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 planet of the Ro-Men is depicted as being a mix of primordial and industrialized. Well, the barren wilderness was easy to represent, using a moonscape from Depositphotos, where I find most of my stock images nowadays. I have a subscription that allows me to download 30 images per month. All images are high resolution and therefore perfect for creating backgrounds for my films. The cityscapes of the planet took some thinking, though. Eventually, I decided to pillage the brutalist architectural achievements of, mainly, the Eastern block. I thought that the looming concrete monoliths of that design movement would fit very well with the matter of fact mindset of the Ro-Men. Besides, I also happen to think that some of these buildings are quite decorative in their brutally plain honesty.
Some examples of the Brutalist movement. Quite alien, I'm sure you'll agree.
To create the cityscapes I simply cut out the elements I found interesting in Photoshop and added them in separate layers in After Effects. Adding some space between each layer using the 3D tool allowed for some slight perspective movement when all the layers were put in motion using a keyframed "camera pan" over the images.
I also added some suitably gloomy skies as backgrounds. Those are all real skies, most of them sped up using time-lapse. I found my skied over at Videoblocks, where I also have a subscription. As an example of how the layers work, the image above contains five. Firstly we have the clouds, over that goes a Photoshopped Brutalist mishmash, the rocket, which I found at Depositphotos, is positioned in the next layer, then comes still images of the saluting Ro-Men, and lastly (though not visible in this still) comes an animated Ro-Man marching past his fellows towards the rocket. And it is, of course, a rocket, since the original "Robot Monster" is a 1950's monster movie, and the only way to travel through space in those days was via rocket ship.
We also have some interior shots. Wherever I could find representations of the Brutalist movement in indoor architecture, I grabbed those images. Of course, you can't have a Ro-Man film without bubbles, so I added a clip I found at Videoblocks.
The shots of the Ro-Men's scientific experiments is another matter. To get the proper look of retro science I used stills old mad scientist movies and snipped out the best elements in Photoshop. Don't know how many copyrights I violated doing that, but I did stick to using promotional stills released by the movie studios themselves, and again, I found a bunch that was decidedly public domain over at Depositphotos.
Here's a still from a scene that apparently resulted in squeals of delight from some old movie monster fans -The brain from planet Aurous (from the movie of that title) meets a Ro-Man and gets zapped. The brain itself was another stock image download, but the look of it was modified in Photoshops and eyes were added.
The three tentacles under the brain were just the one tentacle, animated a couple of times snaking about.
I think that's a decent summary of what might be interesting about this part of making the film. I will return to the world of classic movie monsters, but I'll stay well clear of the more famous, studio-owned properties, as I don't want my videos pulled down because of copyright claims. But there's a wealth of cult-status creatures out there, some of them even public domain, that I feel should be given a second shot at the limelight.
My main Love for the prose and poems of H P Lovecraft comes from his unparallelled talent for generating mood or atmosphere. Whatever I do in my video adaptations of his texts I'm always chasing that mood. Sometimes I stumble over another work of art that has managed to generate those qualities.
A while back I bought the CD "Strange Aeons", which is produced by British musician and artist Steve Lines. Besides his own work the CD also contains contributions by Childe Roland, The Zoogs, Black Monolith and other bands, as well as spoken word pieces by Lovecraftian authors like Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell and Robert M. Price. Highly recommended! The opening track is also called "Strange Aeons" and is written and performed by Steve Lines himself. It sums up what Lovecraft's cosmic horror is all about, and I thought it would make a great subject for a YouTube video. I contacted Steve and he gave me permission to use the track.
My plan was to mainly show prehistoric Earth during the reign of the various evil entities that arrived here before the advent of humans. I wanted to put some of the older puppets back into action before they became too brittle to use for animation. I also had some new ideas for a few new puppets.
I thought that Ramsey Campbell's monstrous space slug Glaaki would make a novel stop-motion monster, and started off with sculpting the underside of the creature in medium grade Monster Clay.
The armature for this puppet was super simple, just a bundle of aluminum wires, with a t-nut foot at the rear for tie down purposes. The eyes are plastic balls on aluminum wire eye stalks. The round mouth also has a band of aluminum wires to allow it to open and close like an orifice. The black chunks on the armature are bits of dense foam, added to build up bulk without impeding the animation (like thick foam would've).
The body was padded with balls of cotton encased in a "suit" of thin, soft polyurethane.
I used an old plaster skin mold to cast the knobbly skin of the slug covering the foam body. The whole thing was then dry brushed with tinted latex.
Glakki is covered with metallic spike which it uses to infamously impale human victims. These victims then turn into Glaaki's zombified servants. The spikes were bits of cotton dipped in latex and then rolled between my fingers to create the spiky shapes. Silver latex tinting powder was used with the latex to add the metallic effect.
The finished Glaaki had airbrushed eyeballs covered with air drying scrapbooking plastic to create a gelatinous lens-like effect.
The other thing I wanted to do was to illustrate the line "Wantonly they trod the dark ways, cavorting in the steaming fens, until all the planet had known the touch of the Great Old Ones", by having two of Cthulhu's star-spawn -basically his minions- play wrestle in the primordial swamps. A star-spawn is more or less a smaller replica of Chtulhu. It's the sort of form that can be endlessly varied and still be recognized. I made two sculptures of the front of the heads where the eyes would be located and the tentacle beards would hang down.
I made the armatures out of several bundles of aluminum wires, making them very sturdy. Arms and legs were padded with hard foam and the tails were given shape with soft string wrappings covered in latex. The wings were my usual constructions of string-wrapped aluminum wires, submerged in soft plaster with a latex wing membrane build-up.
The padding of the main bodies was achieved with cotton balls. Since I wanted these creatures to look flabby, with folds of warty skin covering their bodies I didn't spend a lot of time creating foam shapes to indicate muscles. Instead a fairly basic foam wrapping made up the general shape of the bodies.
Lots and lots of patches of tinted latex skin was cast in several old molds and attached using liquid latex as a glue.
The finished star-spawn were dry brushed with tinted latex, and touched up with acrylic airbrush paints. The eyes were the usual reflecting scrapbooking beads I use to make glowing eyes for my puppets.
This guy was also an original puppet made for this project. Despite its likeness to the infamous penisaurus of porn comedy "Flesh Gordon" it's actually another Great Old One called Gobogeg.
Other creatures in the film, like this one, were created using only partly animated elements. The fringed eye is a Photoshop creation..
..While the tentacles are just the one tentacle, animated a few times and clumped together in After Effects.
The apocalyptic end times were realized using different techniques altogether. I wanted the return of the Great Old Ones and their destruction of our world to appear in ultra slow-motion, to show the inevitability of it -or something like it. I can't really describe the effect I was after, but I think I achieved it.
These shots were all created using photos animated in After Effects using the puppet tool. Smoke, falling ash and various digital effects were superimposed, and the whole finished film was color graded and various filters were applied to create an otherworldly look. The prehistoric scenes in the beginning were also mainly made with Photoshopped images, animated in After Effects.
I think the most powerful effect Lovecraft achieves in his writings is the concept of "deep time", which is about vast stretches of time so far in our planet's past that we can't really comprehend it. This film was an experiment of sorts, trying to chase that concept with moving images.
