Woodland Lurkers

The idea for Woodland Lurkers came about when I thought about doing a film about strange forest creatures that we've never heard of, that hide in the deepest areas of the woods. Originally, I would only have made one critter, but I came up with a bunch of them, so the menagerie grew. I even added yet another one when I had finished editing the film. Let's go through our fauna.

The first creature you see, or glimpse, is a Bigfoot-like figure that towers over the forest.

I reused an older puppet, the hulking creature from "The Path Through the Marsh," and if you're interested in how that puppet was built, check out my blog post HERE! 

I call this little fellow "spud guy", since, well, he looks like a potato. He was built up without me using any parts sculpted in clay and cast in plaster molds.

This is the very basic armature for the character. 2 mm aluminum wires were used for the arms and legs, with Polymorph thermoplastic (the white blobs) used to hold them all together. The upper lip is made from a steel wire wrapped in yarn and is rigid. The jaw is a 3 mm aluminum wire wrapped in soft yarn, and is flexible for animation. 

The midsection is totally rigid and made from a wooden tongue depressor reinforced with a large 

stainless steel nail and thermoplastic. 3 mm threaded bolts are attached to the feet using super glue and baking soda.

EVA foam was used for most of the padding, making the body solid but lightweight. Below the jaw and around the neck, I added a bit of soft polyurethane foam (not yet attached in this photo) to make the opening of the jaw easy. Hot melt glue was used to attach the bits of EVA foam.

Soft yarn was wrapped around the arms and legs, which were then dabbed with latex.

The torso was also wrapped in soft yarn to smooth out the slightly blocky shapes of the EVA foam.

The body and head were built up using cotton dipped in tinted latex. I used a pointy sculpting tool (a dental tool, actually) to create the wrinkles and other shapes by simply pressing down with the tool in the cotton and moving around the material.

The throat was covered with a patch of wrinkly latex skin cast in a texture mold.

The fingers were made by wrapping yarn around a toothpick, dabbing the yarn with tinted latex, and then slipping the yarn off the toothpick when the latex had cured. The fingers were attached to the cotton/latex hands using liquid latex as a glue.

The eyes were made from two small plastic pearls, with irises cast with UV resin.

The puppet was painted by dabbing tinted latex over it with a sponge. Various colors were applied with this method in thin layers to create a mottled look. 

Acrylic airbrush colors were used to add highlights here and there.

Teeth and nails were just blobs of latex tinted white applied to the puppet using a toothpick.

The tuft of hair on the head is from an old fur winter hat, from which I have cut bits over the years for a few of my puppets.

The living tree stump is a staple critter among Swedish illustrators of children's stories. Trees and stumps with eyes and faces add color to many books throughout the 20th century. Swedish illustrator Gustaf Tenggren worked on Disney's Snow White and created a bunch of truly monstrous trees for the flight through the woods. I grew up with the staring storybook trees and have been thinking about how to add the concept to one of my films. 

The main part of the body, the actual trunk, was made from a piece of thick, rolled-up EVA foam. I cut two holes for the irregularly placed eyes, which were made from two plastic pearls, and also inserted two 1 mm aluminum wires to work as eyelids.

Two blobs of silicone clay pressed down around the backsides of the eyes hold the plastic pearls in place, allowing them to swivel when poked on the outside of the trunk. Thermoplastic was applied over the silicone to lock it down. More plastic was used to line the insides of the trunk, making it very sturdy.

The trunk creature has three limbs for walking, made from folded 1,5 mm aluminum wires. I used this smaller gauge to make the feet as small as possible. Using 3 mm threaded nuts as tie-downs, the wires were attached with a mix of superglue and baking soda. Thick, soft yarn was wrapped around the wires to build up the rough shape of the legs, and then dabbed with latex.

The legs were attached to the trunk with thermoplastic.

Hot melt glue was used to piece together the EVA foam bits.

To create the bark-like texture on the trunk, I dipped cotton in latex and draped it over the foam trunk. With various tools, I could then shape the dough-like substance into the look I wanted.

The splintered bark on the top of the trunk, as well as the smaller roots at the bottom, were made from tissue paper dipped in latex and rolled into pointy shapes.

The finished puppet was drybrushed a few times using tinted latex and a foam sponge. Concave dips were reamed into the plastic eyes, and then painted to create the look of colored irises. Drops of UV resin filled out the dips to create a lens effect.

The eyelids were created by attaching patches of latex cast in a skin texture mold to the edge of the aluminum wires making up the lids and the trunk, using liquid latex as glue.

Texture mold latex patches were also attached to the legs, instead of using cotton and latex, as that would’ve made the legs too stiff for animation.

This creature makes a very brief appearance, but I tried to make it memorable. I wanted something that was both creepy and a bit goofy, and hopefully I achieved that.

The head and jaw were made completely from Cosclay, which is a polymer clay cured in my kitchen oven. In contrast to other polymer clays, Cosclay cures semi-flexible and feels more like a piece of plastic.

