Someone in my YouTube comment section described this little short as "Metal Hurlant meets Lovecraft", and I think that's pretty apt. The French sci-fi comics magazine (better known in the US as Heavy Metal) had a lot of crazy content, and I certainly read the magazine and I'm sure I've been influenced by it. The Lovecraft part is the fact that I decided to join bits of his poems "Nemesis" and "Psychopompos: A Tale In Rhyme", which, in themselves are good, but I had my favorite parts and thought they'd go together very well. What I ended up with was, basically, a revenge tale of a single warrior taking out a planet-destroying giant monster.
So, let's start with the monster, as I usually do. My idea was to make a tentacled skull with a distinctly evil look. I started with a rough clay sculpture of a slightly cartoony and scowling skull. The skull and the jaw were made as two separate pieces.
However, I didn't make a plaster mold around the sculpture as I usually do, but I instead built up a skin over the clay using cotton and latex. I just addad one thick layer, and allowed to dry slowly.
The eyes were two glass blobs with flat undersides glued to a paper printout of photoshopped blood veins. I used transparent scrapbooking glue.
To make the skull and jaw sturdier, I mixed up some Rhino plastic, a fast-setting resin that I use for many things, and simply poured it into the hollow skull and jaw skins, slushing around the plastic to make it cover all spots. Tentacles made from aluminum wires covered with soft yarn soaked in tinted latex were attached by drilling holes in the skull and inserting the ends of each tentacle, attaching them with thermoplastic. I also made a bunch of horn-like protuberances by wrapping yarn around the tip of a pencil and painting tinted latex over the yarn.
I added teeth made from cotton dipped in latex, using liquid latex as a glue.
The eyes were stuck to the eye sockets with dabs of hot melt glue.
Patches of textured latex skin were cast in texture molds and attached to the puppet.
The finished puppet was painted with tinted latex and acrylic airbrush colors. A support rod was made from two thick aluminum wires wrapped in chroma key tape.
The ship seen in the film was a CGI stock footage animation downloaded from Videoblocks. In the clip I used various angles and movements were provided.
In After Effects I added the ship to various space backgrounds that were either Photoshopped or also downloaded from Videoblocks.
The vengeful pilot was an even bigger cheat. I simply used two still images of a dressed up person, found at stock image provider Depositphotos, and placed that guy in spaceship interior backgrounds, also a mix of stock photos and Photoshopped details.
I'm sure my interpretation of Lovecrafts poetry differs wildly from the intent of the old guy himself, but as it is, I had fun doing this film. It was a quick and creative project.
I've started adapting Donald Wandrei's poetry sequence "Sonnets of the Midnight Hours" from Weird Tales. It'll be a somewhat irregular series on my YouTube channel. Wandrei was, of course, one of H. P. Lovecraft's buddies and a regular contributor to the seminal Weird Tales magazine.
Each installment of Wandrei's sonnet collection had a heading drawn by Hugh Rankin, a very busy illustrator who, among other things, illustrated Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. The heading shows a nude woman sitting opposite an ape-like demonic creature. I thought it would be fun to try and recreate that image on film.
I didn't bother with making a new puppet for this very short clip, so I resorted to re-using an ape-man I built for my film "Memory", coincidentally adapted from a Lovecraft prose poem. You can read all about the making of this puppet right HERE.
Way back in the 1990s, when I was just getting into animation using a digital camera I bought a bunch of miniature props meant for various projects I'd dream up, but I never really used any of them. The lute was one of these. It's actually made from wood and nicely detailed. I animated the ape puppet plucking at the strings, hopefully matching the tune I was eventually going to add to the finished footage, but I didn't do any timed animation to any music. I just hoped it'd look fine in the end, and it did. The ape was supposed to sit down on a rock. I didn't bother with a miniature rock, so I just had the puppet crouching down a bit.
For the nude girl, I found a stock footage clip at, if I recall correctly, Pond5.com. She's sitting on a pebble beach with the sky and sea in the background. I was able to remove that background by pumping up the saturation in After Effects, making the blue sea and sky very blue; blue enough to key it out using the Keylight plug-in. I could then return the saturation to a more natural look. The pebbled beach became the ground the characters are sitting on. And, of course, a campfire was also added using a stock footage clip of a fire shot against a black background. The mountains and the double-mooned sky in the background is a stock digital illustration found at Depositphotos.com.
