I had the notion to do a Lovecraftian weird tale in the style of a diary or log book and considered writing my own text instead of finding one readily available. This is what I came up with. I think it's filled with enough cliches to feel comfortably familiar. I decided to dispense with any actors, just showing a lonely ship on an ocean that was getting weirder and weirder.
One inspiration for this project was, of course, the horror-filled nautical tales of William Hope Hodgson, but also the rambunctious songs of Swedish singer-songwriter Evert Taube (seen in his element in the photo above). Some of his songs are very long and tell of nautical adventures, some of which he himself took part in. These songs go into great detail, naming the ship, describing the cargo and the destination, and painting colorful pictures of the crew.
I found a few images online showing model ships built for museums, picked one image, and then spent a couple of evenings removing the background in Photoshop. I probably could've made things easier for me, and only included the absolutely necessary details for a ship shown in the distance, but I wanted to be sure that nothing was missing. I added an animated flag waving in the wind atop one of the masts in a couple of shots, as well as engine steam.
The sea in all the shots is stock footage clips, either showing real oceans or CG versions of water. The sky is represented by photos of normal skies, which are then supplanted by stock footage of time-lapse skies, as well as shots of ink and glitter being pumped into a water tank.
When the ship eventually crosses into a different dimension it's escorted by strange creatures floating in the ethereal sea of space. I only made one puppet and animated it moving about. This beastie was built from scratch, and by that, I mean not sculpting anything in clay, but only relying on building up the shapes using materials like latex, cotton, and EVA foam. It’s a fairly quick procedure and very cost-effective. I’m starting with making the eyes, and I wanted big watery eyes for this creature. Instead of resorting to buying glass or acrylic taxidermy eyes, I’m making these using acrylic domes bought in a Scrapbooking shop, and Photoshopped eyes printed out on ordinary printing paper. I’m using transparent scrapbooking plastic to glue down the dome over the eye art, creating a lens effect that looks kind of neat.
For smaller eyes, because this monster will have a bunch of them, I’m adding drops of UV resin over the art and then blasting the plastic with a small UV light. I can then simply cut out each eye from the paper with small, sharp scissors.
The body of this puppet is this leftover plastic casting made from a silicone mold created over an old perfume bottle. This was what I had handy, but I could’ve used an old pill jar or a bit of scrap wood. I made holes in the plastic and attached screws to create points where aluminum wires for tentacles will be placed. If I just attached the wires with glue or thermoplastic to the body, they might come loose, but when they’re hooked up to the screws they’ll stay put.
This little wooden ball will become the head and this single 3 mm aluminum wire will be the neck. To attach the wire to the ball I’m using a few drops of super glue, and then I’m spreading some baking soda over the glue, thus creating a new solid material which helps bond the wire to the wood very effectively. I’m also making a hole on the side of the model to attach a t-nut. This nut will work as an attachment point to my flying rig. This nut is also held in place with the super glue/baking soda combo. To attach the aluminum armature wires to the screws I’m using melted thermoplastic. I melt portions of it with a heat gun and being careful I can then handle the material with my fingers, taking care to move the plastic blob around a bit, so I won't get burned. This creature has three tails or three tentacles growing out from its behind, and I’m making them out of 1,5 mm aluminum wires, covered with soft string and then dabbed with latex. You’ve most likely seen this procedure before. It’s one of my golden oldies.
I wanted something like a strange beak growing out of the monster’s head and for this, I’m using dense EVA foam. Ordinarily, I would’ve made this as a sculpture in clay, then making a plaster mold around it, and then cast a latex duplicate into the mold. But building it up like this saves time, as well as allowing happy accidents to happen.
To add texture as well as to cover up parts of the puppet I'm applying cotton dabbed with tinted latex. Using pointy tools I can create wrinkles and other textures in the material. This method works well for rigid parts of the puppet that won't have to stretch or bend.
Most of the puppet is then covered with patches of wrinkly latex skin cast from skin molds. This skin is very flexible and will work well for the bendy areas on the puppet.
To create extra details I'm adding drops of latex on top of the skin, creating small bumps.
Cotton and latex are also used to build up folds of skin around the eyes, which have been applied using contact cement.
Finally, the whole puppet is painted a dark red using tinted latex and a sponge. When that layer has dried (with the help of a heat gun) I dry-brush on a grey/blue color to offset the deep red, which will still be seen adding shadows to wrinkles and folds.