The jaw was attached to the rest of the head by a single 2 mm aluminum wire running from the back of the head to the underside of the jaw. A mix of superglue and baking soda was used to fix the wire in place. The neck and torso have 4 mm aluminum wires running through them, and the legs have three 3 mm wires. Polymorph thermoplastic holds the armature together. Thick and soft yarn pads out the neck and thinner crochet yarn pads out the arms. I used soft polyurethane foam for the legs.

More soft foam was used to pad out the whole body, except for the arms, which I wanted to look feeble and scrawny. The dark grey section on the back is a piece of EVA foam, which is tougher, and was OK to use here, since I didn’t plan on bending the midsection of the puppet when animating.

The body of the puppet was covered with patches of tinted latex, which were cast in various skin texture molds. Wrinkly skin covers the join between the head and the jaw. This was also made from latex using the ”chunks-o-flesh” method, where latex is stippled onto a flat surface, allowed to dry, and then rubbed off the surface, creating a bunched-up, organic-looking texture. While the body was painted with tinted latex using a sponge, the Cosclay head was painted using water-based hobby paints.

The eyes are two plaster half-spheres with a mother-of-pearl effect, bought at a local scrapbooking shop. The flimsy hair is crepé hair (sheep’s wool) attached to the head using Pros-Aide prosthetic adhesive. The back spikes are tissue paper dipped in latex and rolled between my fingers into thin, pointy shapes. They were attached to the puppet’s back using liquid latex and glue. Highlights and other additional details were added with acrylic airbrush paint.

This scene was the first one conceived, and would, at one point, have been the entire film.

The largest puppet from my film is what I call the ”big mouth.” You only see him from a distance, but I still wanted to add a fair amount of details. A big chunk of medium-grade Monster Clay was shaped into the character.

Dental plaster was applied over the sculpture to create a durable mold, and three layers of tinted latex were cast into this mold. The latex skin was also reinforced with thin pieces of polyurethane foam soaked in latex, which were pressed into the mold over the latex surface. The head was reinforced with a mix of cotton and latex.

Here’s a better view of the insides of the latex skin. The cream-colored material is foam padding. The white stuff up in the head is thermoplastic, which adds extra sturdiness as well as provides a fixing point for the aluminum wires working the nose and the jaw. Two wooden ice cream sticks provide extra support for the head, helping it keep its shape.

The legs were actually created for the pig demon in my film ”Snail Wizard”, but they turned out a bit weak for that large puppet. I saved the original legs and put them to good use here instead. 3 mm aluminum wires are used to create the armature for the puppet. Thin metal rods are tied down against portions of the wire using yarn to create hard sections simulating a skeleton.

Soft polyurethane foam is wrapped around the armature, creating a pudgy look for the puppet.

Teeth and claws are made with tissue paper dipped in latex.

The finished puppet is painted with tinted latex and detailed with acrylic airbrush paints.The eyes are Photoshop print-outs of goat’s eyes, with drops of UV resin applied to create a lens.

The trunks are aluminum wires with yarn wrapped around them to create both the shapes as well as wrinkly skin. 

Clear varnish was painted onto the mouth and the nostrils to create a wet look.

Here’s the smallest puppet from ”Woodland Lurkers.” 

I forgot to snap photos of the clay sculpture, but the image above is pretty much what I sculpted. This creature is basically just a big head with legs and a tail.

The head was cast in tinted latex from a plaster mold. The eyes are two acrylic half-spheres with Photoshop print-outs attached to the flat backsides using transparent glue.

The mouth has a 1 mm aluminum wire looped around it inside the latex skin.

All the limbs for the puppet were made from 1 mm aluminum wires and wrapped in soft yarn. Liquid latex sealed the yarn.

Thermoplastic holds together the head and the limbs. Right under the second leg pair there's a small dark area. This is an attachment point for a flying rig.

Soft polyurethane foam was attached to fill up the back area.

The finished puppet is around

3 inches long. It’s painted with tinted latex and acrylic airbrush colors.

Here’s how the scene where the big mouth monster eats the tree grabber was made. A flying rig arm (far right) is joined to the attachment point on the side of the grabber puppet facing away from the camera, holding it aloft when the puppet is animated. Beside this is another flying rig arm, made from a 5 mm aluminum wire, working as a substitute for the tree the creature is grabbing. The green sticky tape makes both arms invisible when shot against my green screen puppet stage background.

When the shot is static, I'm using still images of mossy woodlands from Depositphotos. When the camera is moving, I'm using stock footage from Storyblocks or Videohive. I could've gone out in the forests where I live and gotten the kind of shots I wanted, but being quite lazy now in my old age, I went for stock options instead. 

My first idea was to make a fake nature documentary about these creatures. As the project evolved, it began to take on a more found footage-like quality. At least, the whole series of events is observed by someone walking through the woods, as we can hear his / her footsteps and breathing.

I am tempted to make a similar video in a different setting, but my aim is always to try and vary my content  -we shall see what turns up in the future.

Night Land

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.

The finished puppet was dry brushed with tinted latex, with mottled effects being applied using a toothbrush and acrylic airbrush paints. The wispy hair is simply a tuft of crepé hair (sheep's wool) glued on with a few drops of liquid latex.

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.