The House of Bad Dreams

 So, this is another one of my "contemplation" or "mood" shorts, which I thoroughly enjoy making. They're not as simple to do as one might think, since it's easy to overdo things, and just make the video campy. I think I'm guilty of crossing that line a few times in my films. I once did a short called "The Haunted Room", and you could say this is an expansion -we're having a look at the rest of the house.

The house itself is nothing more than one stock video file and a bunch of stock images acquired through my various subscriptions. Through first Photoshop and then After Effects, I can work with the images to achieve the look I want for each shot.

Here's one example. This exterior photo of an abandoned castle has been altered by cutting out the sky in Photoshop and placing the image on a transparent alpha layer. In After Effects, I then add a layer behind the castle, a photo of a stormy sky, which is then manipulated into becoming a moving image by applying and manipulating the "Mesh" distortion tool. 

In the same way, the ghosts are added in their own AE layers using a mix of stock videos and images. Changing the transparency setting on the ghost layers helps make them a more subtle element. I also add an adjustment layer on top of all layers where I add a filter to change the colors and create that dreamy, fuzzy look. I hope all of this isn't all gibberish to you. Suffice it to say, if you manage to get a decent grasp on After Effects, you have a wonderful toolbox at your fingertips. I access AE through an Adobe subscription, which one of my Swedish book collaborators kindly pays for.

However, this shot is a little bit different from the others. The whole background is a photo of a dilapidated house, like the other settings in the film, but the ghosts are originally two of my older puppets.

It's these two guys, whom I have used many times before in my film projects. Once they both had full heads of grey hair, but moths have eaten away all of it. Though the ghost to the left moves, he's not animated via the miracle of stop-motion. I snapped photos of the puppets arranged in their positions for the tableau, extracted them from their backgrounds in Photoshop, and added them to the background photo in AE. Besides erasing parts of their heads and adding smoke stacks (digital stock footage) over these areas, I also animated the arms and hands of the left ghost via the AE "Puppet" tool to make them shake. With the metallic grinding of the soundtrack looming over everything, I felt that I, unplanned, managed to create a sort of David Lynch-like atmosphere to the scene.

I did add a bit of stop-motion in the shape of two demonic pics having a discussion about something. Demonic pigs and cursed houses seem to go like hand in glove. The Amityville Horror house has a diabolical porcine in it, as does the haunted derelict home in Edward Lucas White's "The House of the Nightmare." The stately but crumbling "House on the Borderland" by William Hope Hodgson is positively swarming with pig monsters. So, in short, no haunted home should go without one. The two pigs here are actually just the one puppet, and again, it's one I've used before. It was built and animated for a very brief shot in my film "Imps." I thought it would be ok to recycle it and have it do a bit more (like playing two characters.) Though I do have a full post about "Imps," I'll do a quick retread here of the pig-making process.

I sculpted the head and torso in medium-grade Monster Clay, and cast a latex skin from a dental plaster mold created over the clay.

A very simple aluminum wire armature did the job. It's still strong enough and versatile to carry the puppet through many hours of animation.

The latex skin was partially padded with thin bits of polyurethane foam. Aluminum wires go into the ears and the jaw. Also, reflective pearls were glued into the eye sockets.

The foam muscle padding was quite detailed, though most of the focus of the viewer would be on the latex torso, which was attached to the padded body using liquid latex as a bonding material.

Reddish tinted latex was applied as a base paint, with a purple-greyish latex paint dry brushed over that, with strands of fake fur added as bristles to the neck, and cotton/latex tusks stuck into the mouth. Saliva and snot were created with Glossy Accents scrapbooking plastic.

That's about it. There's no narration in this one. The music is plucked from the YouTube sound library, plus choice sound effects from various subscriptions. The end credit song, "Tickle Me, Timothy," is a little ditty I found on Wikimedia.

Hello?

Like last month's post, this entry is about a project that started off as a YouTube shorts project, until I rejected that idea. In the end, I ended up just making a very short, silly video. 

My inspiration for the ghost in the film was this Victorian illustration. I have no idea where it's from but it's included in a huge book on supernatural literature, which I've had for years.

I sculpted the face in medium-grade Monster Clay on a flat slab of aluminum and did all the rest: a plaster mold of the clay and the casting tinted latex into the mold. The chest area was cast in a mold created many years ago for the demon in my film "Memory."

I wanted striking eyes for the puppet since it would only be on screen for a very short bit. I picked a couple of semi-transparent plastic pearls, for a sort-of luminous effect, and reamed a concave surface into each pearl to create a lens effect. The eyes were detailed with acrylic airbrush paints painted on with a thin brush. UV resin was then added to create the actual lens effect.

I wanted the arms to be really spindly and skeletal, so they were built up with thin metal rods folded over and covered with soft crochet yarn soaked with latex.

When the puppet parts were assembled the whole thing was attached to a wooden rod, one of those you stick into a flower pot to support a floppy plant. Thermoplastic was used to hold it all together.

The flimsy garment of the ghost / dead thing was made with kitchen tissue paper soaked in latex. I then simply cut pieces from it and pressed them together. the sticky surface of the paper as a bonding agent.

So, here's the finished ghost. The arms, the neck, and the jaw were the only articulated parts of the puppet. the hair was made from crepé hair (sheep's wool used for fake beards.)

The second puppet in the film is the man who walks by the cave and engages in conversation with the ghost. This is actually a very old puppet, built at the end of the 1990s. It's still holding up, barely. The latex is really dry and brittle but the clothing and the armature are fine. As you can see he hasn't got any real feet because for the film he was originally built, he doesn't show his feet. I didn't make any tie-downs back then, I just clamped the puppet down on a tabletop with a small glue clamp.