Wandrei's poem paints an apocalyptic vision of our planet's future where the oceans have been emptied of their water. The creatures of the deep lie floundering and dying, and all the uncovered secrets of the sea are covered with slime. To create that look I downloaded stock images of rocks covered with seaweed and added the "Plastic Wrap" Photoshop filter over them. This gave the textures in the photos a very slimy look. I also re-used lots of Photoshopped beached sea creatures from my Dagon film.
We do get a brief glimpse of a sea-dwelling race, which might now become the new masters of the world. Many years ago a built a bunch of puppets for a Lovecraft-inspired online game called "The Talisman." I honestly have no idea what became of it, but I spent quite some time building a bunch of creatures for it. One of these was representing a "deep one", a mix between fish, amphibians, and humans dreamt up by Lovecraft for many of his tales and also used by other authors. I simply took one of the photos of this puppet and 2D-animated it in After Effects using the puppet tool.
At the end of the film, you see a mysterious slug-like white thing writhing about. Again I used an older puppet, a hand-puppet built some years ago for a short horror film (not featured on my YouTube page.) I shot it against my puppet stage green screen and added a few manipulations in After Effects to change its color and make it look bigger and broader.
That's about it. As you can see this project held few innovations and no new puppets. But it was a fun exercise, and I'm planning to do a few more Sonnets of the Midnight Hours next year.
Nobody can accuse "The Dweller In the Hills" to be great poetry, but it has a certain flavor that I like. I tried to create a visual esthetic that went with it. But before we get into that, here's a little bit about the guy who wrote this.
August D Derleth is the foremost of H P Lovecraft's disciples, the group of young writers he encouraged and communicated with. Derleth's devotion was such that after Lovecraft's death he and a couple other writers formed Arkham House, a publishing venture with the sole purpose of collecting the works of Lovecraft, which was spread in various pulp and amateur press magazines. Eventually, other authors, like Derleth himself, were also published by Arkham House.
Derleth was a prolific writer for the pulps, both with prose and poetry. "The Dweller In the Hills" is probably a good example of his slightly unpolished style.
I felt that this poem, which is now in the public domain, could be adapted as a fun short horror film with a distinct style. I chose to try to emulate the style of "rubber hose" animation when creating the dweller himself. Rubber hose animation refers to an early style of animated character, including the earliest incarnations of Mickey Mouse, where the limbs seem to be boneless and hose-like. It's a very retro style and lends itself to crazy and sometimes unsettling characters (at least to our modern sensibilities.)
I also looked at artists like Big Daddy Roth, EC Comics artist "Ghastly" Graham Ingels, and Weird Tales´ Lee Brown Coye for inspiration.
So, this is how the character ended up as a clay sculpture; cartoony and grotesque.
The armature was super simple since I was going with the rubber hose aesthetic. The head isn't included here, but a single wire controls the jaw, and that's it.
I used a wrapping of soft yarn to cover up the arms and legs. The sculpted torse was recreated in latex rubber from a dental plaster mold. Some very simple foam padding filled out the body.
I added a couple of mother-of-pearl white plastic half-spheres as eyes to get a creepy effect. The teeth and nails are tissue paper dipped in latex and shaped with a set of small scissors. The hair is fake fur. The whole puppet was dry brushed with tinted latex.
I also applied various filters in After Effects to get a faded retro look. It's a style I'd like to explore in another project. In all of the shots featuring the character, the dweller is sandwiched in between laters of trees cut out in Photoshop. It's a bit of finicky work, but the results are worth it.
There is a bunch of people in this video, reacting to the nightly noises of the dweller. they're all stock footage clips, downloaded from Videoblocks.com. Like my old inspiration and patron saint, Ed Wood, I'm getting pretty good at storytelling with stock video clips, methinks.
I'm not a massive fan of August Derleth, but if I come across something that tickles my fancy in the public domain, I'll give him another go. I will, however, do another project where I can explore the rubber hose retro style to hopefully both unsettling and entertaining effect.
One of my all-time favorite authors is Clark Ashton Smith, a buddy and a contemporary of H P Lovecraft. They both contributed to the same magazines and developed the genres we now call sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. In their days it was all more or less simply "weird fiction." Smith invented his own bestiary of strange and terrifying beings, one of them being Ubbo-Sathla, basically a primeval soup of DNA with some kind of sentience. Well, I won't go into too many details. Hopefully, you've by now watched the video clip posted above, and you know everything you need to know on the subject.
I have many CAS (as Smith is often abbreviated) projects in the pipeline. Some of his writings are by now in the public domain, but I took the precaution some years ago to contact his stepson, head of the CAS estate, explaining my intentions and requesting permission to adapt his stepdad's work for my YouTube channel. He didn't have any problems with that, so off I went! "In the Ooze of Ubbo-Sathla" is the first of these projects I've managed to finish.
