The Munkits

I recently found two poems written by the fabled Dr. Seuss that are in the public domain. I thought I'd give them a go as adaptations for my YouTube channel, starting off with "The Munkits." 

For those of you who have no idea who Dr. Seuss is, his real name was Theodore Geisel (1904-1991), and he's the author and illustrator behind more than 60 children's books, including "The Cat in the Hat" and "The Grinch." In the field of stop-motion animation, he's connected to Ray Harryhausen, as both men did their military service at the same time and collaborated on creating the cartoon character Private Snafu.

Most of Dr.Seuss' characters look the same; more precisely, they look like the Grinch. Even some of his bird characters look like the Grinch. I wanted something different for my version of the Munkits.

I looked at monkeys with colorful faces, because nature always gets it just right.

I was also inspired by the look of the Fraggles and other Muppet characters. I also had to look at what kind of materials I had lying around. In the end, the resulting puppets had the DNA of all these factors.

I didn't take many snapshots of the Munkits in progress, so we'll have to make do with what I have. Each Munkit face was first sculpted in medium-grade Monster Clay, and two molds made with regular hobby plaster were created over them. Latex tinted with universal tinting mediums was carefully painted into the molds to create separate areas of different colors.

The eyes are plastic pearls pulled from a fake necklace. I reamed a concave surface into each ball using a Dremel tool and painted the iris and pupil. UV resin was then poured into the iris area to create a lens.

The square brass tubes at the bottom of the picture will become attachment points for a flying rig. Two tubes are placed in the chest and on the back of each puppet, and I did have two more tubes that would've gone up the butts of the puppets, but with the other attachment points, I never had to use them.

You can see a partial shot of the armature here, which is as simple as can be; just two mm aluminum wires for the arms and legs, and two wires joined together for the spine and neck. To quickly create the back of the head, I just crunched together a ball of aluminum foil and hot-glued it onto the top of the neck armature. Parts of the face were propped up with cotton dipped in latex, which created a tough, leathery feel, while other sections were padded with soft polyurethane foam. The fingers and the toes were made with 1,5 mm aluminum wires wrapped in soft yarn and then dabbed with tinted latex.

Most of the puppets were covered with fur, all of it fake fur left over from various projects, including some stage productions. For example, the shockingly pink fur was originally bought to build a suit of the Cheshire Cat from a production of "Alice in Wonderland." That suit was quite an eyesore for the audience!

Teeth and nails were made with tissue paper dipped in latex. The jaws of the Munkits were just aluminum wires wrapped in yarn and attached to the lower lip with liquid latex. As the lip moved, so did the teeth, which wasn't very realistic, but somehow expressive enough to make the animation work. Cartoon characters have their own rules regarding anatomy and physics, as you know.

The eyeballs were placed in globs of dental silicone which were pressed up against the inside of the eye holes, lining up the eyes to fill out the eyelids. When the silicone had set after a couple of minutes, thermoplastic was added on top of it, permanently fixing the eyes and their sockets in place. The oil in the silicone makes the sockets lubricated, and it's fairly easy to swivel around the eyeballs.

The flying rig I mostly use nowadays is just a 4 mm aluminum wire fixed to a metal plate, with a bit of square brass tubing at the other end. This tube is slightly smaller than the ones inserted into the puppets and easily fits into those. The flying rig was used for shots where the Munkits were running or climbing.

Funnily enough, a background figure was actually spoiled with more coverage than the main characters. I wanted a desert animal loitering around the edges of the main story. I went with a cross between an aardvark and the extinct giant armadillo Glyptodon (see image above).

I sculpted the main carapace out of Monster Clay mostly using small loop tools. While using a Glyptodon shell as a template, I also added big spikes to make it look both more cartoony and more over-the-top.

I used PlatSil Gel 10 to build up a silicone mold over the sculpture. Burro resin with a brown tinting medium added was poured into the mold to create a hollow shell. Excess resin was cut away with a Dremel sanding tool.

