"Feather of Owlbear": A D & D Fan Film

This project started way back in 2014, but now it's finally finished. I made a few puppets inspired by the original 1977 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, and they're all covered in previous posts on this blog. Here are links to all of them:

The Owlbear.
The Rust Monster.
The Beholder.
The Umber Hulk.

D & D Monsters: Beware the Umber Hulk

While working with our RPG world film, John and I kept adding more and more of that vast menagerie of cool monsters, until we realized that we could go on with the creature encounters without really getting on with the story. Even so, here comes yet another ugly brute!

I decided that having these classic monsters and not creating a Ray Harryhausen-style monster brawl between a couple of them would be a sin indeed. Thus the owl bear now makes a second appearance, and encounters a foe to grapple with, namely one of my favourite D & D monsters: The umber hulk.

Again I looked to the original first "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual" from 1977 for inspiration. There, the umber hulk is a slightly comical monstrosity that looks like a cross between a beetle and an ape. It's got two sets of eyes, huge mandibles and a burly body. What's not to like?? In later monster manuals the creature has been given a big makeover, and though it may look cooler in terms of the number of details, I think it has lost some of its charm and personality. My umber hulk puppet would turn out to be a cross between the cherished original concept, and my own added details.

I sculpted the head in Monster Clay, but soon realized that I was making it way too big if it was going to tussle with the owl bear. So I sculpted a new head, which was slightly smaller in size.

As you can see, the smaller set of eyes were small smooth beads, the bigger insect eyes were a pair of plastic buttons with a knobbly surface. I found these, and lots of other buttons suitable for both puppet eyes and other decorations, at a local sewing machine shop.

The head was cast as a loose latex skin from a plaster mould. Limbs were created by bonding together lengths of aluminum wires using sewing string. Friendly Plastic helped merge all the bits. Fingers were made by wrapping thick cotton string around aluminum wires and coating these with tinted latex. I'm thinking of making a stand-alone tutorial on building up hands and fingers, as a few people seem to have issues with this.

The mandibles were really just the one, sculpted in Monster Clay and cast twice in Smooth-Cast 300Q plastic, using a DragonSkin Pro silicone mould. Just before the quick-setting plastic gelled, I lowered a bit of folded aluminum wire into it to create a joint.

More Friendly Plastic was used to hold the mandibles in place from inside the head skin, as well as adding strength to the head. A piece of aluminum wire was also added to the lower lip, to make the mouth open and close in animation.

The armature in itself is, as usual, a straightforward deal. The aluminum wire and Friendly Plastic construction makes it very light weight.

Besides the head, the feet were also sculpted in clay. It's actually just the one sculpture, cast twice in latex. The inside of these latex skins were padded with polyurethane foam and a cotton/latex mix.

Some people seem to have problems finding thick, soft foam to pad the puppet body and create the muscles. As I've mentioned many times before I simply use old cushions and mattresses found at garage sales and donated by friends. But here's another alternative.
I buy thinner sheets of very soft foam used in kitchens to soak up moisture under drying racks. Usually, I use these for smaller puppets, or when I build up bulk on thinner limbs.

But you can also glue bits of this thin foam together. Four bits make up a pretty thick single piece, and you can thus decide exactly just HOW thick you'd like the bits to be. I use a very soft and flexible contact cement to bond the foam pieces. You can also use foam spray glue (which I can't get hold of in Sweden at the moment) or perhaps also rubber cement, which I haven't used in this application.

Here are two examples of the layered thin foam padding. You can create very precise shapes using this method, though it takes a bit longer than using bigger bits.

Here's the puppet with finished foam muscles padding. As you can see, I've used bigger pieces on some parts of the body.

Using older plaster moulds with various skin textures I've created big and small patches of latex skin to cover the foam body. Adding drops of tinted latex helps create interesting textures and patterns.

The finished puppet has received a uniform layer of dark grey using tinted latex drybrushed thinly over the surface of the body. Deeper crevasses have kept their black hue, adding depth and shadow to the character. More drybrushing, using lighter shades of blue grey and reddish brown, adds more details. Both sets of eyes are now covered with transparent scrapbooking liquid plastic.

This puppet ended up slightly larger than I had preferred, but its still workable, and the umber hulk now provides the owl bear with a great wrestling buddy. Play nice, boys!

D & D Monsters: A Transatlantic Collaboration

I though I'd give you an update on my Dungeons & Dragons tribute film created with John Hankins. You can read about the puppets created for this project HERE, HERE and HERE.
We are now in the stage of adding pick-up shots to the previously shot video footage, and I've started piecing together the stopmotion animation with the live-action bits. We recently posted a short video clip on Facebook, where John is attacked by an owlbear, while simultaneously searching for an owlbear feather; one of many magical items he need to find on his quest.

