The House of Bad Dreams

 So, this is another one of my "contemplation" or "mood" shorts, which I thoroughly enjoy making. They're not as simple to do as one might think, since it's easy to overdo things, and just make the video campy. I think I'm guilty of crossing that line a few times in my films. I once did a short called "The Haunted Room", and you could say this is an expansion -we're having a look at the rest of the house.

The house itself is nothing more than one stock video file and a bunch of stock images acquired through my various subscriptions. Through first Photoshop and then After Effects, I can work with the images to achieve the look I want for each shot.

Here's one example. This exterior photo of an abandoned castle has been altered by cutting out the sky in Photoshop and placing the image on a transparent alpha layer. In After Effects, I then add a layer behind the castle, a photo of a stormy sky, which is then manipulated into becoming a moving image by applying and manipulating the "Mesh" distortion tool. 

In the same way, the ghosts are added in their own AE layers using a mix of stock videos and images. Changing the transparency setting on the ghost layers helps make them a more subtle element. I also add an adjustment layer on top of all layers where I add a filter to change the colors and create that dreamy, fuzzy look. I hope all of this isn't all gibberish to you. Suffice it to say, if you manage to get a decent grasp on After Effects, you have a wonderful toolbox at your fingertips. I access AE through an Adobe subscription, which one of my Swedish book collaborators kindly pays for.

However, this shot is a little bit different from the others. The whole background is a photo of a dilapidated house, like the other settings in the film, but the ghosts are originally two of my older puppets.

It's these two guys, whom I have used many times before in my film projects. Once they both had full heads of grey hair, but moths have eaten away all of it. Though the ghost to the left moves, he's not animated via the miracle of stop-motion. I snapped photos of the puppets arranged in their positions for the tableau, extracted them from their backgrounds in Photoshop, and added them to the background photo in AE. Besides erasing parts of their heads and adding smoke stacks (digital stock footage) over these areas, I also animated the arms and hands of the left ghost via the AE "Puppet" tool to make them shake. With the metallic grinding of the soundtrack looming over everything, I felt that I, unplanned, managed to create a sort of David Lynch-like atmosphere to the scene.

I did add a bit of stop-motion in the shape of two demonic pics having a discussion about something. Demonic pigs and cursed houses seem to go like hand in glove. The Amityville Horror house has a diabolical porcine in it, as does the haunted derelict home in Edward Lucas White's "The House of the Nightmare." The stately but crumbling "House on the Borderland" by William Hope Hodgson is positively swarming with pig monsters. So, in short, no haunted home should go without one. The two pigs here are actually just the one puppet, and again, it's one I've used before. It was built and animated for a very brief shot in my film "Imps." I thought it would be ok to recycle it and have it do a bit more (like playing two characters.) Though I do have a full post about "Imps," I'll do a quick retread here of the pig-making process.

I sculpted the head and torso in medium-grade Monster Clay, and cast a latex skin from a dental plaster mold created over the clay.

A very simple aluminum wire armature did the job. It's still strong enough and versatile to carry the puppet through many hours of animation.

The latex skin was partially padded with thin bits of polyurethane foam. Aluminum wires go into the ears and the jaw. Also, reflective pearls were glued into the eye sockets.

The foam muscle padding was quite detailed, though most of the focus of the viewer would be on the latex torso, which was attached to the padded body using liquid latex as a bonding material.

Reddish tinted latex was applied as a base paint, with a purple-greyish latex paint dry brushed over that, with strands of fake fur added as bristles to the neck, and cotton/latex tusks stuck into the mouth. Saliva and snot were created with Glossy Accents scrapbooking plastic.

That's about it. There's no narration in this one. The music is plucked from the YouTube sound library, plus choice sound effects from various subscriptions. The end credit song, "Tickle Me, Timothy," is a little ditty I found on Wikimedia.

In the Jungle of the Air

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.

 

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.

Forbidden Words

I sometimes contribute to the various publications of Graeme Philips, which all have Lovecraftian content of some kind. In the booklet "Forbidden Knowledge" I found the poem "Forbidden Words" by Frank Coffman and decided that it would be a perfect addition to my cosmic horror selection on my YouTube channel. After I got Frank's permission to adapt his poem, I set to it. 

I wanted to do something that had the atmosphere and look of the AIP Roger Corman Poe adaptations, which meant over-embellishing certain colors, using bombastic music, and a gothic setting with overdressed rooms. 

I was briefly contemplating finding a real location for this, but I quickly realized that wherever I went, I'd have to augment the place in After Effects anyway to get the look I wanted. So instead I went with completely digital 2D backgrounds, composed in Photoshop. I mainly used a bunch of stock images found on depositphotos.com, with additional elements added.

For the main character, a man searching for taboo knowledge (aren't they always?), I recruited my stalwart actor Andreas Pettersson, whom you've seen in a number of productions by now.

I shot all of his scenes in his living room in front of a green screen. By now we have this process pretty much down to a T.

The occult book our hero reads from is just an old book -a cookbook if I remember correctly- with a printed-out spread placed into it. The pages are a Photoshop mash-up of parts from a 19th-century astrological calendar.

In the end, our protagonist conjures up a demonic entity, and I could've gone with a number of creatures, but for some reason, I decided to go with a hovering skull. I had a bag of plastic Halloween bones lying around and I thought the included skull had the right dimensions.

As props bought from dress-up shops often are, this skull was made from rather flimsy plastic, and I had to reinforce it by mixing a batch of Burro casting plastic (from FormX in Holland) and lining the insides of the skull with it. After that, I cut loose the jaw and re-attached it to the skull with aluminum wire hinges. In the eye sockets, I placed two tentacles made with aluminum wires wrapped with soft yarn and dabbed with latex, and a long tongue made the same way. The tongue was rolled up and pushed up into the roof of the mouth when not lolling out to be animated. I placed screws on the inside of the skull to help attach the tentacles, the tongue, and the jaw joints. A wooden dowel was also attached to the rear of the skull as a support rod.

The whole skull was then covered with a mix of cotton and latex. This created an organic-looking surface and a base for creating more elaborate shapes.

Using more cotton and latex and using a pointy dental tool I built up a textured skin, with bumps and wrinkles.

I also made teeth with the cotton / latex mix.

I also used yarn to create some of the shapes. This whole procedure is pretty quick and very economical since you don't have to make any molds, but since the latex/cotton mix dries to a sturdy leathery quality it's only applicable to projects where flexibility isn't necessary. using this technique on a full stop-motion puppet would not work at all.

Here's the finished skull before the paint was applied.

I started off with a mix of latex and red pigments sponged on with a bit of foam. This created a very organic-looking base.

Other colors were mixed the same way and dry brushed on with more sponges (bits of foam from an old cushion). I used I light layer of white acrylic paint over everything to get a glowing effect. Lastly, blue acrylic airbrush paint was hand-applied with a brush to offset the other colors and augment the psychedelic effect.

Here's the finished skull puppet. The stand is simply held fast with a glue clamp when animating the puppet.

This is how it looks when piecing together the various elements that make up one of my monster scenes. In this case, I have the animated skull in the front layer, and behind it, I've added layers of smoke and a cloudy luminous background. I've also added a part of the billowing smoke pillar over the skull to create a sort of widow's peak coming out of the top of the head.

The skull only makes a brief appearance, but that's the only thing it should do. This was a very quick project but I'm quite happy with it. Stuff like this is perfect for experimenting with creating mood, which is one of my favorite challenges.