Editing "The King Who Sought Immortality",

Now here's an old project I haven't talked about in a while. That's mostly because I've been deep into the gruelling task of trying to get good composites out of quite bad bluescreen shots. While filming this project the actors were placed in front of a pretty dark blue screen and lit with two stage lights. About half-way into the filming we managed to smash one of the lights, which considerable lessened the effect of the blue screen background. The resulting footage is full of background shadows, grainy imagery and other compositing horrors. The main problem has been achieving an edge around the actors that doesn't flicker.

So for almost a full year I've been trying to make the best out of the situation, using different ways of extracting keyed material and applying hand-drawn mattes (sigh!) The finished result varies wildly from scene to scene. Sometimes it's quite horrible, at other times not that bad. But I've been told that for an amateur production shot under the aformentioned circumstances with a DV camera, it's not that bad at all. It's just that I always pump up my ambitions to abnormal proportions, aiming for highly unlikely results: "But.. But, Peter Jackson's got these really nice composites in the Lord of the Rings films! Why can't I have that too??" It's been a good learning curve, though. Here are some stills from some finished scenes:

Tiger Shark for Shelley; Part one

I thought I'd join the band of puppet makers / animators that have contributed with sea creature puppets to Shelley Noble's project "Halfland". My idea was to make the puppet in cast silicone for maximun flexibility. It was supposed to be a learning experience for me too, and it was.

I started off with making a sculpture of the creature; a "tiger shark" all in line with the rules for how wildlife in Halfland looks.

A dividing wall in softer clay was put up around the sculpture in order to cast a two piece mold.

A thin first layer brushed on to avoid air bubbles.

Top layer cast and sculpture turned around for second layer.

The whole plaster mold ready to be separated. The thin wooden stick provided a tunnel through the plaster, where I could stick an aluminum wire support rod for the puppet.

So far all's good and well. I mixed some PlatGel 10 silicone with yellow pigments (to provide a painting base) and brushed that into both mold halves. I should also say that the armature was padded with soft foam after this photo was taken.

Before putting the mold halves together some more silicone was added as a glue. The halves were clamped together and in theory the finished casting should come out just dandy.

Which of course it didn't. It turned out I added too little silicone and in some parts there were just big air pockets of loose skin. So the new plan will be to either recast the puppet with a (very expensive) silicone foam I'm dying to try out, or just do it with a latex skin, like I usually do. I'd like to get this puppet finished as soon as possible or it won't be of any good to Shelley's project. There have, however, been a few complications.

Taking up most of my time the last month-and-a-half is a theatre production of a famous Swedish children's book. I have been making 40-something soup terrines, one to be smashed each show, casting them in thin plaster and painting them to match the non-breakable original. Thank god it's all over now, but a rumour of a revival next year is already buzzing. I did get handsomely paid for it, though.

My little studio was also flooded during a week of terrible rains and I've been working with the drying and cleaning of the room since then. So quite a bit of my many projects have been on the backburner due to both planned and unplanned interludes. There's also a little film project that I had planned for this past summer and that I actually, despite all other interventions, managed to get done as far as the raw footage with the actors goes. More about that one in a bit...

Green Man Mask

Instead of doing stuff I had originally planned to do this past weekend, I took a vacation from my ever-consuming film projects and made something completely different. I like the image of the Celtic Green Man or Jack-In-the-Green; The human face with leaves for hair and beard. It's a powerful but cheerful symbolic image of the symbiosis between nature and man, or at least it's a reminder that we should be connected to nature.

I thought a Green Man mask would look just right on the staircase wall in my house, so I sculpted one in Chavant clay on top of a plaster cast of a friend's face.

When the sculpture was good enough for me I built a clay wall around it and poured in DragonSkin Q silicone. The silicone was slushed around over the sculpture until it set (in about seven minutes)

I applied some more silicone, with added thickener, to cover all areas properly. I tinted the new layer green so I'd see exactly where I'd put it.

I put a reinforcing plaster shell over the silicone. This shell created a "cradle" to put the silicone mold into, making sure it maintains its shape while the casting process is going on.

Here's the first-ever casting of my Green Man mask in SmoothCast 325 plastic.

And after some clean-up and acrylic airbrush painting it looks like this. Those are my eyes peering through the mask. It was a quick, fun thing to do, although I really should've spent this weekend doing some puppet work instead.

Concerning Brown Jenkin

Just a short post about the film featuring the Brown Jenkin puppet -for those of you wondering what it might look like moving about.