The finished puppet was animated and held aloft on my flying rig jointed arm. You only see the creature from one side, but I finished both sides with equal effort.
I read the narration myself, as I usually do. I don't consider myself especially gifted at that, but hiring people to do the voice work is getting increasingly expensive.
This film was a fun little experiment. I might do similar projects in the future if I can come up with narratives that fit this form of storytelling.
"Silly Asses" was adapted from a short story by Isaac Asimov published initially in Future Science Fiction, # 35, 1958. It has slipped into the public domain since, and I thought it would make a short, fun project for my YouTube channel. All of the story is there, basically. I have changed parts of the text that work better as imagery on film.
There are two main characters in the story. Let's start with this one, which I call "Shrimp Guy."
His most distinguishing feature is probably his head. It's actually the nose section of a different puppet made for a different project. Way back in 2014 I was involved in the pre-production for a rock opera adaptation of H P Lovecraft's "The Dreams In the Witchhouse." The monster designs were made by my DeviantArt buddy King OvRats and I was responsible for translating his drawings into puppets. We put quite a bit of work into the project, but nothing came of it in the end. I finished one of the puppets, but I haven't used it for any of my own films. I still have the mold made from the nose and thought I could at least put that to good use.
Here's my original sculpture for the nose, one of the first I made in Monster Clay. Turned upside down it would be used as the head of Shrimp Guy. If you want to read the full story of the Witchhouse project, or as far as it got you can read all about it HERE.
I cast the headpiece in tinted latex, making it as pink as I could. The inside of this latex skin was lined with a latex/cotton mix to make it sturdy and to make it hold its shape. I also added thermoplastic to create a sort of skull inside it. The thermoplastic also worked as an attachment for the two eyestalks and the pincer-like mouth of the character. The body is a paper ball covered with thermoplastic. Tail, arms, and legs were made from aluminum wires wrapped in soft yarn dabbed with tinted latex. The limbs don't have any "bones" in them. They're jointless and move about very much like the limbs of cartoon characters in old animated films using the so-called "rubber hose" animation style. The claws on the feet are also latex cast in an old plaster mold for horns and such, made many years ago.
A bit of polyurethane foam padding puts more flesh on the torso and tail. The skin textures are latex casts made from molds for older puppet projects. The combination of textures and latex casts is a real mishmash.
Here the puppet has gotten its base coat of pink paint, which is made from tinted latex. Detailing with acrylic airbrush paints now awaits.
Here's the finished puppet. The eyes are photoshop print-outs stuck to the backside of clear acrylic domes. These domes as well as the transparent glue used on them were bought from a local scrapbooking shop.
The device he's holding is a plastic cast taken from a silicone mold made over a model kit part. I think it's a motor part or some kind of hatch from a Klingon ship.
Now for Shrimp Guy's impatient boss. He's actually an older puppet used once for a film called "Beans." I touched up the puppet a bit and added a chest plate made from latex and silver paint. He also got plasticene eyebrows and a plasticene lower lip and teeth, so I could animate him talking and add a few bewildered expressions to his face. It's cartoon acting of the lowest order. You can read all bout how this puppet was made and the "Beans" project HERE:
The Galactic Federation planet is populated with many alien races, some of which are briefly glimpsed in one shot as they're walking past the "camera" in a corridor. For this, I only used old puppets from various projects, and I also stuck an old toy robot in there - an R2-D2 knockoff bought for me at the end of the 1970s. The city and its densely trafficked skies are a blend of CG stock footage and CG stock images, animated by me in layers in After Effects.
The same goes for the office of the boss. I found a few CG images of a spaceship interior on Depositphotos.com and adapted them in Photoshop, changing the perspectives and adding or removing details. The computer graphics floating around the room were also stock media found of Videoblocks and Videohive, and again adapted in After Effects to suit my needs. I did the voices for both characters, and my Italian friend Marco Zanelli provided the trippy music.
I really like Sci-Fi, probably more so than fantasy, so I'm planning on doing more projects in that genre.
For ages and ages, I've been planning to do an adaptation of William Hope Hodgson's epic novel "The Night Land." There's nothing like it before or since in pop culture. It's teeming with weird monsters and it's copyright free -perfect for my purposes. Also, it's mostly about just a single character wandering like a knight errant through a wild wasteland, just waiting to be Photoshopped together using various strange textures. So, why haven't I gotten around to adapting it? Well, mostly it's about boiling down 584 pages of verbose narrative and archaic prose to something that could be told in around 20 minutes. But there is actually a solution for that because there's a shorter version of the novel, which I'll get back to shortly.
