Nattravn

The story in "Nattravn" is based on local Swedish folklore, but I have added a few bits myself. Briefly, the Nattravn ("the night raven") is a pretty generic folkloric creature. The Nattravn is a supernatural monster belonging to a group of beings in Swedish folklore called "kyrkogrimmar", basically meaning "the grim ones of the church." They are spirits created from animals sacrificed at the location where the church was being built. The Nattravn exits the churchyard and flies about chasing late-night walkers, while other kyrkogrimmar stay around the church. There are a few versions of the Nattravn. Sometimes it looks like a big raven; in my local parts, it looks more like a pterodactyl. I added the part of the shining eye, and its purpose is to hunt the dead who leave their graves. The stories of my local version of the Nattravn say that if you look up when it's passing the moon, you'll see its bones through its skin, and that will turn you very ill. So don't look at that part of the video too many times!

This is an illustration of my local version of the Nattravn I made for a Swedish horror RPG a couple of years ago. I used this as a template for my Nattravn puppet.

The only new piece I sculpted for this puppet was the head, which had a fair amount of details. The sculpture was made from medium-grade Monster Clay and cast in latex from a dental plaster mold.

Here's the armature for the Nattravn, mostly made from 2 mm aluminum wires. You can see that parts of it have been covered with a mix of cotton and latex, soft polyurethane foam, and yarn. Under and above the tail, two bits of 4,76 mm square brass tubes have been attached with blobs of thermoplastic. Into these, a 3,96 mm brass tube attached to a flying rig will be inserted to hold the puppet aloft during flying scenes. After all the animation was finished, the shoulder joint for the right side wing broke. During all my years of stop-motion animation, this was the second time an aluminum wire joint had snapped, so the material is actually quite sturdy. The problem with this particular joint was that it was too short; there wasn't enough length of wire between the two hard sections -the upper portion of the arm, and the shoulder. The aluminum wire gradually became frayed from being bent up and down, and it eventually broke. I'll cut open the latex skin and fix it, but I'll also remember to make longer wire sections for my joints.

The puppet is getting close to being finished. All of it has been covered with patches of tinted latex cast in skin texture molds. The chest area is a latex cast from a mold originally created for the demon puppet in the film "Memory." I have shamefully reused this chest piece a couple of times.

I usually make wing membranes by submerging the wing armature in soft plaster and then adding latex over both the plaster and the armature. But since this puppet was so big, I used another method to save on the plaster. For each section of the wing requiring membranes, I made a simple recreation of the two relevant armature bits holding the latex skin using clay on a flat plaster mold backside. I then painted on latex over clay and plaster using cotton Q-tips. After two layers of latex, the skin could be removed and attached to the wing armature. Having the latex follow the shape of the armature helped place the membrane along the centre line of each armature "finger", making it look very natural (I hope that made sense.) 

I didn't use any tinted latex for the wing membranes, just standard latex straight out of the bottle. I didn't add any textures either. I only placed a few holes in the latex here and there to make the wings look old and worn.

 

The finished Nattravn was painted with tinted latex applied with a sponge, and then touched up with an airbrush and acrylic colors. The wings were given a mottled look and subtle veins with the airbrush. Teeth and claws were made from tissue paper and latex. Tufts of synthetic fur were glued to the body using liquid latex as a bonding agent. The glowing red eye is a piece of UV resin cast in a silicone mold. Red resin pigments were added to what would otherwise have been a clear dome. Radiating lines were etched into a piece of aluminum foil with a pointy sculpting tool. The resin dome was then stuck to the foil using transparent glue. The eye has the effect of glowing when a light is pointed directly at it, due to the reflecting foil at its base.

I did get a few questions on YouTube about this shot, where the puppet passes in front of the full moon and becomes transparent. Here follows a description of how that shot was made.

When I animated the puppet flapping its wings, I held off a few seconds, just having the creature glide through the air. I grabbed a screenshot of a frame where the puppet is still, and edited it in Photoshop. I drew a black skeleton on the image and removed the green background I used during animation. Since the puppet remains still during animation, attached to the flying rig, I have to keyframe the monster flying across the night sky in After Effects. Using the animation footage as a parent layer, I attached the skeleton image to it. The reason you don't see the skeleton layer until it passes the moon is that I added a mask on the layer following the shape of the moon. The skeleton layer is invisible outside of that mask.

