Someone in my YouTube comment section described this little short as "Metal Hurlant meets Lovecraft", and I think that's pretty apt. The French sci-fi comics magazine (better known in the US as Heavy Metal) had a lot of crazy content, and I certainly read the magazine and I'm sure I've been influenced by it. The Lovecraft part is the fact that I decided to join bits of his poems "Nemesis" and "Psychopompos: A Tale In Rhyme", which, in themselves are good, but I had my favorite parts and thought they'd go together very well. What I ended up with was, basically, a revenge tale of a single warrior taking out a planet-destroying giant monster.
So, let's start with the monster, as I usually do. My idea was to make a tentacled skull with a distinctly evil look. I started with a rough clay sculpture of a slightly cartoony and scowling skull. The skull and the jaw were made as two separate pieces.
However, I didn't make a plaster mold around the sculpture as I usually do, but I instead built up a skin over the clay using cotton and latex. I just addad one thick layer, and allowed to dry slowly.
The eyes were two glass blobs with flat undersides glued to a paper printout of photoshopped blood veins. I used transparent scrapbooking glue.
To make the skull and jaw sturdier, I mixed up some Rhino plastic, a fast-setting resin that I use for many things, and simply poured it into the hollow skull and jaw skins, slushing around the plastic to make it cover all spots. Tentacles made from aluminum wires covered with soft yarn soaked in tinted latex were attached by drilling holes in the skull and inserting the ends of each tentacle, attaching them with thermoplastic. I also made a bunch of horn-like protuberances by wrapping yarn around the tip of a pencil and painting tinted latex over the yarn.
I added teeth made from cotton dipped in latex, using liquid latex as a glue.
The eyes were stuck to the eye sockets with dabs of hot melt glue.
Patches of textured latex skin were cast in texture molds and attached to the puppet.
The finished puppet was painted with tinted latex and acrylic airbrush colors. A support rod was made from two thick aluminum wires wrapped in chroma key tape.
The ship seen in the film was a CGI stock footage animation downloaded from Videoblocks. In the clip I used various angles and movements were provided.
In After Effects I added the ship to various space backgrounds that were either Photoshopped or also downloaded from Videoblocks.
The vengeful pilot was an even bigger cheat. I simply used two still images of a dressed up person, found at stock image provider Depositphotos, and placed that guy in spaceship interior backgrounds, also a mix of stock photos and Photoshopped details.
I'm sure my interpretation of Lovecrafts poetry differs wildly from the intent of the old guy himself, but as it is, I had fun doing this film. It was a quick and creative project.
I had wanted to make more retro-styled sci-fi after my project "Empire of the Robot Monsters", and this resulted in the all-puppet video "Xorg the Conqueror." It's also nice to intermingle the often dour Lovecraftian projects with some sprinklings of humor.
The character of Xorg is based on a drawing I did for a game project here in Sweden. It's pretty much the very same character.
The front of the head and the torso of Xorg were sculpted in medium grade Monster Clay.
As you might imagine with that look, Xorg's head was the most complex part of his body. The thingie on his head was armatured with aluminum wires, as were the snout-like mouths. The eyes were Photoshop print-outs attached to acrylic domes using Glossy Accents scrapbooking plastic as a glue.
The armature for the body is my usual aluminum wire contraption held together with thermoplastic. Strips of soft polyurethane foam were used to pad out the body. Like the head, the chest/torso area was cast in tinted latex. This piece was also padded with foam and attached to the armature using contact cement.
Xorg is dressed in a nicely form-fitting suit, made by covering the foam and the wire-wrapped arms with patches of tinted latex cast on the smooth backsides of plaster molds.
Like all good space travelers, Xorg has a backpack. This was made from two magic marker caps (these markers were dried up, so no markers were harmed during the making of this backpack), two plastic balls, a glue bottle cap, and two bits of spring tubes.