Let's talk briefly about the background of the book. It was the last work written by hunky Victorian fantasy author Hodgson, who had been a sailor in his early years and was one of the first bodybuilders in the UK, but the first of his books that were published. Hodgson would go on to join WW1 and eventually be blown to smithereens by an artillery shell at Ypres, cutting a career of completely original horror fantasy tales tragically short.
Above is my edition of The Night Land, published in the 1970s by Ballantine books in their Adult Fantasy series (edited by Lin Carter). They split it up in two volumes, as you can see. To protect copyrights in the US, Hodgson boiled down his 200 000+ word epic to a shortened 20 000-word novelette, published in the USA as The Dream of X, thus establishing, kind of, his novel as having a copyright status and protecting it against pirate publishers. However, the risk of someone stealing and publishing the enormous The Night Land was slim indeed, but there you have it. I actually read The Dream of X in a Swedish translation before I could get my hands on The Night Land.
In short, the premise of The Night Land is that the story is set on Earth millions of years in the future. The sun has died but the desolate landscape is partially illuminated with fire and lava from the ground and from mysterious lights sometimes appearing. The remnants of humanity are huddled together in a gigantic pyramid called The Last Redoubt. Around this fortress is the Night Land shrouded in perpetual darkness, but teeming with monstrous lifeforms. Some are huge as mountains and loom threateningly along the horizon. Others are man-sized and quite human-like. A blue flame of mystical earth currents surrounds the pyramid and keeps the nightmarish vermin at bay. Futuristic knights each armed with a "diskos", a sort of spear ending with an electrically charged razor-sharp rotating disc, guard the refuge.
However, one such man receives a telepathic distress call from a Lesser Redoubt, that nobody in the great pyramid has heard of. Our hero sets out alone to rescue the inhabitants of The Lesser Redoubt, since their earth current is failing, and travels across the bizarre world of the Night Land, encountering mysteries and fighting monsters.
The Dream of X tells the same story but pretty much snips out almost all of the travel bits. There's also a bizarre framing story set in the 1600s concerning a narrator who dreams the whole tale but is convinced it is a true vision of the future. This narrative device is enthusiastically presented at the beginning, even providing a romance for the narrator, but it's all soon forgotten when we leap millions of years ahead in the story.
For a few years, I've been contributing illustrations to Graeme Philips' excellent fanzine Cyäegha, but he's also published other collections pertaining to the "Lovecraft Circle" of writers, as well as peripheral authors. Included in the collection Forbidden Dreams is The Carpathian Codex, written by Cardinal Cox. It's a collection of poems inspired by the writings of Lovecraft and others. Among these poems is Night Land, a text summarizing the set-up for the plot and concept of Hodgson's The Night Land. I figured that would be a fun way of tackling the world of the Night Land and doing a very compact meditation on the subject rather than tackling that big project just yet. I got permission from Cox to adapt his poem, and off I went.
If you've followed my YouTube videos the past few years you know that my preferred filmmaking style is to use still images, adapt them in Photoshop, and use those as backgrounds/foregrounds. For the Night Land landscape, I used images of lava fields from Iceland. Digital effects like animated smoke, fire, and lightning were pulled from various open-source CGI clips.
The Great Redoubt pyramid was made from a single stock CG image found at Depositphotos.com duplicated many times and arranged as two sides of the pyramid. I wanted a tile-like texture, inferring that the pyramid is a patchwork of generations worth of repairs. The small pinpoints of light were added in Photoshop with the drawing tool.
The skies were made from more stock images of CG clouds, animated with distortion tools in After Effects, and also with altered colors.
The monsters of the original novel are too numerous to give a due appearance in a short video, but I picked a couple of favorites. "The Yellow Thing" is a four-armed humanoid creature the hero encounters and fights at one point when he's lit a campfire. "The Humped Men" are a race of squat creatures that seem to be very populous, so I figured I'd better include one of those too. I included a scene where a Yellow Thing tries to catch a Humped Man.
As I usually do I sculpted the head and torso as a single piece in medium grade Monster Clay, adding a couple of plastic pearls for the eyes.
