Strange Aeons

My main Love for the prose and poems of H P Lovecraft comes from his unparallelled talent for generating mood or atmosphere. Whatever I do in my video adaptations of his texts I'm always chasing that mood. Sometimes I stumble over another work of art that has managed to generate those qualities.

A while back I bought the CD "Strange Aeons", which is produced by British musician and artist Steve Lines. Besides his own work the CD also contains contributions by Childe Roland, The Zoogs, Black Monolith and other bands, as well as spoken word pieces by Lovecraftian authors like Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell and Robert M. Price. Highly recommended! The opening track is also called "Strange Aeons" and is written and performed by Steve Lines himself. It sums up what Lovecraft's cosmic horror is all about, and I thought it would make a great subject for a YouTube video. I contacted Steve and he gave me permission to use the track.

My plan was to mainly show prehistoric Earth during the reign of the various evil entities that arrived here before the advent of humans. I wanted to put some of the older puppets back into action before they became too brittle to use for animation. I also had some new ideas for a few new puppets.

I thought that Ramsey Campbell's monstrous space slug Glaaki would make a novel stop-motion monster, and started off with sculpting the underside of the creature in medium grade Monster Clay.

The armature for this puppet was super simple, just a bundle of aluminum wires, with a t-nut foot at the rear for tie down purposes. The eyes are plastic balls on aluminum wire eye stalks. The round mouth also has a band of aluminum wires to allow it to open and close like an orifice. The black chunks on the armature are bits of dense foam, added to build up bulk without impeding the animation (like thick foam would've).

The body was padded with balls of cotton encased in a "suit" of thin, soft polyurethane.

I used an old plaster skin mold to cast the knobbly skin of the slug covering the foam body. The whole thing was then dry brushed with tinted latex.

Glakki is covered with metallic spike which it uses to infamously impale human victims. These victims then turn into Glaaki's zombified servants. The spikes were bits of cotton dipped in latex and then rolled between my fingers to create the spiky shapes. Silver latex tinting powder was used with the latex to add the metallic effect.

The finished Glaaki had airbrushed eyeballs covered with air drying scrapbooking plastic to create a gelatinous lens-like effect.

The other thing I wanted to do was to illustrate the line "Wantonly they trod the dark ways, cavorting in the steaming fens, until all the planet had known the touch of the Great Old Ones", by having two of Cthulhu's star-spawn -basically his minions- play wrestle in the primordial swamps. A star-spawn is more or less a smaller replica of Chtulhu. It's the sort of form that can be endlessly varied and still be recognized. I made two sculptures of the front of the heads where the eyes would be located and the tentacle beards would hang down.

I made the armatures out of several bundles of aluminum wires, making them very sturdy. Arms and legs were padded with hard foam and the tails were given shape with soft string wrappings covered in latex. The wings were my usual constructions of string-wrapped aluminum wires, submerged in soft plaster with a latex wing membrane build-up.

The padding of the main bodies was achieved with cotton balls. Since I wanted these creatures to look flabby, with folds of warty skin covering their bodies I didn't spend a lot of time creating foam shapes to indicate muscles. Instead a fairly basic foam wrapping made up the general shape of the bodies.

Lots and lots of patches of tinted latex skin was cast in several old molds and attached using liquid latex as a glue.

The finished star-spawn were dry brushed with tinted latex, and touched up with acrylic airbrush paints. The eyes were the usual reflecting scrapbooking beads I use to make glowing eyes for my puppets.

This guy was also an original puppet made for this project. Despite its likeness to the infamous penisaurus of porn comedy "Flesh Gordon" it's actually another Great Old One called Gobogeg.

Other creatures in the film, like this one, were created using only partly animated elements. The fringed eye is a Photoshop creation..

..While the tentacles are just the one tentacle, animated a few times and clumped together in After Effects.

