In A Quiet Field

This film was finished in March 2024, so it's taken me over a year to blog about it. But I am quickly catching up to my latest published work. I've been delayed by some sorrows of everyday life, and also a stretch of poor health. The idea for "In A Quiet Field" came from the many cow-filled fields I've walked over in my childhood. Where I grew up, there were many such places, and the cows generally didn't bother me. With that huge, open sky above the fields, I thought something might be watching, and here's the result of that pondering. Let's start with our two alien visitors. I decided to build a robot with three legs, inspired by pulp-era sci-fi magazine covers, for my short film ”Nightcrawlers.” In the end, I used a flying UFO in that film instead, but I still finished the robot puppet, which I put in this project instead.

I bought this weird drinking vessel from a dollar store and thought the ”flask” would make a great robot body. I planned to use the ribbed tube on the puppet too, but in the end I found another 

solution.

 

I have this decorative crystal ball with hexagonal shapes ground into its surface, and I thought something like it would make an interesting head for the robot. I simply put the ball on a slab of clay and built a clay wall around it, pouring PlatSil Gel 25 silicone over the ball. 

Into the resulting silicone mold I could then cast Burro plastic, first lining the inside of the mold with silver paint dust to create a metallic color that’ll stick forever.

Here are a few things that went onto the puppet. The pink blob to the left is a dental silicone (or silicone clay) mold taken from a detail on an old toy robot. I’ve poured a resin called Onyx into it. It’s black, as you can see, and sets really fast. The middle thing is a resin cast of the whole robot detail, and the right thing is the cap from an old Whiteout bottle. The last two items will join together to become the very bottom part of the puppet.

I wanted the legs to be quite spindly and remind you a bit of girder works, since that’s a recurring detail on the old pulp magazine robot. The bigger bent v-shape is a crochet needle bought at a Dollar Store. These cheaper needles are hollow, which is perfect for my purpose. I bent a bit of steel wire into a u-shape and inserted it into the hollow v-shape, attaching it with super glue. The three feet you see to the right are Onyx resin castings from the dental silicone mold seen at the top of the page. They have been drilled out at the bottom, and threaded nuts have been attached. Likewise, 2 mm aluminum wires have been stuck to the tops. 

These are the tiny 3 mm threaded nuts that went into the puppet's feet. I bought a whole bag of them on eBay for a very low price.

The finished legs are, as you can probably see, a mix of materials, from marker pen caps and bits of EVA foam to wooden dowels and balls. All joints are 2 and 3 mm aluminum wires. The legs go into the Whiteout cap, which has a nail inserted to its centre. This nail will help attach this whole piece to the rest of the puppet. A mix of super glue and baking soda cements all the pieces together.

The robot will have black tubes sticking out of its main body. Thet are made by wrapping macramé yarn around a thin wooden dowel, dabbing the yarn with tinted latex and then pulling off the yarn when the latex has dried. I then had a hollow, flexible tube.

Here’s the robot, almost finished being put together. The long tentacles are 3 mm aluminum wires with the ends sharpened by grinding them down with a rotary grinder. Soft crochet yarn is wrapped around each wire (single layer) and then dabbed with tinted latex. The piece at the very top is a plastic casting made from a silicone mold I created to reproduce an ornamental metal piece from a curtain holder. I’ve used those castings for various costume projects. Each black rubber tube is attached to brass tubes at the bottom (I can’t remember where I got those) and to metal washers at the top. All pieces are superglued in place.

Scrapbooking pearls were superglued to the head, one on each hexagonal shape.

The finished robot was airbrushed with black acrylic paint first, then Alclad II ”Iron” was applied, again with an airbrush. The rubber tubes were painted with ArtAlchemy metallic blue rubbing wax.

The other alien character was also built for another project, but I thought he'd fit right in in this one. The body, arms, and legs were leftovers made for alien characters in my film "When Chaugnar Wakes." The body was covered with latex pieces cast into silicone molds made from various model kits. The head is an original sculpture, first sculpted in Monster Clay, then cast in latex from a plaster mold. The eye is an acrylic lens, under which I've glued a paper print-out of a Photoshopped eye. The mouth has an aluminum wire loop going around the edges of it. I used pliers to open the mouth during animation. The raygun is a loan from the Saucer Man appearing in "Rumble On Monster Island."

The flags are bits of stock illustrations showing various patterns, one of which is inspired by a church window. I printed them out on paper and glued the flags to a pair of small barbecue sticks painted silver.

The two spaceships were stock CG animations found at Videohive.com. Thankfully, one shot showed one of them crashing. The transportation beams are also stock CGI.

And the cows were also stock footage. My house is surrounded by fields for grazing cows, but when I made this film, they hadn't been released from their winter accommodations.

To sum up, this little project was fun to make, despite the robot puppet being very awkward to animate. The point of the film is, of course, that being highly advanced is not a requisite for being civilized. 

Nightcrawlers

 This video is another one concerning the so-called unexplained, believe it or not. Quite a few of my viewers comment and suggest that I tackle more cryptozoological subjects, i e strange creatures people claim to have seen.

In the world of paranormal research and cryptozoology, the case of the Fresno Nightcrawlers stands out because of how bizarre it is. Back in 2007, what looks like a pair of white pants walking about on their own was caught on a nighttime security video recording in Fresno, California. A while later two pants, now dubbed "Nightcrawlers" were filmed at night in Yosemite National Park and another bit of footage came out of Poland. The latest sighting is another home surveillance video from Billings, Montana, in 2020. So, are these sightings just crazy hoaxes? Probably. However, nobody has come forward, admitting to the pranks, and nobody has been able to exactly reproduce the Nightcrawlers. 