Now over to the "gast", what would be called a revenant in English. Basically, it is a walking corpse, but like the vampire, it also has ghostly characteristics. The Swedish revenant is an all-around useful being for when telling stories about the dead returning. They behave like spirits, but also have a tangible quality, which makes them creepier than a regular ghost. 

From the start, I knew that I needed the revenant in two scales; One big enough to allow for a decent amount of details, and one for when it's grabbed by the Nattravn. I sculpted two heads with a torso in Monster Clay.

I also sculpted two sets of feet, which you hardly see in the finished film. All the pieces were awkwardly clumped together on a slab of clay for the making of the mold. Dental plaster was applied over the clay.

From that plaster mold, a latex duplicate of my sculpture was cast. A 1,5 mm aluminum wire controls the jaw. Thermoplastic holds the wire in place inside the head and also adds a bit of support for the chest. 

2 mm aluminum wires folded up (so, really 4 mm) make up the armatures in arms and legs. The wires are covered with cotton and tissue paper soaked in latex. 4 mm threaded nuts are placed in the feet as tie-downs. 

All parts are held together with blobs of thermoplastic. The next step is to cover the neck and torso parts of the armature with foam padding.

The shroud for each puppet is made from kitchen tissue paper dabbed with latex. The bandage holding the jaw shut is also made from the same materials, but also has a 1 mm aluminum wire running through it, so I can animate it flapping about when the revenant removes it. There really was no need to sculpt the whole torso for these puppets, but when I started planning the film, I hadn't decided how much of the revenant's body I'd show. The finished puppets are painted with tinted latex and detailed with acrylic airbrush colors. Crepe hair (sheep's wool) is used for the head, and plastic pearls for the eyes.

I wanted threads laying like webbing over holes in the shroud, but I found that using real string wasn't doing the trick, and would take far too long to piece together.

I resorted to using "chunks o´ flesh", an old makeup FX trick used to create bits of fleshy viscera. Here's how you make it: Tint your latex in any desired color and use a bit of polyurethane foam to sponge out the latex over a slick surface. I used a plastic tray. A hairdryer speeds up the drying process. When the latex is dry, you dust it down with talcum powder or corn starch. Then you simply tear up sections of the latex using your fingernails. The latex will bunch up into web-like organic textures with elastic qualities. You can then drape the webbed latex over your puppet, using liquid latex as a bonding agent at points here and there, to keep the texture hanging on, but at the same time allowing it to move and stretch when the puppet is animated. I also used chunks o´ flesh for the frills around the edges of the shroud's arms.

When animating the Nattravn carrying away the revenant, I wanted a shot from below. To achieve this, I rigged the Nattravn puppet to basically sit straight up in front of my animation green screen. In After Effects, I then animated a night sky rolling overhead and curving slightly, the way it would if you were standing looking up at something and trying to follow it by turning your head.

The cross on the church steeple is similar to crosses seen atop some older Swedish churches. It's actually a crucifix I got from a local iron smelting business. They had cast a few things in old molds and were throwing away castings with imperfections in them. I picked up a crucifix and some other bits and bobs. After having cleaned up the crucifix with files and sanding paper, I created a silicone mold over it, into which I could then cast a resin copy.

I drilled a hole into the bottom end of the crucifix and attached a threaded 4 mm metal rod using super glue. The crucifix was then secured to my animation stage like any other puppet, using a wing not from the underside.

I knew that the Nattravn's toes wouldn't be strong enough to hold up the puppet while it was sitting on the cross, so I kept the flying rig arm attached to the puppet.

The backgrounds are a mix of AI images rendered in Adobe Firefly and photos of real locations. For example, the image above has a church from the south of Sweden mixed with bits from an AI graveyard, and a real 18th-century Swedish churchyard. It's all mixed together in Photoshop.

This stock photo of a spruce forest has a sky that contrasts with the dark trees. In After Effects, I added this to a layer of a night sky, with the animated Nattravn sandwiched in between. Changing the layer value to "Multiply" made the sky transparent and allowed the Nattravn to appear from behind the tree tops.