The main character is the wizard Zon Mezzamalech. For this role, I called upon my old buddy John Hankins who is looking more and more like a wizard for every passing year. You might recognize him as the doomed hero (sans beard) in the film "Feather of Owlbear." John has a green screen and a plethora of home-made fantasy outfits, so he could provide me with footage of Zon staring into the crystal orb of the story. He drew some shapes with blue paint on his face, which allowed me to remove the blue and add a digital effect of swirling lights onto his head, showing the being a wizard and staring into unwholesome objects might change you gradually.
Let's get to the backgrounds right away. They were all made in Photoshop using stock images downloaded from Depositphotos. This shot with John as Zon was made up of 12 elements pieced together in After Effects: The background, real candle flames, John, the flickering lights in his face (a stock CGI animation), the stone table, the orb, and the light shapes in the orb. John is in the USA and I'm in Sweden, but I could mail him instructions and he would mail me the filmed results.
This shot is another bit of trickery; it's a still image of John combined with a stock image och a guy in a wizard's robe. It's so short that using stills worked OK in this case.
The sonorous narration was performed by another American buddy, Fabian Rush. I helped out Fabian with a bit of stop-motion animation for his film "Forsaken: Rock Opera of Chaos", and he happily contributed his voice talents to my project. Fabian is in his own right a very interesting creator, a hard-rockin' musician and filmmaker, and, like me, a big fan of the work of H P Lovecraft and Ray Harryhausen. We plan to have more collaborations in the near future.
The city of Mu-Thulan, where Zon Mezzamalech has his tower of sorcery, was also created with layers of stock photos of various buildings. The people moving about in the shot were leftover takes from a production of "Aladdin" that I made with a group of special needs people some years ago. These takes were all shot in front of a green screen. Applying the 3D effect to each layer allowed me to do a fake pan through the city up to the tower.
There are other people in the film, but they're all either stock photos manipulated with the puppet tool in AE, or stock video. I experimented with transitions quite a bit in this project. I wanted to add organic transitions between the shots and achieved this look by applying shots of black ink dissolving in water and using the black and white contrast of those shots to create a matte effect in AE. That was a bit of a learning curve, but it garnered a very useful result in the end. I try to do something new with AE in every new project.
Now let's go on to the creatures. The text describes Zon Mezzamalech's descent into primeval brutehood in detail. One of the first stops in this downward spiral is a "man-beast." I wanted to make this puppet as something inspired by the often weird-looking ape suits of studio-era Hollywood. I took specific inspiration from the suits worn by ape performer Ray "Crash" Corrigan, which were bulky, very hairy, and with a peculiar-looking face.
The only part of this puppet I sculpted was the face, using medium-grade Monster Clay. Two metallic red pearls served as eyes.
The armature was simplicity itself. I didn't add any articulation to the face except for the jaw, which was in keeping with the rather unexpressive 1940's ape suits. The red pearls are stuck to the backside of the latex face using latex eye sockets. They can be animated by inserting a pin into the hole in each pearl and swiveling the eyeball around. As usual, I'm using aluminum wires and thermoplastic for my armatures.
The padding was also very simple, just a few layers of thin and soft polyurethane foam wrapped around the armature.
Real bulk was achieved with fluffy fake fur, a nightmare for any animator by the way, as you keep moving it around every time you touch the puppet. The teeth were made from toilet paper and latex and the exposed parts of the skin were dry brushed with tinted latex. I also did two hardly noticeable breasts with cotton and latex peering out from the fur, again in imitation of the Corrigan suits.
This puppet is quite big, around 16 inches tall. I placed the puppet for scale next to my main coon cat Ludwig, who's huge. Ludwig, by the way, had a fling with the cat variant of the Coronavirus in November. He's just recovered from his ordeal and his usually bright yellow eyes are still stained a bloodshot red in this photo.
The pterodactyl, a Pteranodon to be specific, was built for an as-of-yet unrealized project, a King Kong fan film that I helped out with during the planning stage. You can read all about the making of this puppet HERE.
The Ichthyosaurus was simply a 2D animated stock illustration. The animation was achieved by splitting up parts of the image in separate image files -the beak and the fins- so they could be animated separately and integrated with the body. The fleeing squid was a stock CGI animation.
Eventually, Zon Mezzamalech devolves into a "forgotten behemoth". I based this puppet on the Permian reptile Ophiacodon. Like with our man-beast, only the head was sculpted in clay. The upper part and the jaw were cast separately for easy mold-making.
