Orc Horn and Other LARP Stuff

These past two weeks I have been exhausting myself (always an interesting experience) by making a bunch of stuff for an upcoming local LARP event. In other words, lots of people dressed up as orcs, elves, etc, running through the woods. Among the things I built was this orc horn, something I hadn't done before. The people arranging the event couldn't find a big imposing-looking horn, so I volunteered to build one.

My idea for the horn-construct was a traditional one, as far as prop-making is concerned. I built up a basic smooth shape using Chavant clay, and decided to cover it with paper and glue papier maché style.

However, I opted to use latex instead, since time was suddenly of the essence, and latex would set up faster that the wallpaper glue traditionally used for this kind of work.

I tore up small bits of newspapers and fastened them to the clay horn by painting the latex over the paper with a sponge. When the first layer was finished..

..I added another using tinted latex, so I could see if I missed any spots.

 When these layers had set up I cut a slit all the way down the latex/paper skin with a scalpel, and simply peeled it off like a banana skin. Liquid latex was used to seal the split.

Of course, the horn as it was so far was far too soft, so I reinforced it by pouring SmoothCast 325 into the horn, and slather it around by turning the horn. The plastic was tinted a dark brown to cover up the newspaper printing on the paper. I did this two times to add sufficient support.

The next trick was to add exterior support too, and a smooth bone-like surface. For this I used another type of plastic called Epsilon Pro, which is mixed up and painted onto a soft surface to add a hard shell around it. Two layers of Epsilon Pro created a very smooth and durable surface for the horn.

As I had also tinted the Epsilon plastic a dark brown, the resulting look was quite nice, I'd say.

But to make it an Orc horn we also need to adorn the horn with some crude metalwork. I built up a clay shape around the opening of the horn using Monster Clay soft, which is very quick to work with, and fine if you don't need very complex details in your sculpture.

The white surface you see here is the bottom of a paper plate, and it's there for a good reason.

 Onto the paper plate surface I poured DragonSkin Pro silicone to create a base for the silicone mold that would go around the sculpture.

One truly indispensable tool in my workshop is my little turntable, on which I built up a Monster Clay base for the mold making process.

The horn sculpture was turned upside down and placed onto the clay base, and clay walls were built up around the sculpture to contain more silicone that was poured around the horn.

The final layer of silicone was thickened with a special chemical agent and smeared on like butter. This was done to quickly build up a thickness of the silicone. Trying to save that ever away-slipping time again..

A middle section was created in pretty much the same way, using clay containment walls and DragonSkin silicone.

Finally, the mouth piece was sculpted and a small wooden button added at the very top to create the desired look.

This time, again to save time, I simply used a roll of soft carton to create a containment wall for the silicone.

All these sculpted bits were cast in SmoothCast 325, using silicone molds that had been dusted down with aluminum powder. This powder stuck to the darkly tinted plastic, and created a dull metal surface that would never rub off.

The final horn was sandpapered for a more organic, dull look, and the "metal" bits were weathered using black airbrush colors. And how does this magnificent instrument sound? Well, when I blow in it, it either sound like a distant breeze or a smattering fart. I hope the Orc who'll be wearing this can make more noise with it. You can possibly make out that two metal rings have been added to the top and middle sections. These are points where a leather strap will be added.

I also cast 16 latex Elf ears, and 11 Orc and goblin latex masks, some of which are shown below. 

It's quite a lot of work hauling big plaster molds around, and I don't plan on participating in any such project again. I started making LARP masks and props way back at the start of the 2000's. A big LARP boom was occurring in Sweden then, and although this hobby isn't practiced by as many anymore, there are still ambitious fantasy role playing events popping up in the Swedish woods around this time of the year. 

What Is It?: Digital Trickery

My DeviantArt friend Jeff Kwasniewski has written a lot of funny and inventive poems, most of them in the realm of fantasy or horror. I was especially charmed by one of them, "What Is It?", which is an hommage to the ghost stories of English writer and scholar M R James. If you haven't read any of James´ work, get yourself out on the Internet right now and start Googling, or listen to any audio book version, OR get the DVD box set of the BBC "Ghost Stories For Christmas" TV movies, which frequently adapt the stories from this author.
Jeff's prose poem follows the hapless narrator who inadvertently sets loose an eldritch horror, apparently once imprisoned in Eton Collage chapel by James himself. I decided I wanted to make a short film based on this text, and set to work on it last fall, building a puppet and planning the shots. A couple of weeks ago I filmed the live-action footage, which I'm now editing in After Effects and Adobe Premiere Elements. This entry in my blog will be about the work in that editing process, which I hope you'll find inspiring, as I think it shows that you can go a long way with a bit of inventiveness and planning.