Some of my YouTube viewers were disappointed that the film was short and thought it was just "gimmicky." Others thought the film was fun. It was an interesting experiment.

 

Abandoned Places

The concept for this one is very simple and even seems to be a bit trendy at the moment: Making videos about creepy places where unexplained events have taken place or are taking place. I did one earlier called The Haunted Room, and this project is a development of that idea, you could say.

So, I'll go through each scene and make some comments on it. I probably shouldn't, since it's really up to the viewer to make up his or her own mind about what has happened in those abandoned places. Most of the content in this film is cobbled together from still stock images and videos, but there is some animation here and there.

I've downloaded all my stock photos from Depositphotos, and then made a few tweaks to them in Photoshop. This old place is obviously haunted by a girl who seems to be stuck in a single window pane. the girl, like most of the stock videos used here, comes from Videoblocks.

My idea here was that some government experiment went to heck and this energy sphere is still around causing havoc. Again, a blend of stock effects and animations.

An old abandoned classrom with an unplugged TV that turns on anyway. A satanic ritual of some sort is displayed on the screen. the screaming noises I used are supposedly "real" sounds from Hell, picked up by drilling crews. It can't get more authentic than that!

This shot is, of course, alluding to H P Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." The crosses and the well were added in Photoshop and the green energy is a stock CGI effect tweaked in After Effects to look a bit more organic.

The abandoned asylum is a must, and I found a very nice stock CGI zombie girl which I stuck into the dark doorway.

This field is a stock video -you can see the grass moving slightly which I thought was nice. I replaced the original, very blue and calm sky with a CGI cloud vortex. The writing on the silo was there in the original stock footage,

The two bat-like creatures circling the cloud funnel are a single puppet once built and animated for my film "Azathoth." It was pressed back into action here.

A once-nice drawing room invaded by giant slugs. I thought about having dead people sitting on the furniture, but decided against it, as the place would look more abandoned without them.

The giant slugs were simple photos of the brown "Spanish" garden slug. My garden is, unfortunately, full of the pests. I moved them about in After Effects using the Puppet tool.

The scene of some industrial accident, though it might have occult overtones, as you can glimpse gigantic tentacles looming out of the mists behind the buildings. I re-used old animations of a tentacle prop.

A farmhouse afflicted by some sort of pulsating alien fungi. Again, a bit of Lovecraftian overtones. The fungi are actually some sort of ocean anemone creature.

Some sort of stately building where a zombie-like creature sits on a ceiling corner and then scuttles off into a hole. 

The creature is a zombie puppet I've used a few times over the years. It was actually animated upside down since that was easier for me, and then flipped in After Effects.

This shot is actually a complete stock footage clip, so kudos to whoever came up with it.

Of course, you need some creepy toys when doing a video about haunted places. I re-used a couple older puppets that still held up quite well despite being over ten years old by now.

A commentator on YouTube noted that it was obvious that the cymbal monkey would come to life, and he's right -why put it in there and not have it bang its cymbals?

The clown puppet might've been a better surprise, but a clown puppet is a rather obvious addition to a cast of haunted toys, right?

In this shot, I added the jars and bottles with freaky contents. The beating heart is a stock animation placed inside its jar with some After Effects trickery.

I thought the last shot would be a bit humorous, with a hairy arm grabbing a bug scuttling by on the floor.

The arm came from another old puppet, a devil puppet that has popped up here and there in my films. Again, despite being over a decade old, he's held up quite well.

This film was another little experiment in creating mood. I'm quite pleased with it, but it's not something I can do too often or the idea will wear very thin indeed. I might return to it eventually.

The Haunted Room

I can't recall who came up with the idea, but I'm sure someone suggested to me, at some point, that I should do a video where we observe fantastic things happening without any cuts. I like a book by Edward Gorey called "The Untitled Book", where every page is an illustration of a garden where first very little happens, then all sorts of strange things start to happen.

Another Gorey book, "The West Wing" is probably also an inspiration. The reader walks through a stately but empty house, sometimes seeing bits of weirdness.

The room in my film is inspired by a room in my grandmother's old country house, a guest room that was seldom used with an old carpet and old wallpaper. It is, however, not haunted in the slightest. I furnished my haunted room with various props that I could animate during the brief running time. The grandfather clock has a time-lapsed dial, which speeds up, and then stops to start going backward. There's a ball and a rocking horse moving on their own accord, a bloody handprint, and a CGI spider crawling down the wall. The one thing happening throughout the video, though very slowly, is the framed portrait of the young man. He turns from a handsome chap into a decomposing corpse.

This was very easily made by having the original photo dissolve into a Photoshopped corpse version. Inbetween frames I also added bits of distortion to make the hairline recede and his mouth frown up a bit. It's not a perfect morphing effect, but I think it did the trick.

The video ends with a small demon crawling out from behind the clock and invading the rest of the house, indicating that the haunting has now spread.

I actually built this puppet so quickly that I didn't snap any photos of the making of it, but it's basically the same basic puppet I make when no extra bells or whistles are necessary.

The critter is about eight inches tall, so a fairly small puppet. I sculpted the head, neck, and torso in medium-grade Monster Clay and cast a latex piece from a dental plaster mold built up over the sculpture. The rest of the body was built up with foam, cotton, tissue paper, and latex over an aluminum wire skeleton. I added tie-downs both to the feet and the palms since the demon would briefly walk on all fours. Bits of crepé hair was attached to the body using liquid latex as an adhesive. The teeth and the horn are tissue paper mixed with latex, and the eyes are small scrapbooking pearls.

This was a fun experiment, and I sort of made a more elaborate variation of it a bit further down the road. But more about that later.