Shepherds of the Moon

 "Shepherds of the Moon" is, of course, based on "The First Men in the Moon" (1901) by H. G. Wells. Specifically, it's inspired by a section where the two astronauts discover giant slug-like creatures being tended to by tiny insectoid beings. Though Ray Harryhausen did include such a sequence for the 1964 adaptation of Wells' novel, using a caterpillar-like stop-motion puppet, I always wanted to make my own version. It felt like a fun project to tackle, and it was; though, I couldn't have anticipated the hubbub it caused when I posted it on YouTube.

Let's start with one of the puppets: the moon calf. Wells describes it thusly in the novel:

"First of all impressions was its enormous size; the girth of its body was some fourscore feet, its length perhaps two hundred. Its sides rose and fell with its laboured breathing. I perceived that its gigantic, flabby body lay along the ground, and that its skin was of a corrugated white, dappling into blackness along the backbone. But of its feet we saw nothing. I think also that we saw then the profile at least of the almost brainless head, with its fat-encumbered neck, its slobbering omnivorous mouth, its little nostrils, and tight shut eyes. (For the mooncalf invariably shuts its eyes in the presence of the sun.) We had a glimpse of a vast red pit as it opened its mouth to bleat and bellow again; we had a breath from the pit, and then the monster heeled over like a ship, dragged forward along the ground, creasing all its leathery skin, rolled again, and so wallowed past us, smashing a path amidst the scrub, and was speedily hidden from our eyes by the dense interlacings beyond."

 I’ve said this many a time, but the mooncalf IS my biggest puppet to date, at 28 inches from snout to rectum. This puppet hides a few tricks I haven’t used before, for example, a slightly retractable head, inspired by the neck of the snapping turtle. We’ll actually start with creating the skin texture this time around.

This is a piece of acrylic wallpaper that I found in my uncle's basement. I thought it had a lovely organic texture that would look very nice on one of my puppets. It's perfect for a larger-size puppet, so I picked it for my mooncalf. 

I placed the wallpaper on this plastic tray, and I held it down along its edges using monster clay softened with a heat gun. When the clay is this mushy, it's also a bit sticky and adheres to both the tray and the wallpaper. When the wallpaper was secured to the tray, I sprayed it down with a release agent called Ease Release. When that's done, I spread it out with a soft brush, and then I gave the paper another spray and let it dry. That'll keep the plaster I'm using to make a mold from sticking to the wallpaper.

I used ordinary, cheap hobby plaster, which can usually be found at any paint supply shop. I used a brush to spread out the plaster and made sure the material lay pressed against the wallpaper surface without creating any air pockets. Then I gave the tray a good shake to smooth out the surface. When the plaster is still moist and still a bit warm, it's the perfect time to remove the wallpaper from the mold. 

As you can perhaps see, there are tops and valleys on the mold, which comes from the wallpaper reacting to the plaster getting hot as it cures, as well as extracting moisture from the plaster mix. This unevenness is no worry since it won't be visible on the latex skins when they're attached to the puppet.

I'm applying tinted latex using a sponge. I want the mooncalf to be a pale grey/blue color, so I'm using a purple base for its skin to imply that there are blood vessels under the bluish skin. Here I've made a bunch of textured skin bits, which are first dusted down with talcum powder, and then I just pull them off the mold's plaster surface. This plaster that I'm using has a semi-glossy surface, which makes it quite easy to remove any latex piece you cast in it. 

This is the main shape of the moon calf's head and neck, sculpted in medium-grade Monster Clay. 

I'm cheating a bit here, pressing down monster clay into the plaster skin texture mold, and thus producing a thin piece of clay with the wallpaper's texture.

I can then press the textured clay strip onto my clay sculpture, and Voilà, I have quickly reproduced the wallpaper texture in my clay sculpture.

With various tools, I can then smooth the transition between the applied pieces and also add a few blobs of clay to add extra texture. I mainly used a loop tool to detail the sculpture, as well as a smidge of vaseline to smooth out the shapes. 

Here's the finished head, ready to be covered with a plaster mold. The eyes are just small plastic beads. I'll replace them later with eyes especially made for this puppet. 

The plaster was first added with a brush, again to avoid air pockets. It seems a lot of people throw away their brushes when they've been clogged up with plaster, but I just rinse the brush in water. I've used this particular brush for five years or more. 

After brushing, I simply applied larger chunks of plaster and smoothed out the surface with a paint knife. When the plaster had cooled, I removed the mold from its base on my sculpting turntable. I then dug out the clay with a larger loop tool.

