Carcosa Project: The Byakhee

Among the many creatures dreamt up by author H P Lovecraft we find the Byakhee, which is probably one of his weirdest. In his short story "The Festival" they appear as mounts for a strange secret sect, and are described as hybrids with features from such diverse things as bats, moles, birds and decomposing humans. One of Lovecraft's protégés August Derleth also wrote about Byakhees in his story "The Gable Window", but his version of the monster is easier to grasp. I'm building a Byakhee puppet for my video version of Lin Carter's poem "The King In Tatters", and his version of the beast is something in between Lovecraft and Derleth. The sketch above is my concept of the Carter Byakhee, and my guide for the puppet.

 Medium grade Monster Clay was my material of choice for creating the head. "Black-furred and iron-beaked, with eyes of Hell" is how Carter describes it. I tried to get something that looked loathsome and I took familiar features and did something different with them. Therefore I, for example, put the eyes on the topside of the head, like a bottom-dwelling fish. The head was mostly sculpted with tiny loop tools.

The head is cast in a one-piece mold, with the mouth cavity filled up with clay. I try to make most of my molds in one piece. A clay wall is built up around it to hold the plaster around the sculpture.

Can't remember what the small cast is, but the bigger one is the Byakhee head. I'm using pink dental stone, which creates very durable molds, and which are also easy to cast latex into.

The other body part I sculpted was the underside of the body. Again I'm using Monster Clay medium grade, and various sculpting tools, among them a rubber-tipped tool.

My aim with this sculpture was to create an amalgam of different textures, making the body look like it's a hybrid of very different creatures. The sculpture is actually upside down. The warty spiky "back" will be the monster's gut.

The head has been cast in black-tinted latex, and attached to an aluminum wire armature using Friendly Plastic thermoplastic. Two reflective read beads are inserted into the latex skin and attached by pressing the soft plastic up behind them, until they stick as the plastic cools. The neck, a length of folded aluminum wire, is divided up in small sections using short steel nails as "vertebrae" held in place with crochet yarn.

To get the insect element into the Byakhee physique I'm making its front legs look like the limbs of an ant. I'm sure I could've made the claws in some very simple way, but decided to sculpt them and cast them in plastic using silicone molds.

Here's the body sculpt cast in tinted latex and filled with layers of soft polyurethane foam.

The ant-like forelegs with the plastic claws waiting to be attached. Friendly plastic holds them in place.

The various bits that make up the Byakhee puppet, including the spine. All feet have wing nuts in them to hold tie-down screws.

All the limbs, including a stumpy tail are joined with Friendly Plastic. I did attach the belly here, but pulled it off and filled it up with more foam to make it saggier.

I've covered wing-making in quite a few of my earlier blog posts, so I'll just rush through the process here. Aluminum wire frames are wrapped in soft string..

And a combination of cotton mixed with latex and polyurethane foam is used to build up muscle shapes.

Patches of latex skin are cast in old plaster texture molds and used to cover the muscle build-ups.

Here's the skin-covered arm bit of the wings, and the "fingers" have also been covered with tinted liquid latex.

The wing membranes are created by submerging the wing halfway down into cheap hobby plaster and when the plaster has set I can sponge on latex between the fingers. When that has dried I just pull the wing out of the plaster.

I made the wing membranes a little too dark, so I have painted them with a mix of latex and pigments. And as you can see the belly is now removed.

Filling up the belly piece with more foam made the creature look bloated and slightly clumsy when compared to the skinny legs.

Time to build up some bulk on the critter. I'm using a thin polyurethane foam which is manufactured to be placed under plate racks in kitchens to soak up moisture. I'm simply wrapping some of it around the neck.

The rest of the body and the limbs get a more careful build-up of foam muscle padding. Soft yarn is also used to create certain shapes.

Again, patches of tinted latex skin cast in various texture plaster molds I've made over the years are used to cover up the puppet body.

Here's the finished skin patching job.

 I used my Iwata airbrush to create a subtle mottling on the wings, but I then simply painted on the acrylic airbrush paints with a small brush.

I'm almost done with the puppet, but it's supposed to be black-furred, remember?

This fur is actually brown and comes from an old lady's hat bought at a thrift store. I cut strips of the fur and painted it black with the acrylic airbrush paints. This also created a stability in the hairs and made them keep their shape. Tufts of hair are attached using Prosaide prosthetic glue.

The teeth are blobs of melted Friendly Plastic simply rolled between my fingers into pointy elongated shapes. Flexible super glue is used to attach the teeth into the gums of the latex head. Glossy Accents scrapbooking plastic is smeared around the mouth and in the nostrils to create shiny, moist areas.

The finished Byahkee is ready to be animated. To keep it aloft while it's flying I'm attaching it to a flying rig from Animation Toolkit using a wing nut at the rear end of the puppet.

Hopefully, the finished scenes in the film will look something like this. This image is a Photoshop mash-up, with an image of the film's actor Samuel Lange riding the Byakhee as they head for Carcosa on cosmic winds.

My Lovecraftian Alphabet part 1

Last time I blogged about my attempt to build a Cthulhu stop-motion puppet. This is the project I built it for.

