. Eventually, it'll be finished.

This film is adapted from a prose poem by Clark Ashton Smith, a contemporary friend of H P Lovecraft and Robert E Howard, and a very prolific author and contributor of what we now call horror, fantasy, and science fiction. CAS (as he's lovingly abbreviated) had a penchant for taking our good old planets in our solar system and turning them into very exotic locations. In this case, it's about Saturn.

CAS was also a very prolific artist, and I took inspiration from one of his påaintings called "The Martian" for my design of the Saturnian people. I liked the various wiggly protuberances and the pear-shaped body.

I only did the sculpting for one Saturnian, and I only did the head, relying on various texture molds to make up the look for the rest of the body. My rather startled-looking Saturnian was sculpted in medium-grade Monster Clay.

The head was cast in tinted latex reinforced with a cotton/latex mix. The eyes are mother-of-pearl-colored plastic pearls, with a red ring painted around the hole that goes through them (the pupil) as the only decoration. 1 mm aluminum wires were inserted through the nose and chin areas, then wrapped in soft yarn and dabbed with tinted latex. A single 2 mm aluminum wire allowed the lower lip to be animated.  A blob of Polymorph thermoplastic holds everything in place inside the head.

I made four Saturnians, looking slightly different from each other depending on how I shaped their heads when propping them up with the cotton/latex mix and later the thermoplastic. Their armatures are 3 mm aluminum wires, padded with thick soft yarn, dabbed with latex. 4 mm threaded nuts are inserted into the feet.

The bodies were padded with polyurethane foam and turned into a very simple shape.

I used various older skin texture molds to cast patches of tinted latex skin, which I applied to the body using liquid latex. I forgot to say that I also sculpted a flat ribbed texture piece for the torso and the neck.

There would be four Saturnian characters; one king, one scholar, and two gardeners. Since the king's garden had turned into a very dangerous place, the gardeners had turned more into guards. I figured a gladiator-like harness would do the trick, and I turned to a plaster mold I made many years ago, featuring a selection of belts and other leather details, some plain and some with studs. I cast a bunch of them in tinted latex.

Here's the finished harness. The metal details are silver hobby paint. I only did one harness (I was too lazy to make two) held together with a single brass fastener, which meant that I could take it off one puppet, and put it on another.

I gave the gardeners a couple of nasty-looking garden tools, based on late medieval pole weapons. The pole section is made from sushi restaurant chopsticks. The blades are thin cardboard covered with Burro resin and then painted with black and silver hobby paints.

The king's robe is made from kitchen tissue paper dabbed with latex on a plastic tray. When the latex had dried, more latex tinted a dark bluish grey was stippled on using a foam sponge, and then latex with a silver powder from Kryolan was finally added.

I drew out a simple pattern for the robe on stationary paper and duplicated it on the backside of the latex/tissue paper material.

I cut out two parts for the robe and joined them together with liquid latex.

I wanted some swirly patterns on the robe and used a glued saturated with gold powder bought in a scrapbooking shop. When the glue dried it remained semi-transparent.

The crown is just a short bit of gold-colored textile fringe super-glued down around the top of the king's head.

The gold details are latex pieces cast in silicone molds taken from large buttons and other pieces. the big belt buckle is a piece cast from a detail on the scabbard of a Persian dagger that I own.

The small rings on the nose and chin tentacles are bits of metal wire. 

The sword wielded by the king was originally made for a puppet from my 2007 project "The King Who Sought Immortality." It's made from a wood tongue depressor and plumber's epoxy. 

The scholar's leather tunic is made from latex cast in a plaster skin texture mold made some years ago. The metal parts are, like with the king, latex pieces cast in silicone molds taken from various metal buttons and decorations.

The eyepiece was made from bits of an old plastic pen, with a small acrylic lens attached to it. The headpiece is actually the head from a puppet I never made. I cast it as a hollow latex piece and pressed it down over the top of the puppet's head.

