They Stalk the Night

I'm a huge fan of M R James's "ghost stories" containing so much mood and weirdness. History, folklore, and the landscape are components that loom large out of his tales. I have adapted a poem by James a few years ago, but I also wanted to write and film my own take on his particular brand of folk horror. I should also say that James wasn't alone in this very unique genre. Some contemporaries such as the Benson brothers were also very apt storytellers within this narrow but effective vein of horror. The above film is the result of my own take on the subject.

The supernatural entities I chose to include in my own text are light tropes in these types of tales: Restless undead, a beheaded ghost, an imprisoned demon, a black dog, a drowned corpse returning, and a boundary specter. All these can be found in folktales as well as variations on themselves in the classic horror tales of the above-mentioned authors. I was happy to find among my collection of stock footage another classic folktale character (of sorts) -the raven. I used the raven as a connecting element between the various segments.

Most of the settings and backgrounds in the film were stock photos found over at Depositphotos.com. I also found a bunch of useful stock video clips at Videoblocks.com, including the floating head ghost, which is an actor with bloodied mouth standing against a black backdrop with a spotlight on his face. This allowed me to insert him as a floating head by changing the transparency setting in his video layer. I also used the matte tool to isolate his mouth, so the blood could remain red while his face was changed into a ghostly blue.

Most scenes were combinations of stock photo backgrounds, with various Photoshop additions or removals and stop-motion animated puppets.

Sometimes live-action elements were added to scenes. In this shot, the girl's eye is a real eye opening, inserted into the still image of the sleeping girl, and trimmed appropriately using the matte pen tool.

The undead walking thing was an older puppet I built a few years ago for my Halloween video. I've pressed him into service before for a few shots here and there.

The (hopefully) sinister back dog is somebody's pet filmed in front of a green screen and shared on YouTube. Again changing the transparency setting in After Effects made the doggie look much darker, and I also added a single glowing eye (a detail sometimes mentioned in folktales) by manually tracking a digitally animated fireball a few frames at a time.

For the demon coming out of a tomb, I wanted something arachnid and uncomfortably familiar, yet alien in its own weird way. I settled on giving it a small head with horns and sharp teeth sticking out of it. The head was sculpted in medium grade Monster Clay.

The puppet had a very simple aluminum wire armature onto which thin strips of foam, yarn soaked in latex and a latex cast of the head sculpture were attached.

Patches of latex skin cast in a skin texture mold covered the whole puppet, and a blend of cotton and latex was used to detail the puppet. Red reflective beads became eyes. Although the puppet's body is quite small it still has quite a big spread, a little over a foot, because of its long legs.

I used a panoramic photo of a Scottish graveyard for a scene where the demon crawls out of a stone tomb.

In order for this shot to work properly, the demon puppet had to emerge from behind something and climb over it. I used a piece of board painted with green chroma key paint. The puppet footage was then aligned correctly in After Effects to sell the illusion of it emerging from a part of the scenery, as it were.

The returning dead sailor fungus man started off as one of my usual aluminum wire puppet skeletons. I used images of a human skeleton to get the proportions right. The thing had after all been human to begin with.

The trusty Monster Clay was again put into action to create a basic zombie/skeletal character.

A dental plaster mold was created over the sculpture, and tinted latex was applied over the inside of the mold using a q-tip.

A very simple latex skin was thus made. The inside of the head was reinforced with a latex/ cotton mix.

The armature was padded with wrappings of thin polyurethane foam. I didn't bother to create any specific muscle patterns since this creature is decomposing.

I wanted a weird organic texture all over the puppet, creating a look that would hopefully remind the audience of nasty stuff you can find growing in the water. To make this texture I resorted to using "chunks o´ flesh", an old makeup FX trick used to create bits of fleshy viscera. Here's how you make it: Tint your latex in any desired color and use a bit of polyurethane foam to sponge out the latex over a slick surface. I used a plastic tray. A hairdryer speeds up the drying process. When the latex is dry you dust it down with talcum powder or corn starch. Then you simply tear up sections of the latex using your fingernails. The latex will bunch up into web-like organic textures with elastic qualities. You can then drape the webbed latex over your puppet, using liquid latex as a bonding agent at points hear and there, to keep the texture hanging on, but at the same time allowing it to move and stretch when the puppet is animated.