I made the puppet's armature slightly disproportionate and irregular. I wanted to imply that the Yellow Thing is some kind of mutant abomination, not something that evolved with a symmetrical body.
For the arms and legs, I used exclusively cotton dipped in latex and thin polyurethane soaked in latex to shape very sinewy muscles.
The rest of the body was padded with thin polyurethane foam to achieve a knotted, but softer muscle look.
I cast patches of latex skin from a variety of old plaster skin texture molds, again to try and achieve a varied, deformed look to the body.
The head only has a single aluminum wire loop for the mouth. I retained the pearls from the sculpture as eyes. The skin was painted in a dirty yellow using tinted latex and touched up with numerous passes of airbrush colors. The teeth were tissue paper dipped in latex.
I decided the Humped Man would be symmetrical, but anatomically different from humans in many ways. It sort of came out looking a bit like a hairless Ewok.
Very simple padding on this puppet. I wanted a softer, chubbier look to the body.
For some reason, most of the photos taken with my phone turned out blurry, but hopefully, you can see some details. Like the Yellow Thing, the Humped Man only has articulation in the jaw regarding the face. Both these puppets make very quick appearances and weren't required to do much. The Humped Man was only painted with tinted latex.
I'll talk a bit about my plans for making a longer Night Land adaptation at the end of this post, and if that comes to fruition I'll re-design these monsters and make puppets with more articulation.
I also built a puppet that doesn't have a direct analog in the book. I just wanted to include a creepy monster with humanoid features, and this is what I came up with. I wanted the critter's eyes to be grown shut and the neck to have a tumorous texture.
Basically, this creature has the look of a human spider or insect, so the legs were made to be long and spindly. Cotton dipped in latex was used to shape muscles and tendons.
The latex head was attached to a long neck made from a single aluminum wire wrapped in soft yarn. I used a paper ball dipped in latex to prop up the back of the head. The snaking tongue is just a very thin aluminum wire wrapped in sewing yarn and painted with tinted latex. A couple of nails joined together with thermoplastic make up the center of the body.
The bulk of the body was shaped with two pieces of dense foam plucked from a package I got a while ago. Whenever I get useful package material it goes into the handy-to-have-some-day box.
A prominent monster character in The Night Land is The Silent Ones, so I felt I had to include those. They are a group of hooded beings who emerge from The House of Silence and travel on the few roads still remaining. It's very bad luck to encounter a silent one. It's never really revealed who or what they are, but the reader gets the feeling that they are among the top power players in the Night Land. For my Silent Ones I found a stock image of four hooded capes. I cut them out in Photoshop and added a few other changes before importing the images into After Effects and keyframe animated them to glide over the crusty ground. I added a CG animation of a wiggling squirmy shape in a layer under each cape, so you can just see something nasty peeking out under the cloth.
I wanted to focus on the actual Night Land landscape, following the text of Cox's poem, so the people of the pyramid are only glimpsed briefly. There is a version of an old Italian "peplum" or sword & sandal movie called The Giant of Metropolis, which is in the public domain. I used still shots from the movie where people are dressed in various retro-futuristic costumes, cutting out the people and adding them in layers in After Effects. The raging thunderstorm outside the pyramid is CG stock footage and the inside pyramid "set" is a modified stock image from Depositphotos. I made it a keyframed tracking shot, having the various elements in layers move a bit as the "camera" tracked in.
There is a bunch of so-called watchers in the Night Land; huge mountain-like monsters that move so slowly that the observers of the phenomena need millennia and generations to track any movement at all. One thing is certain, though -they're all moving towards the Last Redoubt. I use two old puppets to portray a couple of the watchers, each with its own characteristics. I took two photos of the puppets and 2D animated them. My idea was to show the monsters finally bearing down on the pyramid, making -for them- very quick movements.
Even the brave knights of the pyramid were still images. Again, I found useful material on Depositphotos and created the spinning diskos using a Photoshopped image of a glowing wheel with lots of spokes, animated to rotate very fast.
And that's about it for my Night Land video. I did the narration myself and used music by YouTube composer Sir Cubworth, who offers a collection of his work among the free YouTube resources.
Will I do another version? Yes, that is the plan. I want to basically do The Dream of X, but with more monster encounters, so it'll be a mix of the two versions of the story. When I'll be able to do it is up in the air for the time being.