My buddy Andreas Nordkvist plays the narrator, though the actual text is read by Jeff himself. On and off through the past years I've had access to a big room in a local boarding school just a stone's throw from my house. That's where I've been putting my lights and my green screen, but that building is now under renovation, and I've had to look for another available space. Luckily for me, my nearest neighbour, a big archive, is now happily letting me use their facilities, which has resulted in me getting better sound and even more space to play around with. However, for this little adventure I only went with a very simply arranged green screen, since it was all I needed.

Most of the story takes place in Eton, UK. On Pond5 I found a few stock footage shots of the college. I settled for one of them, showing a bustling street with the college in the background. The clip cost $50, which stang a bit, but I wanted something more than just a still image from Wikimedia to establish the beginning of the story. As you can see, Andreas is pretty seamlessly inserted into the stock footage. This is thanks to the Primatte Keyer After Effects plugin, combined with Key Correct, both of them included in the Red Giant Keying Suite. I see now that it's priced at $799, but I recall that it was slightly cheaper when I bought it about a year ago. At any rate, this software has proven to be worth every penny.

For example, if the filmmaker turns out to be an idiot, which I can be sometimes, then all is still not lost. Take this mad shot: We wrapped the green screen around Andreas´ car and did not anticipate the problems that would follow with sunlight being filtered through bright green cloth. This shot should be impossible to save, however..

..With the help from Primatte along with some color adjustment tools in After Effects it was possible to get a decent, if not perfect shot after all. So, why not simply get in the car and actually go for a real drive? It's still winter over here and the trees are completely bare. Some more stock footage from Pond5 makes up the moving background, which is actually an English country road.

Regular green screen shots, especially close-ups, are much easier to work with, and it's possible to quickly pull your actor out of the background and stick him/her into any new surroundings.

The background here is a Photoshop collage with images from various sources. When the final shot is rendered out I add a filter from Rampant Color FX, which unites the various elements in the shot and creates a smoother look for your composite image. However, if you don't want to spend any money on grading your films there are numerous free resources online. Just do a Google search for "grading filters for after effects".

In this shot I've also added layers of dust in the air; one behind Andreas in the sunlight, and one in front of him. It's a moving camera shot, which means that we're closing in on Andreas, with the stacks of books and papers seemingly in front of him and closer to the "camera", This trick is achieved by adding layers of still images on top of each other. The chroma key footage of Andreas is placed between those. There are eight layers of images in this shot, and all of them are turned into 3D layers in AE and spaced with various lengths between each other, using the "Camera" function as a guiding tool. I'm just rushing through the procedure here, but if any one's interested I'll do a proper guide for this type of trick shot. I'm simply showing that you have quite a few options on how to make a shot composed of almost just still images really come alive. The zoom created in AE achieves the illusion that you're in a real room, thanks to the 3D layer effect.

Now on to some meatier stuff. Here's an interesting shot. In the story the hero is forced to escape from a chapel cellar, where he has inadvertently released an evil entity; the "It" of the title. He's rushing back up some old stone stairs to escape the creature. The boarding school I live next to has a lot of stone stairs, stone walls and other bits of interesting architecture. I decided to use one of the stairs for this shot, as I couldn't achieve it by only using the green screen alone. I stood about midway up this flight of stairs holding the folded green screen, and had Andreas stumble in panic up the stone slabs.

In Photoshop I created this mask using free texures found online.

 

In the final shot I've added this mask in AE, also using the masking tool to draw around the parts of Andreas that were obscured by the mask image. This meant that I had to draw frame by frame around him for parts of this shot, but as he moved fast I didn't really have too many frames to worry about. When this shot was rendered out I also added a few color grading filters.

Here's another shot that illustrates quite well that you can go a long way with a little ingenuity. This huge field is another neighbour of mine. Andreas just ran across it towards the camera.

In After effects I then added a Photoshopped mask of an English cottage, along with some foreground silhouettes of wind-swept trees, some free digital rain found and downloaded from YouTube, and finally a grading filter on top of it all to soften the shot. Placing the cottage mask correctly over the live-action footage I could actually have Andreas running out the door.