The head of the "Armavark", as I call it, was again sculpted in Monster Clay with a slightly cartoony look. It doesn't have any jaw yet. That'll be added later.

I'm building up a hard, dental plaster mold over the sculpture, which has been added to an aluminum slab. I made a base for the sculpture out of more Monster Clay. That base is the area which the plaster will cover.

The latex head cast is here just out of its plaster mold. I added a reddish-brown dye to the latex as a base color.

Jumping ahead a bit, here's the head added to the armature. The head has interior aluminum wires providing movement for the ears and the snout. I've also added eyes made from plastic pearls. The jaw is a 1,5 mm aluminum wire bent into a U-shape, wrapped in yarn and dabbed with tinted latex.

The main body is made from a couple of wooden tongue depressors hot-glued together. 2 mm wires make up the legs, the neck, and the tail. After thinking about it for a while, I actually shortened both the tail and the torso, making the creature look more stumpy, which I think worked better.

I wanted the carapace to bob up and down as the Armavark was walking in a VERY cartoony fashion. To make this happen during animation, I made a sort-of lever out of a 2 mm aluminum wire, lashing two bits of metal rods to the wire and creating three joints in the gaps between the rods, the carapace and the back of the puppet. 

When animating, I'd just gradually pull the carapace up and then press it down to make it bob up and down. Here, by the way, is the puppet with the modified tail and torso. Thermoplastic holds everything in place.

I wanted a Glyptodon tail for the Armavark, so I sculpted a bunch of loose sections in clay.

One plaster mold later, I was able to cast latex versions of my sculptures. These latex pieces were reinforced on the inside with a mix of cotton and latex.

The tail sections were pulled over the tail (which is padded with yarn), the biggest piece first and the smallest one last.

All the paint touch-ups were made with a brush and acrylic hobby paints. Here I'm adding differently colored spots to the carapace, while listening to T. E. D. Kline's horror novel "The Ceremonies."

The fur is of the fake variety and comes from an old winter hat found at a local thrift store. Tufts of fur were added to the latex head using liquid latex as a glue. The claws are tissue paper and latex.

The teeth are only tiny blobs of latex tinted white. I added them to the mouth using a pointy sculpting tool.

The worm the Armavark pulls from under a rock was made from plasticine.

The backgrounds were all made from CG stock images downloaded from Depositphotos.com. I tweaked them a bit in Photoshop, for example, adding blue skies or night skies. Stock footage dust clouds were also added over the animation.

I've rarely made something this cartoony, which was a bit of a mellow departure. I didn't have to worry about making anything realistic; quite the opposite. I'll probably do something similar eventually.

 

A Midnight Visitor

Here's another of my really short films, adapted from the story "The Mezzotint", written by M. R. James, one of the most influential shapers of the horror story.

When you read an M. R. James story, you might be struck by how modern the actual horror concepts can feel; the creature, the cause of the mystery, whatever it might be. His "ghost stories" have very little to do with the efforts of his contemporary peers. "The Mezzotint" is a case in point. It features a framed print (the mezzotint of the title) that changes every time the narrator looks at it. A supernatural drama unfolds, where a skeletal intruder climbs into a mansion and reappears with a bundled-up baby in its clutches. It is implied that this incident actually took place in the very real mansion of the mezzotint. 

I did an illustration of the mezzotint from the story a while ago for a self-published book. As I am a big fan of this tale, especially the creepy story within the print, I thought I'd do a short film adapting it. 

The head and torso of the baby-napping revenant were actually originally made for the walking sea corpse of my film "The Stalk the Night." Since that puppet was covered with rubber seaweed, you couldn't really see details on its face, so I thought I'd reuse the same sculpture as a new latex casting from the plaster mold I originally created for that other puppet.

