I sometimes contribute to the various publications of Graeme Philips, which all have Lovecraftian content of some kind. In the booklet "Forbidden Knowledge" I found the poem "Forbidden Words" by Frank Coffman and decided that it would be a perfect addition to my cosmic horror selection on my YouTube channel. After I got Frank's permission to adapt his poem, I set to it.
I wanted to do something that had the atmosphere and look of the AIP Roger Corman Poe adaptations, which meant over-embellishing certain colors, using bombastic music, and a gothic setting with overdressed rooms.
I was briefly contemplating finding a real location for this, but I quickly realized that wherever I went, I'd have to augment the place in After Effects anyway to get the look I wanted. So instead I went with completely digital 2D backgrounds, composed in Photoshop. I mainly used a bunch of stock images found on depositphotos.com, with additional elements added.
For the main character, a man searching for taboo knowledge (aren't they always?), I recruited my stalwart actor Andreas Pettersson, whom you've seen in a number of productions by now.
I shot all of his scenes in his living room in front of a green screen. By now we have this process pretty much down to a T.
The occult book our hero reads from is just an old book -a cookbook if I remember correctly- with a printed-out spread placed into it. The pages are a Photoshop mash-up of parts from a 19th-century astrological calendar.
In the end, our protagonist conjures up a demonic entity, and I could've gone with a number of creatures, but for some reason, I decided to go with a hovering skull. I had a bag of plastic Halloween bones lying around and I thought the included skull had the right dimensions.
As props bought from dress-up shops often are, this skull was made from rather flimsy plastic, and I had to reinforce it by mixing a batch of Burro casting plastic (from FormX in Holland) and lining the insides of the skull with it. After that, I cut loose the jaw and re-attached it to the skull with aluminum wire hinges. In the eye sockets, I placed two tentacles made with aluminum wires wrapped with soft yarn and dabbed with latex, and a long tongue made the same way. The tongue was rolled up and pushed up into the roof of the mouth when not lolling out to be animated. I placed screws on the inside of the skull to help attach the tentacles, the tongue, and the jaw joints. A wooden dowel was also attached to the rear of the skull as a support rod.
The whole skull was then covered with a mix of cotton and latex. This created an organic-looking surface and a base for creating more elaborate shapes.
Using more cotton and latex and using a pointy dental tool I built up a textured skin, with bumps and wrinkles.
I also made teeth with the cotton / latex mix.
I also used yarn to create some of the shapes. This whole procedure is pretty quick and very economical since you don't have to make any molds, but since the latex/cotton mix dries to a sturdy leathery quality it's only applicable to projects where flexibility isn't necessary. using this technique on a full stop-motion puppet would not work at all.
Here's the finished skull before the paint was applied.
I started off with a mix of latex and red pigments sponged on with a bit of foam. This created a very organic-looking base.
Other colors were mixed the same way and dry brushed on with more sponges (bits of foam from an old cushion). I used I light layer of white acrylic paint over everything to get a glowing effect. Lastly, blue acrylic airbrush paint was hand-applied with a brush to offset the other colors and augment the psychedelic effect.
Here's the finished skull puppet. The stand is simply held fast with a glue clamp when animating the puppet.
This is how it looks when piecing together the various elements that make up one of my monster scenes. In this case, I have the animated skull in the front layer, and behind it, I've added layers of smoke and a cloudy luminous background. I've also added a part of the billowing smoke pillar over the skull to create a sort of widow's peak coming out of the top of the head.
The skull only makes a brief appearance, but that's the only thing it should do. This was a very quick project but I'm quite happy with it. Stuff like this is perfect for experimenting with creating mood, which is one of my favorite challenges.
If we are to believe old Lovecraft himself he has a family tree to give you nightmares. If you go far enough back you'll encounter various cosmic abominations in his lineage. Closer to our time, but still very far back in history, we find the name Yogash the Ghoul -apparently one of the first, if not the very first, of that very creepy breed of creatures.
You can study the Lovecraft family tree in one of the volumes collecting Lovecraft's countless letters. The tree was included in a 1933 message to James F. Morton. My fancy had been tickled by the name Yogash the Ghoul for a while since it was both very descriptive (It's a ghoul) and open to endless imaginative story possibilities.
For those of you who remember bits of my previous work, you'll recall that I did make a ghoul puppet way back in 2013 for a film called The Lovecraft Alphabet. The puppet was very detailed and as it happens also very expressive when animated. It was a combination of a sculpture that I was happy with and an armature that did the job.
In that film, the puppet is shown very briefly to illustrate old ghoul painter Pickman. His art comes alive, turns around, and makes a face at the viewer. That's all the puppet did, so I figured I should do something more with it before it started deteriorating, as all latex puppets eventually do. At this point in time, the puppet is in surprisingly good shape, so I thought I'd give it the starring role it deserved. Now, the making of the ghoul puppet has already been covered in an older blog post, so I'll direct you over to that one instead. You'll find it HERE.
The story I came up with for the film set out to show the horrific world the ghouls live in, but in that world, the ghouls themselves might not be all that bad. In Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath they're quite heroic characters.