After the plaster mold had been completely cleaned out, I could add tinted latex to create a hollow skin of the head. I poured in all of the colored latex, and I then used a cotton Q-tip to move around the latex inside the mold. I added five layers of latex, and when that had dried, I added a dusting of talcum powder to dull the shine on the latex. Then it was just a matter of pulling and twisting the latex loose from the mold.

There were some snippets of clay left at the end of the trunk that I couldn't get to. This resulted in the nostrils looking jagged, but this was easily fixed by adding liquid latex to the bad bits on the latex casting. To make the head sturdier, I added cotton dipped in latex to certain areas of the inside of the head casting, but NOT the areas where the skin needed to flex and stretch.

I also made a pair of feet in the same way as the head. I gave my mooncalf only two legs, though a pair powerful enough to drag the massive body along the ground. I didn't add any hooves or toenails to the foot sculpture, but I will add those to the latex castings at a later stage.

This 2 mm aluminum wire will become the jaw on the mooncalf. But first, I need to pad it by wrapping soft yarn around it.

The yarn is then dabbed with liquid latex to fix it in place. I also add liquid latex to the inside of the jaw using a Q-tip. This latex will act as a bonding agent between the latex face skin and the padded aluminum wire.

This is one of the aluminum wire armatures for the legs. The tie-down is a threaded 4 mm t-nut attached to a 3 mm aluminum wire using baking soda and super glue.

 I'm also using polymorph thermo plastic to build up what will become a hoof of sorts. I'm using a dental tool to help shape the thermoplastic.

Ordinary kitchen tissue paper was crumbled up into oval shapes and then dabbed with latex. These paper blobs became two vestigial toes on each foot. I used liquid latex to glue the toenails into place. The plastic hoof needed a bit of texturing, so I applied contact cement to it, and I then added thin wisps of cotton, pressing them into the glue. The cotton was then dabbed with latex, and a pointy tool was used to add some texture.

It's time to start bulking up the puppet, beginning with the legs. Since the shape of the animal is very blobby, I just wrap strips of 5 mm polyurethane foam around the leg armature to build up a soft shape. The foam wrapping is dabbed with latex, and the edge of the latex foot is drawn up over the foam like a sock. The big fat folds around the mooncalf's head need a bit of propping up, so they won't go completely flat when they're pressed together during animation. The simple solution is to fill them up with soft polyurethane foam. A foam piece is dabbed with latex and quickly dried with a heat gun. Then the latex head fold is also dabbed, and the foam is pressed into it.  

At the beginning of this blog post, I mentioned that the head of the moon calf can retract a bit into the body. The armature solution for this motion is super simple. I folded a length of 3 mm aluminum wire twice, turning it into a 6 mm wire. I laid 2 bits of steel rods along the length of the wire, securing them with a wrapping of yarn. By doing this, I now have an armature section with three joints that can be folded together or pulled out into a longer shape. 

The armature is pieced together using thermoplastic and bits of wood. I've added a big blob of thermoplastic inside the top of the head, where both the aluminum wires operating the trunk, as well as the neck armature, are attached.

Besides the two feet, there is one other tie-down point placed about three-fourths down the back of the body. I've folded up a long 4 mm aluminum wire into a wavy pattern, filling out the body vertically. The third tie-down is attached at the end of this wire. The last bit of wire is wrapped in thick yarn and will become the tail-end.

To help the folded aluminum wire maintain its shape while I'm building up the puppet, I'm wrapping the ends of each fold with an elastic tape.

The poor mooncalf doesn't have any eyes yet, but we're getting to them now. Here I have an ordinary sheet of printing paper containing a bunch of eyes collected in Photoshop, and I'm adding drops of UV resin over a pair of them. The resin is cured with a UV light. 

The eyes now have their own little lenses, and I'm cutting them out with a pair of very sharp hobby scissors, which I, by the way, have used to do all the latex cutting and trimming for this puppet.

Since my sculpted eyes had very flat eyelids, I'm improving on these simply by gluing the resin eyes over them using contact cement, and then I add bits of yarn and cotton soaked in latex to create new, heavier-looking eyelids.

To create big fleshy folds for the rest of the mooncalf's body, I rolled up bits of 5 mm foam, adding contact cement every once in a while to keep each roll tightly closed.

But these foam sausages aren't the only padding in this puppet. Here I have, as you can plainly see, a bundle of bubble wrap. I'm actually going to use this as padding inside the puppet. 

