Bye, bye 2012!

2012 has been a shamefully slow year for me; I mean, just look at the time difference between this blog post and my previous one! Lots of stuff happened this year, and just a few things were good. Dad passed away in April, and lots and lots of paper work followed. He was a resident of the US and I live in Sweden. Without going into the entanglements of his personal life and businesses, it's enough to say that it's taken a long time to get everything cleared out, and it's not done yet.

 Dad in his prime (early 1970's), on one of his many to-be-crashed racing bikes.

Another really bad thing that happened was that I was let go from the job I've had for 11 years. So my economy has suffered quite a bit. That I can live with; I've always found ways of getting by. But what astonished and upset me was how low my social status dropped among people. Persons I considered close friends would have nothing to do with me anymore. Apart from being unemployed I hadn't changed a bit, but they apparently thought I had. So I did what the modern civilized person does to retaliate: Kick them out as Facebook friends! Thank god I have my creativity to lean against. There is no better friend when the winds of life blow cold.

 

During the spring, I and my friends Daniel Lenneer, and Christopher Johansson finished our H P Lovecraft film adaptation “The Shadow Out of Time”, and posted it on YouTube. The reaction has been (for us) incredibly positive, and the film has now reached 32000 views.

Almost immediately I was bombarded with suggestions from the YouTube viewers about what we or I should do next. I had contemplated adapting more stories and it's very likely I would've done so anyway. Now it's certain that I will, and I'm already working on the next one. More than anything people have suggested that I take on “At the Mountains of Madness”, which was going to be produced as a feature film by Guillermo Del Toro, but financing fell through, and the world of Lovecraftian fans let out a groan of disappointment. However, having read one of his screenplay drafts I'm not so sure his version would've satisfied the fans anyway. I shall tackle this rather monumental task by approaching it the only way I can; to make a condensed version, but still with lots of (hopefully) interesting visuals and monster action. I've already worked on preparing “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” for a while, and hopefully I can seriously get that one going during 2013.

 

On a slightly similar note, my work on Rolando Gutierrez´ Lovecraftian horror game continues with animations and Photoshop duties. It'll be really interesting seeing the finished version of this old-school interactive game.

 Stills from the animations created for the game.

 

I also have a few older unfinished projects that I shall see the end of during 2013, damn it! One I'm working on finishing right now is what you could say is a dreamlike contemplation on “Alice in Wonderland”; a video illustrating a poem about the young heroine. Alice is played by Angelica, who previously portrayed a feisty Elf and an equally feisty space agent in my films. There has been lots, and lots of work creating the right look for this one, with many new puppets, and tricks I haven't attempted before. I hope you'll enjoy it when it's finished

 

It's astonishing how quickly a year goes by. When we were kids a year lasted forever, and at least I seemed to get tons of stuff done. I will attempt to trick time and get back to that slow passing of things this coming year. In short, I shall try to do more every month. Just a few days ago I got a call from some people who seemed keen on hiring me in February, thereby vastly improving my financial situation. I shall see how that works out, not holding my breath, but it's nevertheless a good note to go out on this year. Here's to 2013!

Monsters For Lovecraftian Computer Game

Since I'm actually starting to build a reputation as being able to recreate at least some of H P Lovecraft's nightmarish creatures successfully, I'm also starting to get requests from others who are making their own versions of his stories in various formats. Rolando Gutierrez is currently building a computer game, probably an online game but my details are a bit sketchy at the moment, inspired by Lovecraft's horrific monster mythos. His concept is, refreshingly, to use real actors, photographic backgrounds, and stop-motion animated monsters in the game.
 So far I've built two puppets for the project, and here they are:

Somewhere in the game a gigantic worm creature will rear its ugly head and make matters worse for the players. This monster is built from one of Roland's designs. I made it quite large to allow for more details, especially the head.

We wanted the head to be interesting to look at and went for a flowery design. The front of the mouth was sculpted flat in Chavant clay and a plaster mould built up over it. The cross shape you see in the middle is the mouth, here closed, that opens up during an attack.

This sculpture is the inside of the mouth. I sculpted it smooth, but once the plaster mould created over the shapes were dry, I drilled lots of small tunnels in the plaster, creating what looks like many tiny legs growing out of the "lips" when the latex was poured into the mould.

Here's the front of the mouth being cast in latex in its plaster mould. The latex is tinted with tinting powders from Kryolan. Even though the finished puppet may be in a different colour I prefer to tint the cast in dark fleshy hues; it helps add depth to the final paint job.

In order to create a back side or neck part of the mouth piece I removed the latex cast of the front mouth piece and simply sculpted the back over the plaster mould. This helped me make a back part that would line up very well with the front part. I could've simply built up the back with latex and cotton, but I wanted more exact detailing, and that you can almost only create by sculpting it in clay.

Here's the mouth with all of it's parts pieced together. All the petal-like frills are jointed with bendable wire and can be animated.

Here's the head attached to the spine; a thick aluminum wire with a thinner wire wrapped around it.

And here's the mouth painted and with a latex throat also added.

The body is supported by many small legs. The first eight have claws to hold onto its victim, the other legs have small nuts in their feet, so the puppet can be anchored to the animation stage. The armature design is based on (or stolen from, how you choose to see it) Ray Harryhausen's moon calf monster from "The First Men In the Moon".

The body was padded, as I usually do, with pieces of foam rubber, and the covered with patches of latex skin. In this case a wrinkled skin for the belly and an insect-like shell armour for the back. Both skin shapes were first sculpted flat in clay.

Here's the worm pretty much pieced together and awaiting its final paint job.

The puppet was painted with a thin layer of Prosaide III mixed with acrylic paints, and then airbrushed with Com-Art airbrush acrylics. I find these airbrush paints to bond very well to most surfaces, but I add a top coat from Medea textile airbrush colours, as an added bonding agent. The transparent Medea coat is supposed to help airbrush paints stick to leather and similar surfaces.

The tongue added in these photos is actually a separate puppet piece, to be animated on its own and added in post production editing. Here you can see the mouth fully open and fully closed.

The other puppet I built is some kind of demon character. It's based on a creature from a wood print titled ‘diable’, which comes from Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, which was published 1863 in Paris. It pops up here and there as a piece of occult copyright-free art. My version of the creature is, hopefully, a little bit scarier, but still keeps the basic look from the woodcut.

The armature is, like all my armatures, homemade using aluminum wire, Friendly Plastic and wing nuts for tie-downs in its feet.

Only the head and the front of the torso were sculpted in clay and then cast in latex. The rest of the body was built up with latex, cotton and toilet paper (to create a wrinkly skin texture).

Here you can see the muscle detailing using cotton shapes, right before they're covered with tinted latex.

All the body is covered, and the head added. The teeth are also latex/cotton shapes and the eyes are Photoshop print-outs, covered with a transparent Scrap booking plastic (great stuff!)

With some Prosaide III paint mix and airbrush colours the demon is finished. It stands about a foot tall. I have added more latex/cotton shapes over the cast latex pieces to give them a gnarlier diseased look.

I have been asked to create a third puppet, which will be based on an actress participating in the game, and apparently showing her in mid-transformation into something nasty. There will be more reports about that eventually.