To illustrate the weirdness of the ghoul world I added a few other creatures. First up is a transforming sorcerer the ghoul spies in a ruined temple. This puppet was inspired by a previous puppet/sculpture I built for an online game-maker. That character was a woman standing up. The sorcerer has traveled a bit further down the line in his transformation and is lying on the ground. I sculpted the puppet's torso in medium-grade Monster Clay to get the best and most exact detailing I could on the anatomy.
A dental plaster mold was made over the sculpture and tinted latex was added to the mold using sponges and q-tips. The dental plaster catches and keeps all the delicate textures and details, something that the cheaper and more easy to get hobby plaster usually doesn't. A total of four layers of latex were added, in some parts of the mold, it was ladled on thinly to give the rubber skin more flexibility.
The rest of the puppet was built up using a combination of soft polyurethane foam, cotton, yarn, and latex. The tentacles were aluminum wires covered with soft yarn, then dabbed with tinted latex. All moving parts had joints made from bundles of aluminum wires held together with polymorph thermoplastic. The teeth are paper dipped in latex. The red monster eye is a plastic pearl with a blue iris created by grinding down a section with a Dremel tool, then painting the concave surface blue and covering it with UV resin. The normal eye is a tiny doll's eye made from acrylic plastic. I bought a bunch of those from eBay years ago. The arm was gradually built up with thin layers of latex over an aluminum wire armature padded with thin strips of foam. The flower-like growths on the hip are cotton tufts dipped in latex and rolled between my fingers.
The finished puppet was dry brushed with tinted latex and given a light touch-up with acrylic airbrush colors. The hair is crepé hair, i e sheep's wool, normally used for stage production beards and mustaches.
As you can see, the back of the puppet isn't much to write home about. Since you'll never see that part of the character I just didn't finish it. You can see the tie-down point coming out of the back. It's a threaded bolt attached to a metal rod using super glue and baking soda to fix it in place.
Journeying further with Yogash we come to the valley of the behemoths, chubby vaguely humanoid giants. We see two of them in the film. I sculpted one with both face and torso, while the other only got a head sculpt. I re-used the flabby body of his friend for him as well when casting latex skins for the puppet bodies.
The puppets are fairly small, about eight inches tall. I forgot to snap photos of their armatures, but they're very simple constructions using aluminum wires and thermoplastic. The foam padding over the armatures was made using foam of various densities depending on where on the body they were placed.
The finished puppets are covered with patches of latex skin cast in skin texture molds, as well as latex casts made from the clay sculptures using plaster molds. They're painted with tinted latex and acrylic colors applied by dipping an old toothbrush in color and spraying it on by dragging my thumb over the bristles. The eyes are mother-of-pearl scrapbooking acrylic domes.
Eventually, Yogash comes to a human city and encounters a dying boy lying on the floor in a pauper's hut. Yogash asks the boy if he'll come with him to become a ghoul himself, or if Yogash should just leave him there to die. This little chap is Hannes Johansson, whom you've seen in a few of my other films by now. I just filmed Hannes lying on the floor in my buddy Andreas Petterson's flat. Hannes lives above it, so he just stopped by on his way home from school.
Probably the toughest shot in the film, the little challenge I try to put into all my projects so I'll grow and learn something new with each effort, is when Yogash leaves the town carrying the boy. It's a combination of Photoshop and After Effects trickery.
To place Hannes in the arms of the puppet I picked him up and twirled around in front of my video camera, to get views from all angles.
Pulling stills from the video footage, I then cut out Hannes in Photoshop and added another photo of the ghoul puppet with its arms in the right position. I animated the puppet walking towards the "camera", cut away the top half of the animated ghoul with the masking tool, and added the Photoshopped image instead. The trick to making this work was to use keyframes at certain points to make the Photoshop image follow the animated lower half of the body. It's a short enough clip that I think I made it work -barely. There is a tracking tool to make one image layer follow the movements of another layer, but I've never been able to make it work satisfactorily.
All the settings of Yogash's world are various stock photographs pulled apart and re-assembled in Photoshop, usually to work in a number of layers in conjunction with stock video effects such as fog or fireflies. I thought this building looked sufficiently crypt-like to work as Yogash's abode. A guy on YouTube called me out on it and explained it's part of an old waterworks complex just s stone's throw from where he lives.
The graveyard around Yogash's crypt is, I believe, an old French graveyard. I had a stock video of a squawking crow shot against a green screen, so I added that to one of the tombstones.
The town itself was a gaggle of photos of the old Mongolian town Sarai-Batu. I thought it had a vaguely Asiatic or eastern look, which would go well with the esthetics of the proto-fantasy tales that Lovecraft and his pals, like Robert E Howard.
All in all, Yogash the Ghoul got a very good reception on YouTube, which delights me. In fact, people have asked for a sequel. They want to see more exploits of Yogash and "ghoul boy", as they've nicknamed Hannes. And I have given that some thought. Hannes is certainly up for it, and the ghoul puppet is still looking well enough. I'd also like to give other characters from the Lovecraft family tree a spin, such as K'baa the serpent, or Goth the Burrower.
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.