 Finally, the puppet gets a rub-down with tinted latex. The puppet was colored a bright fleshy purple, though the creature will appear in the film sporting a greyish-green hue.

This color was chosen because I use a bright green background, and the puppet would not be as easily extracted in After Effects if some parts of it were tonally similar. The color change was easily made in After Effects when the puppet was added to the background settings.

Lastly, we get to the boundary ghost, a revenant that while he lived changed the boundaries of his neighbor's landmarks to gain land himself. His punishment is to spend his afterlife marking where the true, legal boundary lies. This is apparently is a very common ghost story in the West. Here in Sweden, this tale pops up everywhere.

The revenant puppet is an old one, built over ten years ago, but never used. His head was once adorned with a mane of grey hair, but the textile-eating moths infesting my home took care of that, the hair actually being crepé hair, which is sheep's wool.

So I had to replace his hair, and I figured I might as well go with something different. I used this stock footage clip of a spaghetti-like waving CGI texture, extracting it from the light background, turning the texture grey, and placing it behind the puppet. This hopefully created something looking like a cone of hair slowly waving in the wind, or maybe even underwater.

My UK buddy and frequent collaborator John Hutch donated his silvery tones to provide a moody voiceover. Music was again picked from Kevin MacLeod's extensive stock music library. And that's pretty much it for this film. I'm actually working on a comic book version of this material, which will contain more stories about other supernatural entities and situations.

What Is It?: The Finished Film

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.

Living Night by M R James

As you've seen in THIS previous post, I'm a big fan of English writer M R James. Besides his famous ghost stories it seems he also wrote poetry. I found this poem, alternately called "Living Night" and "A Livermere Poem", and I really liked it. I thought it would make a great, moody video. You'll have to be the judge of that :)

There are no actors in this video, just animals in stock footage clips, and my puppets; one new and a couple recycled. My narrator of choice, Mr John Hutch, reads the poem, and the ever useful Kevin Macleod has composed the music.

My plan is to make more videos based on poetry. They'll be shorter and quicker to make, which means that I'll be able to offer new content on YouTube more often. I hope my little audience will appreciate that.

An Art Book of Frightful Fiends

This post will be very different from the usual stuff I'm talking about on my blog. This time I'll be plugging a self-published book, something I usually do on other blogs, Facebook, etc. But, since my drawings ARE such a big part of my creative self, I think I should mention it here as well. This is the bok in question: "The Spectres of M R James."

Since last fall I've been re-reading the works of British scholar and author M R James (1862-1936), and entertaining myself with drawing images of the very imaginative ghosts, demons and monsters, who usually make their appearance during the part of the story where the "Jamesian Wallop" (so named by Will Ross and Mike Taylor of the M R James Podcast) occurs. This is the "booo" moment of the tale, and it's always a very effective one.

So, a good question is: Doesn't this book, then, ruin the whole story if you haven't already read it? It might, yes. On the other hand, the images and the quotes, which accompany each illustration, might also arouse your curiosity and prod you into finding and reading the whole thing.

At any rate, I made this book simply to entertain myself in the hopes that my enthusiasm may be infectious to those who are M R James newbies. It's a labour of love, and I enjoyed the work immensely.

The book is published through Lulu.com, and is 59 pages long, A5 paper size. I've made three earlier books via Lulu, and I'm generally very happy with the publishing arrangements. You upload your own book file, and set the price yourself. Depending on what paper size you choose, your book may or may not be eligible for distribution on Amazon and other venues. This book was entirely created in an A5 Word document, saved as a PDF file and uploaded in Lulu's online book-making machinery. All images are RGB JPGs in 300 DPI resolution. If all this reads like Swahili, Mandarin or Klingon to you, drop me a message, and I'll explain the process in more detail, and in simple English.

Now, if you after reading this blog post find that you can't possibly go on living without owning this little book, you can find it on Lulu right HERE.

And if you're wondering about if I've considered adapting any James story for a film, the answer is yes. I'm preparing the first one to be made this fall, with a short filmed poem almost completed.