Some More YouTube Stuff.

Those of you who have looked through my blog will already have seen posts on this stuff, but I decided to make a couple of image streams for YouTube on the subjects. They might be of interest, as they include video footage of the finished puppets and props at work. So, enjoy!

"The Sword of the Oceans"

Last year I promised my friend Daniel Lenner to help him out building props and doing modelwork for his Jules Verne-inspired film Wavebreaker , but I had no idea it would be such a dragged-out, energy-consuming event. The film is scheduled to get finished at the end of March. Then I'm finally off to finish some of my OWN projects. It's been mostly fun doing the stuff for Wavebreaker, though. But one thing seems to have been particularly gremlin-infested; the creation of a workable version of Captain Nemo's sub "the Nautilus". I first built a 3 feet long version made out of two joined plastic bottles, detailed with Apoxie sculpt. Just as I was getting the final shape sanded and finished for more intricate details, I dropped the damned thing on the concrete floor in my workshop and the model shattered into quite a lot of pieces. I discovered I had not taken any photos of the model prior to the accident and I had none taken after it, as I ran outside with all the pieces I could find and hurled them fuming into the trash can.

So what to do now? I remembered I had an old Revell model of the Hindenburg zeppelin stashed away somewhere. I found it and stripped it down to its very bare essentials, turned it around with its stern becoming the stem, and found that, yes; this could actually turn into a decent steampunk submarine.

I added some very minor details, as Danny's intention had always been to have a very sleek, rocket-like sub, much like the Nautilus from the original illustrations from the first edition of "20 000 Leagues Under the Sea", and not at all like the fish-like Disney film version. To create the famous ram of this fantasy sub I made plastic casts of a saw-toothed knife blade. While the plastic was still soft I pulled out the casts from their silicone molds and bent them slightly to fit the shape of the hull. I added a small command tower from a war ship model kit, reused a fin from the Hindenburg to make the rudder and added a big propeller from another old toy model.

And this is the finished result, painted with airbrush acrylics. The windows and portholes are a mix of clear plastic beads with flat undersides and casts made from Crystal Clear plastic. Now a bit of a problem arose. The original model was built quite big in order to photograph well. This little bugger, its substitute, is only little over 1 ft long. This meant that our original intentions of having it animated in very cool camera moves went out the window. Instead I asked Ola, the husband of a friend of mine, to take some good close-up photos of the model, that could then be cut out and 2D animated in After Effects. Ola is a pro photographer with his own studio and the photos he took really did the trick. Thanks, Ola!

The photos Ola provided already had the model against a pristine white background. Cutting it out and putting it against a solid blue background was therefore not a problem. I took separate photos of the propeller in three different positions and added those to Ola's photos. I imported the photos of the Nautilus into my StopMotionPro animation software and looped them. This created long sequences of shots of a hovering Nautilus with a spinning propeller, that I could then 2D animate in After Effects.

And here's what some of the finished shots look like, with animated 2D and model fish added. These shots will all have a "underwater" filter added.

That's what friends are for

I've been helping out my buddy Daniel Lenéer on a couple of his film projects. The latest one, "Wavebreaker", is about the angst-ridden crew on the sub Nautilus. I'm building a period diver's helmet and some other stuff for the project. And I'll be providing animated fish and a giant squid in post production. But we also needed a practicle tentacle for interaction with the cast. I built one out of an old foam matress and covered it with skin and suction cups molded in latex.


Suction cups galore! Ten different sizes were sculpted in Chavant clay and a mold of Ultracal 30 was made from them. It took about one week to cast as many cups as I needed, two casting sessions a day.

Even more suction cups! This is just as I started adding them to the tentacle.

A little test hug, to see if it's flexible and cumfie enough. The skin has not been added yet.




















On to the actual shoot! Camera guy, and sometimes acting guy, Christopher cuddles the tentacle.


















The tentacle finally meets its intended victim, Jimmy, who acts out the squeeze rolling on the floor, perspiring sweat added with a spray bottle. Fun stuff!


















Danny decides the tentacle needs some proper motivation and steps in himself, a true hands-on director (not many women in his films yet. Hmmm...)













The interior of the Nautilus was the basement of the block of flats where Danny lives. Pure and simple. There are neutral walls and some pipes hanging from the cieling, but nothing else that could make that place go as "submarine interior". My initial reaction was "How the hell will we make this work?" Maybe we won't all the time, but there will be scenes where it will work. Other than that it was fun to do. We alternated using the basement set with filming scenes in front of a green screen. The bottom line is Danny & Co know how to make filming fun. I sometimes get lost in the technicalities of making a shot convincing. I once heard a film critic commenting on the "effects" in schlock meistro Ed Wood's ultra B-movie "Plan 9 From Outer Space". It isn't as much a case of Wood not having good effects as just having representative depictions of the effects he would've had, if he had the proper budget. For those of us who do non-commercial, or amateur, films it's the same thing. We do the best we can with what we have. Just because we don't have EVERYTHING we would need to make the finished film match our visions doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. If we reasoned like that nothing would get done.