I cut bits from it, which I then rolled up into smaller bundles. This may look like stiff plastic, but the bubble wrap is actually quite soft, and I only roll up the bits loosely. The 5 mm foam was cut into strips and wrapped around the bubblewrap, securing each strip with contact cement. So, here I now have the two foam/bubblewrap bundles that will be placed on each side of the main body armature.

Again, I'm using contact cement to hold it all together. I'm adding smaller bits of foam to the top and the bottom to make sure the padding is secure. 

The ends of the body armature wire are wrapped in foam. I add more bits of foam to smooth out the shapes of the body. The rolls of foam I made are wrapped around the body.

Remember those skin patches I cast at the beginning of this blog post? It's time to slap them onto the foam. I gave the belly a different texture, akin to armored skin, since that part of the mooncalf's body is basically taking the weight of the entire body and is also dragged along the ground. I used an older skin texture mold for this -it's actually skin texture I sculpted for a reconstruction of Harryhausen's Ymir monster, which I recently built for a client. In the red circle, you can see the back-end tie-down (with a threaded bolt in it).

These little things are going to be horn-like outgrowths on the back of the mooncalf. They are sculpted in clay, and a plaster mold was created over them. The row of smaller bumps at the top is a row of teeth.

 They were cast using latex dipped in cotton and then attached to the back using liquid latex. Additional bumps and warts were made by dipping a pointy tool into tinted latex and then poking the puppet with the tool, leaving a drop of latex on the skin.

When all details are dry and secured to the puppet, I'm starting to apply tinted latex with a sponge to give the puppet an overall unifying color. When that base color is dry, I can drybrush the skin with a lighter color to create that pale look I'm going for.

Using red and purple acrylic airbrush colors, I'm adding a softer look to the deeper, darker areas of the puppet. To soften the look even more, I then go over the same areas, adding a very light pale blue. The bumps on the back are also airbrushed. By the way, I'm using Warpaints airbrush colors. For the bumps, for example, I'm adding black, and then a color called Rough Iron, topped with Plate Mail Metal.

Neck extended.

Neck retracted.

And here's the finished beastie. The body was given a spray of dull, fixating varnish used for Warhammer models to really make the airbrushed colors stick. It's a big puppet, but thankfully, it'll mostly be lying down and chewing, so it should be fairly easy to animate, though making really small increments of movement to make a puppet move slower IS a challenge in itself. 

Now over to the inhabitants of the Moon, or the Selenites, as Wells called them (after the Greek moon goddess Selene). In the book, these little guys are described as having whip-like arms and a cylindrical body case. "The form of his head was hidden by his enormous many-spiked helmet—we discovered afterwards that he used the spikes for prodding refractory mooncalves—and a pair of goggles of darkened glass, set very much at the side, gave a bird-like quality to the metallic apparatus that covered his face. He carried himself upon short legs that, wrapped though they were in warm coverings, seemed to our terrestrial eyes inordinately flimsy." Besides these shepherd Selenites, there are numerous other subspecies, each having a very niche purpose in the Selenite civilization.

My shepherd selenite is based on this description, and I’m also using an illustration I did some years ago as a reference. 

I’ll be using these toy parts to create the head and the body. Maybe you recognize it? It’s from a family game where you build a bug bit by bit.

In Sweden, it’s a louse, and in Britain it’s a beetle. Over the years, and many moves between homes, my bug game started to lose bits, including the box. I’ve saved what I still have, but since it’s not enough to play the game anymore, I’m using the remaining parts for puppet projects. 

I’m picking apart all the sections for now. They’ll be assembled again eventually. The head of the bug will become the head of the selenite, though turned backwards.

I’m using an extension for my Dremel tool here to drill holes in the bug's head. I can’t recommend these extensions enough. They make working with smaller objects so much easier.

One thing to remember, though: If you have a Dremel drill, only use a Dremel extension. Other brands will not work. Dremel products cost more, but it's probably also the best brand on the hobby market.

For the spikes on the helmet, I’m using simple wooden grill sticks, cutting off the pointy tops. I then sanded them down to an even sharper point using a sanding pad. I gave the whole head a light sanding with a very fine-grit sandpaper. I went over all the plastic parts with this sandpaper, roughing up the surface on each part to make both glue and paint stick better. Each spike was pressed into a hole. And then I apply a mix of super glue and baking soda on the inside of the head, fixing the spikes to the head. I keep adding glue and baking soda until all spikes are secured in place.

A 2 mm aluminum wire is added for the neck. Again, a mix of super glue and baking soda holds the wire stuck against the plastic surfaces.