The apocalyptic end times were realized using different techniques altogether. I wanted the return of the Great Old Ones and their destruction of our world to appear in ultra slow-motion, to show the inevitability of it -or something like it. I can't really describe the effect I was after, but I think I achieved it.
 These shots were all created using photos animated in After Effects using the puppet tool. Smoke, falling ash and various digital effects were superimposed, and the whole finished film was color graded and various filters were applied to create an otherworldly look. The prehistoric scenes in the beginning were also mainly made with Photoshopped images, animated in After Effects.

I think the most powerful effect Lovecraft achieves in his writings is the concept of "deep time", which is about vast stretches of time so far in our planet's past that we can't really comprehend it. This film was an experiment of sorts, trying to chase that concept with moving images.

Loving Lovecraft: A Vlog About One of My Obsessions

My vlogging project continues :)

"The Other Gods": The Gods Themselves Part 3

No, it's not over quite yet -we have some stragglers among the Other Gods. This bunch is made very quickly and with scraps and found stuff, which I thought might be interesting for some of you.

The top thingie on this puppet is a left over casting from an alien fungus prop made over 12 years ago. I found it in a bag of old stuff and was surprised to discover that the latex hadn't deteriorated at all. Below that is a wooden ball stuck to an empty plastic vitamin jar. A wood dowel runs through the whole thing, and all bits are joined together with hot glue.
The tentacles and the eye stalks are the same stuff I always make; aluminum wires covered with soft wire and latex. The black blobs are Friendly Plastic thermoplastic helping to keep the limbs stuck to the body.

I used only cotton dipped in tinted latex to build up the structure of the body. I would never use the cotton/latex mix for parts of the puppet that would move and flex a lot. It simply wouldn't work, it'd be like covering your puppet in tough leather. But since the body on this construction was rigid anyway it was a cheap and quick way of building up structure. I'm using long thick needle tools to detail the surface by simply pressing the tools into the latex-soaked cotton. Using a heat gun in between laying on new details helped dry the structure very quickly.

To make the eyes I printed out eye images created in Photoshop and dripped "Glossy Accents" scrapbooking plastic over each eye. This is a very cheap and quick way of making puppet eyes with flat back sides.

The finished puppet was spray painted with Liquitex acrylic airbrush colours and the wood dowel was painted in the green chroma key paint I use for the backgrounds.

Here's another cobbled together armature, using my usual aluminum wires and Friendly Plastic bonding material, and another wood ball (or rhombus?) to form a head. This creature is a "servitor of the outer gods"; a bunch of creatures playing flute-like instruments to sooth bigger, nastier creatures floating around in space.
The flute was the handle of a discarded watercolour brush glued into the head. The trumpet part is a plastic bit from a broken calibration tool, and what looks like a brown wooden ball is just that. In order to minimize the troubles of keeping the tiny hands stuck to the flute while animating I simply stuck the hands to the brush handle using bits of small aluminum wires going from the hands into the flute. The rod sticking out of the monster's bum was a bit of steel rod attached to a block of wood.

 

A quick padding using many layers of thin, soft polyurethane foam helped bulk up the body while still keeping it very flexible.

The puppet was mainly covered with latex casts from older plaster moulds. These moulds were made for the flying polyps of "The Shadow Out of Time", which in their turn came from clay presses in silicone moulds made over weird-looking lichen growing on rocks by the sea.
The arms were thick macrame yarn with softer string wrapped around it and then covered with liquid latex. Having the arms soft means that I only had to animate the head moving back and forth, and the arms would follow. The wrinkly head was latex and cotton, and the spikes on the back was toilet paper dipped in latex and rolled into pointy shapes.

The puppet was finished off with a layer of PAX paint (Prosaide makeup glue and acrylic paint). One dark brown layer went on first and then a grey/green lighter colour was dry brushed on top of that, accentuating protruding details. Blue acrylic airbrush paints added extra life to the critter. Bronze Warhammer paint was brushed on over the flute using a disposable pipe cleaner.

This other "god" was initially based on Quachil Uttaus from Clark Ashton Smith's "Treader of the Dust", which is a baby-like mummy. While sculpting it it sort of developed into something more fleshy and organic. I used Monster Clay for the sculpture.