Xorg also has a belt with a gizmo on it. Since I couldn't find anything looking like what I had in mind, I sculpted it in clay and made a mold quickly using silicone clay. The actual cast was made in latex backed with cotton fibers.
Lastly, Xorg needed a mighty ray gun with which to blast the poor populations he accosted. Almost all of this prop was made from this old ballpoint pen, held together with superglue and with additions made from thermoplastic.
So, here's Xorg in all his glory. A rather strapping chap, I hope. The tiny teeth in Xorgs mouths are simply tiny blobs of latex tinted white applied to the circular mouths with a needle.
Now for the hammer-headed monster that gets Xorg in the end. I mostly rely on old plaster skin texture molds when I create the flexible skins for my puppets. But for the hammerhead monster I wanted something new, and therefore I sculpted a skin texture with big, horn-like bumps, very inspired by the skins texture imprints found in fossils from the Ankylosaurs. This bit of skin, cast in tinted latex from the resulting dental plaster mold, goes onto the back of the puppet.
Apart from this skin I only sculpted one more thing for the puppet, namely the mouth with adjacent areas.
This is the armature for the hammerhead monster, and it's really simple as you can see. The black clumps on the legs are bits of seat cushions made from compact foam, put there to add volume to the legs.
The actual hammer was made from a plastic latex bottle, a cardboard tube, and a cone made by applying tinted latex and cotton to a clay shape. You can also see the simple foam padding here. This creature has a bulky body that doesn't have all that many toned muscle details.
Patches of cast latex skin from my old reliable skin molds cover the foam padding. The hammer is mostly covered by cotton dipped in latex.
To unify the whole look tinted latex was sponged on over the whole puppet. The eyestalk was added as an afterthought and is just a single aluminum wire covered with string and latex. The actual eyeball is another acrylic dome (used in scrapbooking, apparently) with some more Photoshop art attached to it.
This whole film is filled with candy colors, so the hammerhead was painted blue using tinted latex and a foam sponge. Teeth were made from cotton and latex, and the claws on the feet were latex cast in plaster molds. This creature also has a long tongue, but that's a separate removable piece, an aluminum wire covered with yarn and latex stuck into the jaw of the puppet very much like a pallet or false teeth are placed in the mouth.
Let's not forget our heroes of this piece, the natives of the planet Xorg invades. This puppet is one of the very few ones using replacement faces, and at that in the simplest way. The body sculpture was made to accommodate this. The smaller indentation is for inserting a tentacle.
Here's the body cast in latex with an aluminum wire tentacled added, but I've also added a clay face, as you can see. To make the replacement faces fit as well as possible into the body, I simply pressed some clay into the cavity reserved for the face and sculpted all the details.
The clay faces were then carefully removed and lined up on a strip of clay for casting.
The body was supported with thermoplastic and attached to a foot with tie-down. Each face has a flange of latex on the back which allows it to slit into the hole in the body.
A little plastic pearl was superglued to the top of the body, a nice decoration I think. Using the puppet with replaceable faces I could create a bunch of natives, though this planet seems to be pretty sparsely populated. To animate the jumping motion of these creatures I simply bent the leg into a compressed shape while it was still attached to the animation stage. The actual jumping was achieved by keyframing the puppet moving up and down from the ground in After Effects.
By the way, the running of both Xorg and the hammerhead monster was achieved in similar ways. The puppets were attached to flying rigs covered in green screen sticky tape. The hammerhead had to be animated in a weird angle to make room for his tail.
The backgrounds were my usual collection 2D Photoshop cut-outs made from various stock images. Some of them, like Xorg's rocket ship, were animated using keyframes in AE. And then there's a bunch of explosions and ray effects that I've found on stock footage websites.
It looks like I'll be delving more and more into all-puppet videos. It's not because I can't get my friends to appear in films anymore, but the more I use puppets, the more I appreciate the freedom of animated characters. It won't work for all things, but it's perfect for some projects.
