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.

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.