 A while ago I bought a couple of fun-looking little books from eBay. They were the Lovecraftian poetry parody books (there's a high concept for you) “The Young Guy From Fuggoth” by M. M. Moamrath, and “The Arkham Alphabet Book For Children” by Darrell Schweitzer. Both of them were great fun, and I thought of adapting one or two of the texts as YouTube videos. Both books contained parodies of children's alphabets; here, of course, focusing on Lovecraftian horrors.

I bought the books directly from Darrell and asked for his permission to use the texts. He gave me the go-ahead for his book, but the other one was a different matter. Two authors had joined forces as the pseudonym M. M. Moamrath, and neither of them could be reached. In fact, they seemed to have vanished from the face of the Earth (the work of eldritch powers??)

After having spent a few days trying to get hold of said parties I finally though, what the hell -Can't I write my own humorous Lovecraftian alphabet? It turned out I actually could. I spent an afternoon composing the verses, and then sent them off to my regular Lovecraftian video narrator, Mr John Hutch of London. He sent a jolly good MP3 back to me the following day, and I started on creating the scenes illustrating the alphabet, beginning with “A is for Azatoth, that amorphous blight; B is for Byakhee, which flies in the night.”

Now, what is really the point of this exercise in monstrous Lovecraftian indulgence? Well, that is actually the point: To have fun with the monsters and texts of old Lovecraft, but also to give myself a challenge -how can I produce visuals of a huge number of monsters and places without spending forever doing it, and all of my money? This is why this project might be of interest to other creative minds. I hope to show you in this part and the next that it's possible through lots and lots and LOTS of cheating.

 I knew that I had to approach each of Lovecraft's often indescribable creatures as simplified concepts; the bare bones, tentacles and slime of them, so to speak. Azatoth, “the mad Daemon Sultan”, is as ambiguous as they get. I decided to show him as a rotating lump of mouths, eyes and tentacles suspended in space. I started sculpting a flat circle of nasty details in Chavant clay, but immediately noticed how time consuming this was. When I started out in the early 1990's I knew nothing of clay sculpting techniques or mould-making and casting. I simply built everything up, from puppets to masks, using liquid latex and lumps of cotton. This was the proper way of making this monster, and I did the whole thing in just an hour or so.

 The finished latex/cotton “sculpture” was airbrushed and had red scrapbooking beads added here and there as eyes. I also did a cloth/latex hand puppet, basically a sock puppet with latex teeth added. This contraption was pushed through a green piece of cardboard and filmed live, while operated by me.

 

 Multiple shots of the toothy sock puppet together with some animated tentacles were added over a photo of the Azatoth body sculpture, with all of it animated to rotate in After Effects. Presto: A space-bound Daemon Sultan.

 The Byakhee was done in a very similar manner. A Byakhee is a sort of flying beast, used as a riding animal by several fractions in the Cthulhu “mythos”. Lovecraft describes them as having features of ants, moles, bats, birds, decomposing humans, and other unlikely elements. Again, overthinking this creature would simply keep me from ever getting it finished, so I tried to simplify things as best I could. I started off with a jointed head and neck stuck to a piece of wood painted greenscreen green. This allowed me to animate this part of the monster's body as an isolated element.

 The rest of the body consisted of Googled still images of various insects and crustaceans hobbled together in Photoshop, with the arms and animated wings of a previously built puppet, the Nightgaunt, added in After Effects. A stock footage night shot was added behind the creature.
Of course, this sort of trick film cheating won't hold up for portraying a monstrous character throughout an entire film. But for the odd quick shot, building an entirely new puppet may not be the best option, especially not if it's a very complicated character.

 And you can certainly do the same thing with humans and surroundings. Here's my friend Håkan reading the blasphemous book the Necronomicon, and blowing his mind in the process. The library is a Photoshopped photo collage, the book is another manipulated photo saved with a transparent background, and Håkan, filmed against a greenscreen, is spliced in between these two elements. A stock footage steam effect is protruding from his ears.

 This shot illustrating the story “The Colour Out of Space” is one piece Photoshopped photo collage, and one piece stock footage CGI effect added. Even simpler, in other words.

 Another example: Here we're approaching the fabled city of Kadath in the Dreamlands. It's yet another Photoshop mash-up, with added stock footage sky and smoke.

 I've done so many Lovecraftian projects by now that I'm able to recycle my puppets. Here I've pressed both my flying polyp puppets from “The Shadow Out of Time”, and my claymation shoggoth from my buddy Daniel Lenneer's “The Terror From the Abyss” back into service again.

 In my alphabet V is for “victims of re-animation”, in other words the zombie creatures created by mad doctor Herbert West. I helped a bunch of high school kids make a zombie film, and between takes of their movie, they shambled past my camera for this scene in my project.

 My contribution to their film was the actual zombie make-ups. I spent four hours making up about 10-12 people as the living dead. Prior to that I held a full day rubber guts-making course, which was much appreciated.

Next time I'll delve into the more complicated scenes, where puppets, people, and various Photoshop and digital image files are combined. Stay tuned!