This little film was my contribution to the YouTube Halloween ambience. I'm thinking of making more videos on the subject of folklore, some of them local stories. There are quite a few good ones to pick from!

 

Grootslang vs Piasa!

Last month I wrote about "Scrap Metal" on my blog, which had animation footage originally made for James Balsamo's film "Alien Danger 2". The project in question this time is my animation created for Balsamo's movie "It Wants Blood" (2019), where a monster representing national interests, the Native American folklore creature the Piasa, battles a monster representing foreign interests, the African Grootslang.

There are many strange sights in "It Wants Blood", among them Oscar-nominated actor Eric Roberts (brother of Julia), who's had an interesting career during the last decade, to say the least. His aim seems to be to blow up the IMDb credits list since he makes about a hundred movies a year.

Besides my puppet representations of the monsters, there are also full-scale heads popping into the happenings every once in a while.

These very fetching creations were made by make-up expert Joe Castro, who built them in what seems an impossibly short time and also impossibly cheap.

As for my contributions, I actually made a behind-the-scenes video about building the Grootslang monster, so please have a gander at that. I didn't film any documentation on the making of the Piasa, so here follows a written account of that.

This is what the Piasa looks like painted on one of the limestone bluffs along the Mississippi River in Alton. There's always been a debate about whether the story of the Piasa is actually from Native folklore, or a construction made by the first teller of it, Professor John Russel. Look it up, if this sounds interesting. Anyway, the image painted on the limestone rock became my template for the Piasa puppet.

As you can see, the Piasa has a human-like face. I sculpted two versions, but wasn't happy with either of them, mainly because I made them too large. The body size that would've followed would've been impractical to animate on my smallish puppet stage.

This is the face I eventually ended up with. It was the right size but also had a decent amount of detailing.

The face was reproduced as a latex skin from a dental plaster mold created over the sculpture.

The wings were constructed from two mm aluminum wires, joined together with a mix of super glue and baking soda.

To build up anatomical shapes on the wings, I wrapped soft yarn over the aluminum wires.

I've shared my wing-making method many times before, but the main crux of it is to embed the wing armature, covered with yarn and latex, about halfway down into soft plaster. When the plaster has set, I can etch various details such as veins into the plaster, and then cover the areas between the "fingers" of the wing to create wing membranes. The whole wing is then simply pulled out of its plaster matrix.

The tail was built up with lots of yarn over a 3 mm aluminum wire. A thin layer of latex holds it all together.

The armature is a mix of 2 and 3-mm aluminum wires, padded with bits of EVA foam and yarn. The face has been given an aluminum wire-jointed jaw, plus eyes made with plastic pearls placed in silicone sockets so they can swivel. The face is reinforced with thermoplastic, which also holds the jaw and eyes in place. The horns were made from thin steel wires covered with cotton and latex.

Snippets of foam from old cushions served as muscle padding. They're held in place with flexible contact cement.

Right before the base of the tail, I added a 3 mm t-nut so I could attach a flying rig to the puppet. I needed to do this for the flying and jumping shots.

The scales covering the body of the Piasa, as per the limestone illustration, are quite stylized and ornate, sort of heraldic in a way, and I decided to keep them that way. I sculpted three rows of different sizes on a flat slab of clay.

A hard dental plaster mold was made over the sculpture, and tinted latex was pointed into the mold.

Here's what the rows of scales looked like when they were pulled from the mold.

Using liquid latex as a glue, the rows of scales were layered from front to back, overlapping each other.

The Piasa also has a row of smaller fin-like shapes along its neck. These were created the way the wing membranes were made, but using soft clay instead of plaster.

Here's the finished covering of the scales. Now for the paint job. You can see a tongue here as well. It's a piece of aluminum wire wrapped in sewing string and covered with tinted latex.

The Piasa was painted with tinted latex and touched up with acrylic airbrush paints. I mixed some thinned metallic paint into latex and brushed that over the scales with a sponge to create a more shining, glittering effect.

The tusks and claws are cotton and latex, and the beard was cut from an old synthetic fur coat. The Piasa and the Grootslang were two of the biggest puppets I had built up to that point, and they proved to be a bit of a bother when animating them on my cramped puppet stage. But, in the end, it all worked out. All the animations took about two weeks to finish.