Again, a very simple armature. The puppet wasn't required to do much more than walk around and bellow at the moon.
I did spend a bit of time doing a decent muscle build-up in foam. The sinewy parts on the legs were achieved using very thin foam soaked in latex and rolled into the desired shapes.
I used a subtle but bumpy skin texture for this creature. All the textures were pulled from the same texture mold. Additional bumps and warts were drops of latex applied with a pointy tool. The crest on the back was made from tissue paper dabbed with latex.
Teeth and claws were tissue paper and latex. The eyes were painted on and covered with Glossy Accents scrapbooking plastic.
On to the serpent people, which turned out t be the most popular part of my film. In fact, quite a few people have suggested I should make a film just about them. I split up the head pieces in two parts again, which always makes the mold-making bit much easier.
Again another simple armature. The jaw is provided with a single aluminum wire. I debated wether or not I should give the puppet a tail, but adding one made it much more snake-like, of course. I wrapped the neck and tail in thick, soft yarn soaked in latex instead of padding these parts with foam. This makes these parts wrinkle less like a rubber toy and more like the bodies of real snakes.
The job of the padding in this case was to make the body very sleek. I only added some muscle details on the arms and legs.
For the latex skin I used a texture mold I made years ago for some kind of dinosaur or dragon. It's a basic scaly pattern, which doesn't exactly imitate the overlapping scale pattern on snakes. I think it gets the look right when you look at the puppet from a distance. The belly was covered with a texture that was actually sculpted a while back to look like the belly skin of a snake.
The serpent man was painted with PAX paint (Prosaide glue and acrylic colors) using a sponge, with airbrushed details. To create the very small teeth I just added tiny drops of tinted latex onto the jaw with a pointy tool. The eyes were painted onto the latex with Warhammer model paints. The forked spear the puppet is holding here was made for one of my older films, "The King Who Sought Immortality."
For the serpent war shot I dressed up the puppet in leathery armor created from latex castings in molds made for various puppets. Since I only made one puppet (lazy!) I had to animate this single puppet a few times to portray a number of characters. The most complex animation had two serpent men sword fighting. I first dressed up the puppet in one type of armor and had it perform the choreographed movements with his sword. I then re-dressed the puppet in the other armor and animated the corresponding choreography. The timing of the puppets was achieved thanks to a function in the animation software Dragoframe, which allows the animator to upload a videofile that can be played one frame at a time as a transparent guide to the motion animated by the filmmaker and his puppet. Thus I could upload the previous bit of animation and time the impact of the swords striking together without any problems. These sword also came from "The King Who Sought Immortality" and were made from wooden spatulas ground down with a Dremel tool and decorated with Milliput epoxy.
The short serpent war shot was another rather complex composition in AE, with 20-ish layers stacked on top of each other.
Ubbo-Sathla itself was a digital animation created in AE, as was actually most of the environment around it.
I first made a textured layer using the displacement map tool in AE with other effects such as "Glass" and "Tint" added on top of that. What I got was a nasty-looking bubbling, fleshy stew. I rendered out 15 seconds of this.
That shot was then transformed by cutting out a mass of the texture with the rotoscope tool and then using the distortion grid tool to create an undulating animation. I rendered out a bunch of various animations against a transparent background, which allowed me to drop Ubbo-Sathla into any scene I wanted.
The spawn of Ubbo-Sathla were created pretty much the same way, except that I used still images of human veins added on top of a organic texture I made in Photoshop. The spawn shapes were again animated with the distortion grid tool.
And an even simpler version of this technique was used to create the sea of slime in which Ubbo-Sathla reposes. He's joined in the muck by the tablets of star-quarried stone carrying the forgotten wisdom Zon Mezzamalech covets.
These tablets were another simple Photoshop creation, using a font simulating a made-up alphabet to create the writing. I made this writing transparent and placed a digital animation of shiny shapes behind each tablet to make the writing seem truly alien.
CAS´ strange epic "Ubbo-Sathla" is an example of another concept I keep getting back to, the notion of "deep time" -that awe can be supplied by contemplating the sheer vastness of the number of years our planet has existed, how pathetic we and our civilization can appear in comparison to the life cycle of our world. Lovecraft was a master at this type of fiction, but another famous example is Olaf Stapledon's "The Last and the First Men."
I'll certainly return to the mid-boggling fantasy worlds of CAS -I already have a couple of new projects in the works- but I'll also tackle other authors of the so-called Lovecraft group. There's a lot of wonderful weirdness to be mined there, and much of it is in the public domain.