So, what's all this running about, then? Well, here's a quick glimpse of the "It" following our hapless hero as it surprises him in his cottage. But more about this creature in the next blog post.

Gorn Masks and Dragon Heads

A few years ago I made a replica of the mask used to portray the monstrous "Gorn" in the classic Star Trek episode "Arena", where he matched wits and brawn with the formidable force of nature known as William Shatner. My Gorn mask was built according to my personal opinions of how the original mask was constructed, as there is very little info on the subject.
You can read about the making of my Gorn mask here:
http://loneanimator.blogspot.se/2011/09/wrestling-with-gorn.html
The mask was actually eventually sold to Bobby Clark, the stuntman who played the monster. Bobby is now touring Trek conventions displaying my mask as the best replica he's seen, and he should know since he spent several days encapsulated in the hot rubber suit.

Here's Bobby with my mask at the actual location where "Arena" was filmed. I guess that's kind of cool!

Bobby had some reservations about my version, as the original was apparently bigger, and the eyes were covered with glittery sequins. I haven't been able to find any sequins as small as they appear to be in the stills from the episode, but there might've been a sequin of that type in the 1960's. Maybe the Trek costume department had the stuff on hand.

My old Gorn mask seems to be worn out and Bobby contacted me to ask me to make a new copy. Ideally, a new bigger version would've been much better, and I am actually working on that now, but to meet Bobby's convention schedule, a copy of the old version will have to do. So I recently sent a new Gorn mask off to him, along with a plastic baby hatchling. You can read about the making of the Gorn baby here:
http://loneanimator.blogspot.se/2011/09/making-gorn-baby.html
Now, is making copies of monsters someone else has designed and established a fun job? Not really, although it seems to be a popular way of making a name for yourself as a creative person. I see many wonderfully made replicas of the Alien, the Predator, and other famous movie monsters. But  I'd much rather  make my name doing my own thing.
It's surprisingly hard work copying what what's been done before, and the simpler the design, the harder it is to get it right. Just try to draw Donald Duck off the top of your head. I'm trying to do less of this kind of work, though getting an order from an old monster performer is flattering and hard to say no to.

During the past four months I've been juggling four part-time jobs. I wouldn't recommend it, as I came very close to experiencing a burnout. I have friends who have gone through this ordeal, and it's no joke. One of my jobs was building props for the outdoor stage show "The Brothers Lionheart", based on a very popular Swedish children's book. I made plastic helmets, rubber spear tips, and similar stuff, but the main big thing was creating the paw and huge head of the dragon Katla. The production team bought a previously used fiberglass dragon head from another stage show. This head was very poorly detailed, and my job was to build up a completely new surface on it. This entailed mixing sculpted and cast skin pieces with structures built up directly on the fiberglass surface. I actually used a thick acrylic paint mixed with cotton to create Katla's new skin, and the result was a very durable, leathery structure.

Here's the Katla head with a new lick of paint, but still not quite finished.

Katla in action during the show. A smoke gun located in the mouth and nostrils  provided necessary dragon ambiance, along with loud sound effects and dramatic music. Apparently Katla's a success with the audiences.

This is my last stage production. I've made a loooooot of them, starting when I was 13, creating props and masks for a fairy tale show. It's always hard work, but usually there's also lots of fun. Now, the fun seems to have gone out of the equation, and it's just work for me. As success coach Brian Tracy says, "if you're stuck in a job you don't like, get out of that job as you would get out of a burning house." And as the old Klingon proverb goes, "only a fool fights in a burning house."
For the sake of reducing stress and disappointment in my life I've now learnt to use the most powerful word there is: "NO!" Now I say no to all offers of working on stage productions. Instead I'm focusing all my efforts on my personal work, i e my miniature animation work, with occasional props and masks created for my own films, or for projects of close friends. If I can't use my creativity to put joy into my life, then what good is it for? I've no idea if my personal work will ever result in any sort of monetary success, but now that seems unimportant. I'm more concerned with what kind of legacy I can leave behind, and I'd rather realize my own ideas than someone else's. I've heard people say that's a pompous and presumptuous attitude, but shouldn't we believe in our own talents and abilities? Seriously; we must believe that our work comes to good, is important to other people, and is worth every second of effort.