As you can see the Fresno Nightcrawlers have inspired people to get creative (I'm not the only one.) Besides various t-shirt prints, there are also a number of crafts pieces sold on Etsy and other places. Fun stuff!

As you might expect a stop-motion Nightcrawler is a very simple puppet. The feet are two threaded 3 mm nuts attached to a folded 2 mm aluminum wire with a mix of super glue and baking soda. The head is a small paper ball. I find that having a bit of unjointed aluminum wire makes it wobbly and difficult to animate. To fix that problem I added three toothpick pits along each length of wire and wrapped soft yarn over it all.

The padding of the body was equally simple. A wrapping of soft polyurethane foam to make out the general shape, and then more smooth foam shapes added over that.

I covered the foam with patches of latex patches cast on the smooth backside of an old plaster mold. As you can see the colors of each patch differed a bit since I used leftovers from small batches of tinted latex from other projects.

The finished puppet was dabbed with latex tinted white, applied with a sponge.

We have one human character in the story, a boy played by Hannes whom I've used a few times before. Our young hero spies the Nightcrawlers striding through his back garden, being zapped by a UFO, and nobody will believe him, of course.

Speaking of the UFO, it's really this CG blob, downloaded as a stock video clip from one of my various stock media subscriptions. I created a mask around it in After Effects to get rid of the black background. All backgrounds of the neighborhood locations are also stock images found at DepositPhotos.com.

To have the Nightcrawlers walk behind plants and objects in these backgrounds I created two layers for each background that would be used in such scenes.

The easiest way (for me) to do this is to open the image in Photoshop and use the masking tool to draw over every bit that I want to go in front of my animated puppets.

The masked area can then be copied and saved as an image of its own. In After Effects, I then sandwich the puppets in between these layers.

So that's my Nightcrawler video, short and sweet. There will be more films based on unexplained phenomena, probably the more fun and bizarre subjects.

Go Down the Woods Today..

For quite some time I've been thinking about doing stop-motion recreations -of sorts- of weird creatures people claim to have met; cryptids, aliens, etc. I finally got around to it sometime around last September, when I decided to take on one of the very strangest encounters.

The above two sketches are reconstructions of what bow hunter Jennings Frederick says he encountered in 1968 during a stroll in the woods of Fairmont, West Virginia. According to Frederick he suddenly heard a strange grating sound and felt a painful sting in his neck. A strange, green spindly entity was standing next to him, poking him in the neck with its finger. A voice (maybe in Frederick's head) told him: "YOU NEED NOT FEAR ME. I WISH TO COMMUNICATE. I COME AS A FRIEND. WE KNOW OF YOU ALL. I COME IN PEACE. I WISH MEDICAL ASSISTANCE. I NEED YOUR HELP."

After this short ordeal Frederick's was apparently let go and the creature disappeared into the woods. The flabbergasted hunter noticed that a line of blood trickled down his neck and he concluded that was what the alien stranger accosted him for. He then heard a strange sound which he surmised was coming from the creature's craft, whatever that may be. This very strange story has become something of an odd favorite among people interested inthe unexplained.

To make my vegetable man puppet I sculpted two pieces in clay and cast them in latex from dental plaster molds. The first was the head, or, more precisely, the face.

The second piece was a bit of bark-like skin texture, from which I could cast the bits of skin that would cover the puppet.

I made this pupper large, almost 40 cm tall, so I could make the limbs really thin. I used 1,5 mm aluminum wires reinforced with thin, but rigid, metal rods for the hard skeletal parts between each joint. A tight wrapping of crochet yarn soaked with latex held everything in place with the help of some Polymorph thermoplastic.

Though the creature was supposed to be very stick-like I still added a few spots of muscular detailing by soaking thin bits of polyurethane foam in latex and pressing those onto the body.

In the report, the creature is a dull green, but since I'm shooting against a green screen I painted the finished puppet red. The eyes were kept a chroma key green, so I could key those out and add animated eyes instead.

In After Effects I could then change the color of the puppet into green and also remove the eyes.

I used a caleidoscopic CG animation stock footage clip for each eye, which I think created a nice hypnotic effect.

The film was shot at a forest about 20 minutes walk from where I live. It was absolutely pouring down this day and both I and my single actor were soaked through after a while.

This actor, by the way, is Leif Hult, who is also quite an accomplished singer. He suffered through the gloomy afternoon and even dropped to the ground in the wet moss in one scene. The puppet was animated to interact with his movements. 

At the end of the film it's revealed that the creature is actually an alien, and Leif watches it take off in a flying saucer above the trees. I tried to film the tree tops without having the rain completely soak my camera. The UFO is another CG animation downloaded from Storyblocks.com as a green screen shot. I composited it into the sky above the forest by creating a matte from the trees. I used a contrast tool to make the trees completely black and the sky completely white. After Effects then allows you to place your original footage in a layer above the contrasted footage and using it as a matte, which makes the trees a layer without the sky. A third layer with the sky is then dropped under both these layers. It sounds a bit complicated, but it really isn't. It's actually a very old effect that's been used since the silent movie era. Back in the day it was a chemical process created with an optical printer, or by reversing the shot in camera and running the footage twice through the camera gate. Doing it digitally is, of course, much, much easier.

As you saw in my version of the story, Leif isn't a bow hunter. He's just a guy out for a stroll in the woods and happens to encounter this creature. I did, however, use what the creature said verbatim. It seems this film was quite appreciated by my YouTube audience, and I was encouraged to do more projects of this kind. Since there are almost countless similar weird encounter stories from all over the world to pick from I will get back to the subject eventually.