The front of the puppet was cast in latex, backed with a cotton/latex mix used everywhere except around the neck, which needed to be flexible. Like my tentacles the arms were aluminum wire covered with string and latex. The head part of the armature was another vitamin pill jar and the body was an empty super glue bottle. A long steel nail went up the puppet's behind as a support. Soft polyurethane foam padded the back of the body.

Bumpy latex skin casts from older plaster moulds and the cotton/latex mix covered up the back of the body. PAX paint and acrylic airbrush paints gilded the lily.

These puppets took only one to two days to build, and the demands on them during animating was very simple. But I hope I've shown that you can create stop-motion puppets without spending either a lot of time or money on your creations.

Diving for Deep Ones

Among H P Lovecraft's more popular monsters are the charming "Deep Ones"; the end result for the peculiar people living in the seaside town of Innsmouth. In short, when they reach adult age, they turn into fish monsters and return to the sea. It's all told in "The Shadow Out of Innsmouth", one of Lovecraft's better tales, actually, where the narrator is first horrified by what he sees in Innsmouth, but at the end of the story he reveals he's discovered he's actually a fish-person himself, with gills already growing on his neck, and he returns to the town to join his scaly kin.

US Lovecraft enthusiast and game developer Rolando Gutierrez had me build a bunch of monsters for him a while ago -you can read about that here:
http://loneanimator.blogspot.se/2012/06/monsters-for-lovecraftian-computer-game.html
And here:
http://loneanimator.blogspot.se/2012/08/monsters-for-lovecraftian-computer-game.html

I started with a head and torso sculpture, as I usually do when I make humanoid puppets. This gives me a better overall idea of the other proportions of the character. My first concept was the traditional fish-like deep one, but Rolando preferred a more frog-like design, so off came the crest and the "beard".

The head and the chest was cast as a loose latex skin. When I want to add extra support to the head on a puppet, I usually mix cotton and latex to created a flexible, but tough and leathery layer on the inside of my puppet skins. This time, however, I mixed latex with micro balloons; the white, sand-like substance that you can mix with polyester or epoxy when working on boat and car bodies.  The micro balloons gives the latex a cream-like feel, which is very helpful when you want to thicken latex for certain types of work. Adding chemical thickener usually adds setting time. Using micro balloons lets the latex dry within an ordinary time frame. I'll talk more about this technique in a later blog post.

Here the cotton and polyurethane puppet body has been covered with patches of latex skin, which are tinted green as a base colour. Next, a thin layer of PAX paint (Prosaid prosthetic glue and acrylic paint) is sponged on using a piece of polyurethane foam. The inside of the mouth is a separate latex casting, one I'm often using for insides of round or wide mouths.

And here's the froggie deep one finally finished, using acrylic airbrush colours. I don't know if I'll be animating him yet or just snap some photos. Eventually I'll make my own deep ones, as I suspect I won't be able to stay away from the "Innsmouth" story. They're cool monsters without really being bad guys.

The Lovecraft Alphabet: Effects and Animations

Here's a little video with me babbling on about how stuff was made for "The Lovecraft Alphabet". Hope you enjoy it and get inspired :)
 

The Lovecraft Alphabet: The Finished Film

So, here it finally is. I started working on this in April 2013, and finally finished it 5 January 2014. It's still far from perfect, but it's the best I could do at this point in time. And I'm quite happy with it.

What for 2014, then? Well, my aim has always been to be very productive, but I rarely live up to that ambition. Trying to juggle a day job with various illustration assignments, and my film and animation interest doesn't really pan out. At least it hasn't yet. For the last year I have gradually upgraded my technological assets, as far as my economy has allowed it. For example, I now have a Nikon that allows me to shoot in slow-mo (sort-of), animate in HD, and create greenscreen shots with clearer image quality. Things like that actually make a big difference, as it allows me to work faster when editing.

Anyways, I hope you'll keep visiting my Blog, and find stuff here to inspire or provoke you into getting creative yourself. Happy 2014, everyone!

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!