The belt is a silver-colored textile border that's semi-flexible.

The big metal plate on the gardener's chest is another silicone mold latex casting. It's possible to cast latex in a silicone mold, but the material will take longer to dry since the silicone can't absorb the moisture of the latex like plaster will do.

The flower devil itself is a Photoshop mix-up. I used a flower generated with Adobe AI and a trunk picked from a photo of a palm tree. The web-like foliage are photos of corals isolated in Photoshop, and animated in After Effects using key frames. The vine-covered alcove is a mix of stock photo and AI-generated elements. The column the flower is standing on is a Photoshop mix of images of various antique items. Inside the flower you can see a rotating pattern of black and glowing reds. That's a CD animation of an abstract shape I found over at Storyblocks.com. I earlier used this animation to make a UFO in my film "Nightcrawlers."

One of the gardeners is eaten by a giant carnivorous plant, a classic sci-fi trope that I wanted to include in the film.

The whole scene and the look of the plant were inspired by this Amazing Stories cover by Frank R Paul. 

The medium-grade Monster Clay can be hard to shape when it's cool, so I always warm it up with a heat gun to soften it and make it easier to use.

I do have two big piles of Monster Clay, but I always use it for a few projects at the same time, so I try to not use up all of it at once. I took an empty silicone container, covered it with clingwrap, and applied the soft clay over that.

The mouth of the plant had to be pretty big to close around the gardener puppet, but there's also a certain point where a puppet becomes so big it's hard to handle it during animation. I sculpted the whole of the mouth and made it as symmetrical as possible. In the end, I'd only use a section of the sculpture.

The sculpture was shaped and smoothed out with various loop- and scraping tools. The mouth splits into three sections when it opens up. Each section has a lip of sorts, added to the sculpture here using a long thin sausage of clay.

Here's one of the three mouth sections ready for more details to be added.

To create an organic sort-of pattern of shapes I made a bunch of clay blobs with flat backgrounds.

These were attached to the big clay sculpture, and a loop tool was used to smooth out the transition between the added details and the main sculpture.

To smooth out the shapes further I used my heat gun to melt the surface of the sculpture.

More organic details are added; I've rolled out long, thin clay shapes, cut them in half, and pressed them down in a pattern between the blobs.

Here's how the side of the plant mouth turned out. I've added some wrinkles around the edges of the mouth's "lips."

To save on materials (mainly plaster) but also space in my workshop (not having to house a huge plaster mold) I'm just casting the one side I sculpted. Three sides will be produced from this one mold and joined together to create the finished puppet. I built up a thin clay wall around the edge of the mouth to contain the plaster.

The first layer of plaster was painted on with a brush to minimize the risk of air pockets. When I was happy with that, the rest of the plaster was poured on, filling out the inside of the clay wall. I used a dental plaster that's very durable and reproduces details very well.

The mold turned out pretty well. All the clay was removed using various tools.

Tinted latex was sponged into the mold using a bit of polyurethane. Four layers were applied.

To make the top end of each mouth section sturdier and to give it a more fleshy feel, I soaked thin pieces of polyurethane in latex and pressed them into the mold.

The bottom third of the latex casting was reinforced with a cotton/latex mix, making it very sturdy and slightly leathery.

Having pulled the latex casting from the mold, I added a 3 mm aluminum wire wrapped in yarn to the edge of the top of the mouth section using liquid latex as a bonding material. The aluminum wire will allow me to animate the mouth of the plant opening.

The aluminum wire needs a sturdy base to attach to. This was achieved by mixing resin and pouring it into the bottom of the mouth casting. You can see two white blobs holding down the two ends of the aluminum wire. Those are thermoplastic used to attach the wire to the latex, but the resin really cements it in place and makes the base of the mouth very sturdy. I'm using Q-tips to help move around the resin where it needs to go.