Brown Jenkin Comes Alive

Last fall I got in touch with Jennifer, who has the YouTube channel RavenOfPoe. She creates little videos with philosophical musings, poetry readings and quotes. She did a terrific reading of a part of H P Lovecraft's short story "The Dreams in the Witch House". The part in question describes "Brown Jenkin"; a rat with a human head and a witches familliar. I thought her reading was so good I asked if I could use it for a short-short video project on the subject. She gladly agreed and I went off to my workshop to produce the Jenkin puppet. A couple of months ago I shot scenes with a friend of mine acting out the angst of Walter Gilman, the unlycky hero of the story. Last weekend I shot the last live-action scenes with a witch puppet and some background footage, so it's time to put this one together.

Which means I have no moving images to show yet, but I do have a pretty thorough documentation of the making of the Brown Jenkin puppet. As always I started off with a sculpture of the head. If you get the head right, the rest follows quite easily.

First I cast a stiff latex head skin and attached it to the aluminum wire/friendly plastic armature. My intention at the beginning was to not show very much of Jenkin apart from something quick-moving. But of course while working with the character I fell in love with him and wanted a better-looking head.

This meant I would finally cast my luck into the silicone pond. A make-up artist friend of mine recommended PlatSil Gel 10 to me and I bought a set from Mapont in Sweden. This silicone can probably be found from a number of retailers in the US, the UK and other countries. One place I know of and can recommend is Bity Mold Supply. Mitch, who runs the store, also has a very cool YouTube channel, where he shows how to use many of his products. As you can see, the finished silicone skin is very flexible. I added some Silc Pig red and flesh tint from SmoothOn.com while mixing the two-part silicone. Ideally, I would've added some red flocking but that wasn't available when I bought the silicone.

The head armature for this puppet turned out very simple in the end. I chose to add just two moving sections; an aluminum wire to animate the nose/upper lip and a jointed jaw.

The silicone face was attached to the head armature using Sil-Poxy silicone glue. This stuff also comes from SmoothOn and will stick silicone to absolutely everything.

Sil-Poxy takes about 10 minutes or so to do its work properly. The question was how to keep the silicone face pressed against the armature without having to sit and press on it with my fingers. The simple solution was to hold the face in place with some bits of thick aluminum wire.

Here's the face attached to the armature. As you can see I've also started to add some pieces of upholstery foam to the body.

There was no need for any accurate reconstruction of muscle patterns. Just some basic stuff, so I would know that I was on the right track shaping the body while adding the fur later. The tail and the feet were simply wrapped with thin string and dipped in flesh-tinted latex.

Claws are sometimes a bit of a bother since it's hard to get them to stick properly to the fingers. The best solution seems to be to make them out of the same material as the fingers, in this case latex. I cut out claw shapes in thin cardboard and dipped them in latex tinted black.

The latex-covered paper claws are then simply attached to the fingers with some un-tinted latex. They are quite flexible and very durable, and always maintain their original shape.

I've started adding the fur. So far it's just about gluing down pieces of fake fur. But for the legs and the face I had to add small clups of hair, glued down with latex or silicone glue.

Here's the Sil-Poxy again. When using this to add hair to the silicone face I scraped up a tiny amount of glue on a dental tool.

A small clump of fur was cut off the fake fur fabric.

The Sil-Poxy was smeared onto the face.

The clump of fur was pressed down onto the face and a tiny amount of Sil-Poxy was added on top of the hair ends.

Here's the finished result. Since Sil-Poxy is transparent it won't really show up that much despite being a bit shiny. If you add it thinly it's even less obvious and you don't have to add that much, since its bond is super strong.

Time to paint the little bugger. Which means it's time for some more SmoothOn product placement. Their Psycho Paint is designed to be used on any platinum silicone, which means that it will stick to PlatSil Gel 10 as well. You mix the two Psycho Paint components with whatever tinting you find workable. I used SmoothOn's Silc Pic pigments.

When thinned with Toulene you can put the Psycho Paint mix through your airbrush, though I didn't have the guts to try that out this time. It wasn't necessary either, since the puppet's face only needed some minor touch-ups.

And here's the finished paint job.

The fur on the legs was stuck on with latex. The process is very simple, with overlapping layers. You just have to remember which end is the right one to start at.

The finished fur covering on a leg. The latex bond is very strong and should a shiny surface appear from it, just dab it with some baby powder or transparent make-up powder.

The finished Mr Jenkin. Hopefully, you'll se him wriggling about on a YouTube screen near you quite soon. Lastly; a quick description of the creature by Lovecraft himself:
"Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch's blood, which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages."

Some More YouTube Stuff.

Those of you who have looked through my blog will already have seen posts on this stuff, but I decided to make a couple of image streams for YouTube on the subjects. They might be of interest, as they include video footage of the finished puppets and props at work. So, enjoy!

Goblin Wood Behind the Scenes (of a sort).

Some more YouTube stuff. These two little documentaries were made for the DVD, so Angelica could show them to her class. They are made to be watched by a 10 year old audience and therefore very simple. But I hope you'll find something in them to enjoy anyway.