We were a bit surprised by the very strong positive reaction the video got, from both stopmo enthusiasts and the RPG crowd, so now we're forging ahead with powers renewed. It was a great tonic to get those reactions, and I'll post work in progress more often now. When you're piecing together your film you're mostly working in a vacuum, and you don't get any outside evaluation until you post it on the Internet (or show it in a film festival). Even if the reaction is negative to your work in progress clip, lap that up too, as it's a clear indication of how things are going for you. It's never too late to make changes, until, of course, the film is finished and launched out into the world.

The most surprising reaction we got was from people who asked "How did you make it work?", meaning our collaboration. John lives in Hawaii and I'm in Sweden, so we have an ocean between us, and we're confined to using emails and social media only to communicate. According to our commentators, many such projects attempted by them had failed miserably, and in those cases the distance was shorter, with the interplay spanning just over state borders. Still, entire projects had collapsed due to faulty communication. This is a great pity, for though people with similar interests and talents are spread across the world, the web offers us a means of keeping in touch and sharing information quickly and easily. So more creative individuals should be able to get together and be collectively productive no matter where you live on the globe.

Now, John and I don't have an unfailing recipe to share with you but I can tell you how we work. When we started discussing the Dungeons & Dragons monster movie collaboration, we quickly cleared up our different areas of responsibility, which I think is the most important thing to start with. John was to act out the hero's role in front of his own green screen in Hawaii, and also create the costume and props that he needed. I handled all the monster effects, plus the Photoshopped backgrounds, and the editing and finishing of the film. This allowed John to focus on the more practical hands-on bits he really enjoys (and does very well indeed). He also wanted to have a go at one of the monsters, the purple worm, which he created as a hand puppet. All of this clarity of decision about who makes what seems like a no-brainer, but apparently it's not always addressed in a long distance collaborative project, at least not at the start-up. And if that's the case I can understand when a production eventually runs into a bit of trouble.

John created these storyboards to get us started. I added some extra ideas, and then John went off to shoot all the live-action video clips.

John's green screen set-up is very basic. He built his own wooden stand for holding the screen and shoots the scenes in his garden, with his wife Alicia as the camera operator, and using the sun as his only lighting source. Since it's in Hawaii, the weather is usually on his side and the shots turn out very good. Before sending the shots to me, John has also created optional versions, where the green background has been cleaned up in After Effects, and is free of shadows and other "jitter". This, of course, makes the compositing extremely easy for me.

When all his shots were finished, including the purple worm hand puppet scene, John put all the material on a small portable drive and snail-mailed it to me. So, why not use Dropbox or some similar online file sharing service? We would've, and we are now, but at that time I had some problems with my Dropbox account, and we solved it this way instead.
When I had received the video footage I could start animating, roughly timing the actions of the monsters to John's acting.

The finished scenes are turning out rather well. The backgrounds are my usual collage of photos, mixed and merged in Photoshop. When editing together the finished shots I quickly noticed that I didn't have enough footage of John to make the story perfectly clear, and that he'd need to film more of it. Apparently this is par for course in the big budget blockbuster films as well, so we're in good company. It does, however, make me wonder why a film of sometimes $150 million or more isn't planned out better.

I made some storyboards for the new sequences and emailed them to John, who is now busy shooting the extra material. He had at this point grown a very stately beard and mustache, but these came off in the name of fine art.

As I said earlier, we're now using Dropbox to send clips back and forth, which is working out very well. Our collaboration is so much fun that we already have our next project planned. I can highly recommend creative people getting together in this way, using web communications. I know that so many of you out there have nobody around where you live to share your dreams and ambitions with, and that that can be enough to kill off your fledgling projects. Don't let that happen. Reach out to others around the globe, and find collaborators. It can be the start of a wonderful new way of working.

D & D Monsters: The Beholder

Yet another monster for my collaborative (as of yet nameless) fantasy film project with John Hankins. If you're making a film filled with Dungeons & Dragons monsters, you can't do it without the infamous "Beholder"; a floating, gnashing monstrosity, which is more than an awful eyeful.

 Here's how the Beholder was originally depicted in the first "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual" from 1977. There have been much scarier, more detailed illustrations since then, but because John and I are trying to recreate an innocent retro feel for our project, this is the design I based my puppet on.

This is my first rough clay sketch of the beholder, something John and I could discuss. As it turned out we went with this design with very little alterations.

 Here's the finished clay sculpture, executed in Monster Clay. The eye stalks are not there for the casting, as they will be added at a later stage as built-up features. The holes for the stalks are there, however. The big watery eye comes from a discarded mannequin. I added some extra blood veins and covered the whole thing in transparent lacquer.

I cast the sculpture in a two-part mould. It's a slight bit of a hassle, so I don't do this very often. Half the sculpture is walled off with a softer clay simply called "plastellina" here in Sweden, but it has nothing to do with the famous Roma Plastillina sculpting clay. As you can hopefully see I've added three small bumps in the clay wall.These will become "keys" in the plaster mould, helping to interlock the two mould halves.

This is how the two-part mould turned out. Monster clay comes out easily from plaster moulds, but you can see some brown residue from the softer "plastillina".