Having cast and finished the three mouth pieces I needed a base to which I could attach and join them. I used a ball-shaped plastic light fixture and added a mix of latex and cotton over the top half of it.

When the latex/cotton mix had dried I could easily pull it off the light fixture.

The three mouth pieces were attached to the latex/cotton semi-globe with hot melt glue.

Tinted latex was used to cover the seams between each mouth section.

Blobs of latex were then added to create a texture over the seams.

To help the folding top halves of the mouth keep their shapes better I attached 1/2 inch soft polyurethane pieces to the inside of the mouth using contact cement.

The foam pieces were painted with tinted latex, allowing each layer to dry before applying more latex. Three layers of latex was used.

I wanted the inside of the mouth to be covered with small teeth. I made a bunch of these by dipping small bits of cotton in latex and rolling the cotton between my fingers. With pliers I placed the teeth on the latex surface of the mouth's inside, using liquid latex as glue.

To add more stability to the plant's head I poured more resin into the bottom area, which melded all attached sections together.

The trunk for the plant was made with two 4 mm aluminum wires folded over and bundled together, wrapped tightly with yarn dabbed with latex.

Soft foam was wrapped around the aluminum wires, and held in place with contact cement. Latex was then sponged on over the whole foam surface.

Tinted latex skins cast in an old wrinkly skin texture mold were added to the foam padding, using the liquid latex as a bonding agent.

Going with the Paul cover illustration, the trunk of the plant is covered with a scaly pattern, similar to a pine cone. I sculpted a selection of scales on a flat surface.

I cast the scales in latex reinforced with cotton and latex using a plaster mold created over my clay sculpture. I never counted how many scales I cast, but I made a bunch.

Started at the top of the trunk I glued down the scales with latex, overlapping them until the whole surface was covered.

The plant needed a tie-down for my animation stage, so I added a 4 mm t-nut, fastening it to the aluminum wires using super glue and baking soda.

From the top of the trunk there's a bunch if long leaves hanging down. I figured I could animate these to add more life to the puppet, so I sculpted a single leaf in clay.

For this sculpture I used cheaper hobby plaster to create the mold. It's a bit softer than the dental plaster, but usually reproduce details with the same effectiveness. It does set up quicker though, so you have to work faster with it.

Tinted latex reinforced with tissue paper was applied to the mold to create six leaves.

Each leaf has a length of 3 mm aluminum wire covered with yarn and latex going down the middle of its backside.

The long tongue was made from a single 4 mm aluminum wire, with a ground down tip ending in a very pointy end. The aluminum wire was wrapped with yarn and painted with latex tinted red. The tongue was attached to the top of the trunk, and pulled through a hole in the bottom of the mouth part.

The mouth got a final touch-up using acrylic paints and an airbrush.

The mouth part was attached to the trunk using thermoplastic. The tongue was rolled up and hidden at the bottom of the mouth. It turned out to be strong enough to hold the gardener puppet aloft without any aid.

One gardener escapes from the carnivorous plant, but is accosted by the tendrils of other curious flora.

I only built one tentacle and animated it a few times to make a bundle of them moving about. The tentacle was a 4 mm aluminum wire, with a sharpened tip (like the tongue) wrapped in soft yarm and dabbed with tinted latex. The small buds growing out of the tentacle are bits of yarn dipped in latex and folded over.

The garden backgrounds were created in Adobe's AI tool Firefly. I created a bunch of images and revised them in Photoshop to suit my intentions, and to create several layers that could be moved around in After Effects to create panning and zoom camera effects. I used CG animations from Storyblocks to simulate pollen and dust gliding through the air.

The inside of the king's palace was a selection of CG stock images I found over at Depositphotos.com. I added moving flames to the torches on the walls, using stock animated flames.

I should also mention that the music for the film was made by my Italian buddy Marco Zanelli. I really enjoy tackling Clark Ashton Smith's alien world stories, as they're packed with wonderful details and also allow for my own interpretations. More CAS videos are in the pipeline.