I built my usual aluminum wire armature for this puppet, following the dimensions of a human skeleton. I made this puppet slightly smaller than usual, about 8 inches tall. The reason for this was that I needed to use the full breadth of my animation stage to move the puppet from very near to the camera to very far. More about that later. Besides the latex casting of the sea corpse (here being pinched together to make this puppet thinner), the limbs, and (later) the back were padded with cotton, latex, and tissue paper. 

The puppet has 3 mm tie-downs in its feet, but since it would be crawling on all fours towards the mansion, I also added tie-downs in the palms of its hands. All tie-downs are threaded brass nuts.

When all detailing was finished, I covered the puppet with a dark brown base color using tinted latex. Lighter colors were added over this with more tinted latex, and some highlights were created with acrylic paint. In the story "The Mezzotint", the crawling creature is described as almost a skeleton, but still having bits of skin on it.

Here's the finished puppet, with the hooded cape that it wears in the story. The cape is made from kitchen tissue paper dabbed with tinted latex. A 2 mm aluminum wire runs along the edge of the cape and comes out as the two cords used to tie the cloak together. The wire allowed me to animate the cloak swaying as the puppet walked, but also to press it down over the puppet's body as the character was creeping along the ground.

I added two tiny metallic red pearls in the eye sockets, so when the puppet turns its head in the animation and looks at the camera, the eyes briefly shine when reflecting the photo light next to the camera.

James's story says that the creeping ghoul has a white cross on the back of its cloak. I'm not sure, but I'm thinking this might have something to do with doors being marked with white crosses if the people living there had been struck by the plague. Also, a few spiders have a white cross-like shape on their backs, and maybe James wanted to allude to that, too. The cross on the cloak was painted with an oil paintbrush and acrylic paint.

Since the baby-napping revenant is smallish, the baby it's napping needed to be even smaller, of course. When making really small stuff, I try to make it without any molding and casting involved, since tiny details lose something of their crispness in the process. Instead, I made the baby's head out of a blob of CosClay, a semi-flexible polymer clay cured by baking it in the oven. I've found that this material can be used for a plethora of purposes. The CosClay I used here is a light skin color. I didn't put it in my kitchen oven, but simply cured it using my heat gun. It worked out well, since the sculpture was so small. 

Attached to the baby's head is a 3 mm aluminum wire, wrapped in soft yarn to bulk it up. The wrapping covering the baby is kitchen tissue paper dabbed with latex, no paints added.

For the latter half of the film, the revenant puppet simply walks over my animation stage carrying the baby. But since my stage is only 15 inches deep, I had to animate the puppet from the back to the front, and then reposition the puppet at the back of the stage, going forward again. 

For the puppet crawling, I decided to try a different approach. I turned the animation stage on its side, leaning one end on the green background, and the other end was placed on a pedestal with drawers (containing cables, lights, microphones, etc) and held secure by placing a couple of handlebars on the legs of the stage.

The revenant puppet was attached to the stage using 3 mm threaded rods screwed into the nuts placed in the palms and feet, as I usually do when animating. But having to reach behind the stage to replace the tie-downs during animation made it a bit tricky. I repeated this animation twice to make the puppet move away from the camera as far as possible.

Also, to get the correct view of the crawling ghoul, I placed my animation camera very low, looking up at the animation stage.

The mansion is really a British building now functioning as a hotel. I used a photo of it and removed everything except the house, the gravel area in front of it, and the lawn. The trees and bushes surrounding the building are CG images on a transparent background downloaded from Depositphotos.com. I also cut out all the window pane areas, so I could place either a light or a dark area in a layer behind the image of the house.

The final composite image in After Effects also included a night sky layer, a full moon (it's actually a crescent moon in the story), and a layer of cloud moving past the moon using a keyframed 2D animation.

In 2021, Mark Gatiss adapted "The Mezzotint" for the BBC's annual A Ghost Story For Christmas programme. It's a fine adaptation, but it may take the story a bit too far, as you actually see the revenant climb in through a window and attack the main character at the end. In the M. R. James story, no one ever sees the creature in the flesh, but it is implied that it's out there and may have set its sights on a new victim.