Ordinary liquid latex is tinted with universal tinting colours and dabbed onto the inside of the plaster mould halves with a sponge. Four layers of latex was added this way to build up a sturdy, but not too firm latex skin. I went with a rust red/brown hue, which will form a good base for the additional layer of colour going on when the whole puppet is finished.

Here's the important detail, though. The insides of the latex puppet halves are lined with thin sheets of foam rubber. This will add support without making the latex skin too leathery and still allowing some stretch.

A plastic bottle screw cap becomes a cheap but effective eye socket for the glass mannequin eye. Friendly Plastic thermoplastic holds the cap in place, allowing the eye to swivel freely. I've also added the first two eye stalks, held in place by the plastic.

The two body halves are now joined together with contact cement, and the join is covered with more tinted latex. A thick but bendable aluminum rod has been added to the screw cap using more Friendly Plastic. This rod is a support to keep the "floating" puppet aloft while being animated. I've covered the rod with soft string, which will ease the application of the green screen paint, which will be added later. I've also added a looping piece of string wrapped aluminum wire to the insides of the lips.
 

The eye stalks are aluminum wires covered with soft string, and then tinted latex. The eyeballs are plastic balls used to make "pearl" necklaces. I've ground down a flat area on top of each ball, where a printed photoshopped iris image has been added. The eyeball is then covered with Glossy Accents, which is a transparent, slightly rubbery air drying plastic used by scrapbookers.

Time for teeth! These are simply made by mixing latex with cab-o-sil (fumed silica), which creates a butter-like latex paste. Rolling this paste between your thumb and index finger will create small, pointy, flexible, bone-white bits, which dries quite fast in normal room temperature.

The teeth are stuck to the mouth using tinted liquid latex, and the hole in the puppet's bum is covered up with a cast latex skin patch. The inside of the mouth is created by contact cementing two pieces of thin urethane rubber to the inside of the mouth cavity above the lips, and covering these with cotton shapes and tinted latex.

To finish the puppet a thin layer of purple PAX paint is sponged on over the puppet, taking care not to over apply and cover up the various wrinkles and crevasses on the puppet body.

Hopefully, John's encounter with the Beholder will look something like this. Beholders are among the "boss" creatures of fantasy gaming, so they're not just ugly; they're smart too. They're also able to fire various nasty energy emissions from their eye stalk eyes, so it's a meeting between hero and monster full with exciting possibilities!

D & D Monsters: The Rust Monster

Continuing with my collaborative video project with John Hankins, next up is this critter, which is really one of my favourite monsters in the world: The so-ugly-it's-cute rust monster. This creature will strike at your weapons or armour, making them corrode instantly so the monster can feast on the rusted remains.

The image to the left is the rust monster I grew up with; the illustration from the legendary 1977 "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual", complete with wacky propeller at the tip of its tail. The one to the right is the more recent, anatomically believable concept, perfect for a movie creature. Which is why I'm not using it. I'm going with the original version, and am making very few excuses for its cartoonishness when building the puppet.

D & D also released a line of hard plastic miniature monsters, of which I have a few since childhood. Among these is the rust monster. I had it sitting on a shelf next to me while building the rust monster puppet, mainly as inspiration rather than an exact guide.

I sculpted the main body in Monster Clay. This would become a shell cast in two pieces, under which the limbs would be attached. The eyes are plastic albino mammal eyes bought from a taxidermist supply shop.

Here are the two main body pieces cast in latex with a latex/cotton reinforcement. You can see some of the cotton sticking out from under the belly piece.

To add extra sturdiness to the shell parts I mixed the extremely fast-setting OOMOO plastic from Smooth-On, and poured it into the latex skins, creating a very hard interior, but keeping a leathery exterior.
The antenna are aluminum wires wrapped in soft cotton string, and dabbed with tinted latex. I use liquid universal tinting colours to dye my latex. They're a bit pricey, but last forever, as you only need a drop for each batch of latex. The eyes are glued in place with flexible super glue.

I already had an old plaster mould for a wrinkled, muscular tail or tentacle, made for a previous project. I covered a bit of aluminum wire with soft string, soaked that in latex, and pressed it into the plaster mould. I wrapped the latex skin around the tail, and used liquid latex to cover up the seam. The tail propeller (or whatever it's supposed to be) is a piece of cardboard covered in latex.

The limbs are starting to grow out of the rust monster. They're all attached to the plastic inside shell using Friendly Plastic thermoplastic. I've also added a jointed lower jaw with two latex tusks.

Using small bits of soft polyurethane foam the muscles are built up over the legs with flexible Casco contact cement, and then covered with latex skins. The legs are given a thin coat of tinted latex.

Finally, a thin layer of PAX paint (acrylic tube paint and ProsAide No-Tack make-uo glue) is sponged on. This creates a very good surface for Liquitex acrylic airbrush paints. A thin coat of transparent acrylic primer goes on lastly.

And here's the finished rust monster on my animation stage. I'm hoping he'll be a treat to animate!

A Photoshop mash-up of John as the intrepid questing hero, who is apparently unaware that swords and rust monsters are a bad combo!