"Feather of Owlbear": A D & D Fan Film

This project started way back in 2014, but now it's finally finished. I made a few puppets inspired by the original 1977 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, and they're all covered in previous posts on this blog. Here are links to all of them:

The Owlbear.
The Rust Monster.
The Beholder.
The Umber Hulk.

D & D Monsters: Beware the Umber Hulk

While working with our RPG world film, John and I kept adding more and more of that vast menagerie of cool monsters, until we realized that we could go on with the creature encounters without really getting on with the story. Even so, here comes yet another ugly brute!

I decided that having these classic monsters and not creating a Ray Harryhausen-style monster brawl between a couple of them would be a sin indeed. Thus the owl bear now makes a second appearance, and encounters a foe to grapple with, namely one of my favourite D & D monsters: The umber hulk.

Again I looked to the original first "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual" from 1977 for inspiration. There, the umber hulk is a slightly comical monstrosity that looks like a cross between a beetle and an ape. It's got two sets of eyes, huge mandibles and a burly body. What's not to like?? In later monster manuals the creature has been given a big makeover, and though it may look cooler in terms of the number of details, I think it has lost some of its charm and personality. My umber hulk puppet would turn out to be a cross between the cherished original concept, and my own added details.

I sculpted the head in Monster Clay, but soon realized that I was making it way too big if it was going to tussle with the owl bear. So I sculpted a new head, which was slightly smaller in size.

As you can see, the smaller set of eyes were small smooth beads, the bigger insect eyes were a pair of plastic buttons with a knobbly surface. I found these, and lots of other buttons suitable for both puppet eyes and other decorations, at a local sewing machine shop.

The head was cast as a loose latex skin from a plaster mould. Limbs were created by bonding together lengths of aluminum wires using sewing string. Friendly Plastic helped merge all the bits. Fingers were made by wrapping thick cotton string around aluminum wires and coating these with tinted latex. I'm thinking of making a stand-alone tutorial on building up hands and fingers, as a few people seem to have issues with this.

The mandibles were really just the one, sculpted in Monster Clay and cast twice in Smooth-Cast 300Q plastic, using a DragonSkin Pro silicone mould. Just before the quick-setting plastic gelled, I lowered a bit of folded aluminum wire into it to create a joint.

More Friendly Plastic was used to hold the mandibles in place from inside the head skin, as well as adding strength to the head. A piece of aluminum wire was also added to the lower lip, to make the mouth open and close in animation.

The armature in itself is, as usual, a straightforward deal. The aluminum wire and Friendly Plastic construction makes it very light weight.

Besides the head, the feet were also sculpted in clay. It's actually just the one sculpture, cast twice in latex. The inside of these latex skins were padded with polyurethane foam and a cotton/latex mix.

Some people seem to have problems finding thick, soft foam to pad the puppet body and create the muscles. As I've mentioned many times before I simply use old cushions and mattresses found at garage sales and donated by friends. But here's another alternative.
I buy thinner sheets of very soft foam used in kitchens to soak up moisture under drying racks. Usually, I use these for smaller puppets, or when I build up bulk on thinner limbs.

But you can also glue bits of this thin foam together. Four bits make up a pretty thick single piece, and you can thus decide exactly just HOW thick you'd like the bits to be. I use a very soft and flexible contact cement to bond the foam pieces. You can also use foam spray glue (which I can't get hold of in Sweden at the moment) or perhaps also rubber cement, which I haven't used in this application.

Here are two examples of the layered thin foam padding. You can create very precise shapes using this method, though it takes a bit longer than using bigger bits.

Here's the puppet with finished foam muscles padding. As you can see, I've used bigger pieces on some parts of the body.

Using older plaster moulds with various skin textures I've created big and small patches of latex skin to cover the foam body. Adding drops of tinted latex helps create interesting textures and patterns.

The finished puppet has received a uniform layer of dark grey using tinted latex drybrushed thinly over the surface of the body. Deeper crevasses have kept their black hue, adding depth and shadow to the character. More drybrushing, using lighter shades of blue grey and reddish brown, adds more details. Both sets of eyes are now covered with transparent scrapbooking liquid plastic.

This puppet ended up slightly larger than I had preferred, but its still workable, and the umber hulk now provides the owl bear with a great wrestling buddy. Play nice, boys!

D & D Monsters: The Owlbear

The strapping gentleman in the photos above is Hawaiian filmmaker/ prop maker/ costume maker/ puppet maker/ mask maker/ stop-motion animator etc John Hankins. Like me he works out of his back yard, creating highly imaginative and entertaining fantasy films on a truly shoestring budget. Check out his YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/castlegardener

John's films are actually a two-person show; his wife Alicia is his ever faithful collaborator and supporter, often appearing in the films alongside John in various guises. I've never met John in person but we've been online buddies for years. It's one of those wonderful situations where, at least in my case, I have found through the Internet what I couldn't find where I live; friends sharing the same feverishly passionate interests, and the opinion that nothing is impossible if you just put your heart into it.

Now we're embarking on our first international collaboration -a humorous and hopefully exciting fantasy short film set in the world of the old-school "Dungeons & Dragons" role playing game. John will be shooting the live-action scenes, as well as providing a hand puppet monster, costumes, backgrounds and almost everything else, and I'll be building and animating the monsters he'll encounter.

Long, long ago, when it seemed that my life held an endless mass of disposable time I became enamoured with role playing games, starting with "Dungeons & Dragons" and following with the Swedish game "Drakar & Demoner" ("Dragons & Demons"), with "Tunnels & Trolls", "Runequest", and a smattering of other games and solo adventure game books consumed along the way. Naturally I also made a couple of games with some friends, which never amounted to much. Now I'm actually there again, with the Swedish children's role playing game "Adventure", for which I'm making illustrations and collectible figures.

This is one of the original D & D monsters, here illustrated in the "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual". It is, of course, an owlbear. Later images of this monster are much more anatomically believable, slickly airbrushed in Photoshop and frankly more fierce-looking. In short, they're much more boring, so this first innocently crude and cartoony drawing is my guide for the owlbear puppet I'm building for the project.

I started off with sculpting the head of the beast in my new favourite material in the world -Monster Maker's Monster Clay. I made the open mouth a solid block of clay to be able to create a one-piece mould for the sculpture. The eyes are glass, and bought some years ago from a Swedish taxidermist supplier. They're some kind of predatory bird's eyes, but I'm no expert on the subject.

Here's the latex cast sitting next to its dental plaster mould. I usually tint the latex for my puppets black or a dark colour to get a good base colour. If the painted-on paint rubs off anywhere I prefer to have a darker colour peeking through under it.

My usual aluminum wire and Friendly Plastic combo for the armature. The yellow finger wire is copper wire encased in soft plastic. The white chest plate is part of a discarded SmoothCast 65D casting. It adds extra support, and a good grab-on section on the puppet when animating.

A mix of variously dense polyurethane foam muscles are glued on with Casco elastic contact cement. The claws are thin cardboard dipped in tinted latex.

And here's the finished brute. The fur is short fake fur, or "teddy" fur, sometimes called "monkey fur". I prefer to make my own feathers, but I've had a small bag of tiny feathers lying around for almost 20 years now, and I figured it would be high time to put them to use. The Monster Manual owlbear looks like he's got a bad toupee on, and I opted for a slightly different look, gluing on the feathers in a semi-circle around the puppet's head using elastic super glue. Liquitex acrylic airbrush colours add a mottled grey pattern to the fur.

Since I didn't have a photo of John in his finished fantasy get-up, my local armoured buddy Martin Merkel stepped in and acted out this staged fight photo with the owlbear. In short, here's how our film is intended to look.