Two 2 mm aluminum wires are used for the arms, with 1 mm wires for the fingers. A blob of super glue and baking soda bonds the fingers to the arms.

Cotton crochet yarn is then wrapped around the arms to give them some shape. Sewing string is used to cover the fingers. 

I also used the crochet yarn to build up shapes along the arms. Tinted latex is then applied to seal the yarn and create a smooth surface.

I am something of a hoarder when it comes to small plastic bits and bobs. You never know when they’re needed. For this puppet, I used small plastic jewelry parts to cover up holes in the bug's body, where the legs from the bug game would've gone. Another tiny jewelry bit became the pelvis of the puppet.

Another 2 mm aluminum wire goes through the puppet’s body and out the lower end, and through the "pelvis". This wire becomes the legs. The looped end of the wire inside the body is secured with the glue/ baking soda mix. 

More yarn dabbed with latex is wrapped aroud the leg wires, as well as the neck, and a short piece of aluminum wire which forms a snout on the head. The feet are 3 mm t-nuts embedded in blobs of glue and baking soda. The white piece at the front of the face is a bit of thin EVA foam.

These two UV resin domes will be used as goggles for the helmet. Here’s how they’re made.

I use a ready-made silicone mold and I add UV resin into the dome shapes. Now, I’m here making eyes for a different puppet, but the technique is exactly the same for the goggle lenses. I add a bit of resin pigment; red in this case, black for the goggles. The whole mold is the placed under a UV lamp. I use the kind made for nailwork. After the mold has been blasted with UV lights, I turn it over, to help cure the resin from the opposite side. Since the silicone mold is semi-transparent, the UV light shines through. To make sure the resin is properly cured, I repeat the process two more times, so six rounds in total under the nailpolish solarium.

To create a uniform surface for painting the puppet, I apply black AK primer. I’m not attaching the eyes yet, as I don’t want to risk spoiling them with blobs of paint.

Next, I used an airbrush and Warpaints silver paint to lightly cover the puppet’s body. I then used a color called Burnt Iron to add detail and break up the pristine silvery surface. I glued on the goggle glasses using hot melt glue. To make the goggle domes follow the curve of the face part, I’ve added an extra edge made from Miliput epoxy paste to one side of each dome. I was planning on finding a suitable piece of cloth to create the linnen-like coverings on the selenite’s legs. However I found that pretty much everything I tried was too thick or too stiff. Instead I just made my own leg wrappings out of latex. The latex was applied on the smooth back of an old plaster mold using a foam sponge. After three layers had dried I could remove the latex, and cut it into strips. I used a little dab of latex as glue. 

The shepherd selenites also use a sort of cattle prod. To make the prodding end of this tool, I cut a plastic shower curtain ring in half, and attached the eyes from the original beetle game bug as the base of the contact points. A cut-off needle goes through the bug eye into the half curtain ring. I also added two tiny metal washers as extra details. More bits from the bag of knick-knacks are added and the nail holding all of it together goes into the prod’s handle, which, as it happens, is one of those grill sticks I cut the top off of.

The finished shepherd selenite was easy to animate and control. As he’s mostly made of of hollow plastic, he’s very light.

The backgrounds were made with AI using Adobe Firefly. Doing the backdrops that way created an artificial look that I thought wasn't half bad. I cut up the AI-generated images in Photoshop, and used the bits I liked to create images that could be layered in After Effects. I was quite happy with how it all looked -puppets combined with the AI images.

However, my viewers passionately disagreed. I was pummelled with negative comments telling me I should be ashamed for using the dreaded AI, etc. So I did a little poll on my YouTube channel, and here's how that went:

Now, I do listen to my audience, so I have stayed away from using AI in my subsequent projects.

The book has been adapted a few times in various ways. Most famous is probably the aforementioned Ray Harryhausen’s film version from 1964. There are three types of Selenite in Harryhausen’s creature shots. One sub-species is played by children in costumes, then there’s another group of Selenites represented by three stop-motion puppets, and lastly the grand lunar leader, another puppet. Harryhausen also animated an aggressive moon calf, eventually killed and eaten by the Selenites. 

In 2010, writer and actor Mark Gatiss made a TV version, which omits the moon calves, but gives us a larger variety of Selenites, all of them computer generated. 

Lastly, in 2017, animator Brett Piper made an all-stop-motion short film adaptation, which is well worth seeking out. It can be found among the extras on the DVD for his movie "Outpost Earth."

I think that about does it for "Shepherds of the Moon", but as always, if you have any questions, just pop them in the comments for this post.