Sayonara, old buddy...

One of my oldest and best friends, Rolf Berg, passed away today. We made 15 films together, and had a blast doing them. Rolf played everything from pirates and crooks to trolls and wizards. He did it all and did it very well. I will really miss him.

Recreating Taurus

 I just finished one of my very few puppet-building commissions, a recreation of the monster Taurus from the film "Equinox" (1968/71). I built it for a fellow YouTuber with a great interest in vintage monsters. This puppet is built up, like all my puppets, having a aluminum wire-jointed skeleton covered with soft foam and a latex skin. It's a pretty good recreation, and I'm quite happy with it. I hope my YouTube pal will like it too.

"Equinox", for those of you that don't know, is a low-low budget horror fantasy of singular pedigree. It was put together by people who would in the 70´s rise to fame as creators of the effects for "Star Wars" and most of the blockbuster fantasies that followed during the 80´s. Besides Taurus there's also a bat-winged devil and a Lovecraftian tentacled horror, chasing no other than fantasy author Fritz Lieber in a small role. Today you can get "Equinox" as a very polished double DVD set (of course).

Save Prince Plutonium Trailer!

The poor people who appear in my films are almost always in for a long wait to see the finished piece. I sort-of film first and then later try to figure out how to make the film hold together. I've also learned to film WHEN people are available, and stock up on footage. Anyway, for the young actors in "Save Prince Plutonium", my space movie, I put together this little trailer as a "Happy Easter to you" message. Hope you enjoy it too!

Building an Oliphaunt

I’m sure most of you know what an oliphaunt is by now. Or Mümakil, as they’re also called. If you haven’t read J R R Tolkien’s poem, then you have seen oliphaunts stomp around in the two last Lord of the Rings movies. They’re big, mean elephants, basically.

I like Tolkien’s poem “Oliphaunt”, or I should say Sam’s poem, as Tolkien credits Sam Gamgee as its actual author. I’ve wanted to make a short-short animated video clip based on it for years. In fact, I started sculpting an oliphaunt puppet three years ago, but got no further than the head. But a while ago I decided to finish the puppet nad animate it, urged on by 10-year old Joel, who has a soft spot for the monstrous elephants. So, a short description of my oliphaunt puppet.

As I mentioned, this sculpture was begun three years ago. I made a plaster mold and sort of forgot about the project.

Recently I cast the skin of the head in tinted latex, sort of creating a mini-muppet.

The armature was really simple, using pieces of very hard cardboard for larger body sections, and thick aluminum wire, untwisted, for the joints. This made the joints less “springy”, and in theory that means easier to animate. As I’ve started animating now I’ve found it to be quite true, but only quite.

 First muscle foam padding of the body…

And then some additional padding to smooth things out.

 The eyes are home-made; plastic beads painted and dipped in Crystal Clear plastic to get a nice shine.
 

The tusks are paper clay and not as brittle as you might then think. They’re painted and airbrushed. They’re also NOT as white as my camera flash makes them out to be.

 

The trunk, ready to be attached to the skull, which, by the way is made out of Friendly Plastic thermoplastic.

Trunk attached and covered with latex skin.

Head attached to body, ready for it’s latex skin covering.

I cast about 40 or more smaller latex skin pieces to allow for better stretch and movement. All skin pieces were dyed black.

 Having the latex dyed black meant that I could get away with a very quick paintjob, namely just some drybrushing, using acrylic paint and ProsAid make-up glue.
 

And here’s the big boy ready for the camera. This puppet is actually pretty big, over a foot tall. It’s not at all heavy, though. I’ve started animating him now, and as with all puppets he’s got shortcomings that you don’t find out about until you start bending and twisting the joints. Still, so far he’s behaved pretty well. My idea was to create a slightly surreal elephant, something that would look a bit funny, but also a bit scary. I based most of my design on Mammuthus imperator, a really huge relative of the Wooly mammoth, and then tried to make the finished look a tad cartoonish.

Imitating Life

I'm a member of UFO Sweden, an organization researching strange anomalies encountered and reported by people. UFO Sweden is led by the indefatigable Clas Svahn, journalist and author. We publish one magazine for the general public, and one for the investigators. Several years back I drew a comic for the internally published magazine, portraying Clas and his colleague Håkan as Men in Black. The comic was called “The Y Files”, and made fun (rather innocently, I thought) of the sometimes very weird and crazy UFO movement. Some loved it and some hated it bitterly, arguing that this single jest undermined the whole purpose of our organization. Eventually I grew tired of the crybabies and put the comic to rest.

I decided to give Clas a surprise Christmas gift this years, and sculpted a figurine of his “Y Files” alter ego, about to be grabbed by a stalky-eyed alien.

I created both characters in Chavant clay, and built up silicone molds around each figure separately.

 

The finished figurines were cast in SmoothCast 325, my favorite plastic, and painted with acrylic airbrush paints.

Clas had a really bad Christmas. Both his mom and his father in law passed away within a few days of each other. I hope my little gift gave him cause to smile a bit, and I think it did.

I also made a small sculpture of my uncle Ingvar as a gnome, since he’s interested in folklore and old traditions, but not least because he’s actually seen one!

When I make my silicone molds, I just build up a clay wall as closely to the sculpture as I can, so no excess silicone will be wasted. Also, I don’t want the molds to be too thick. If there’s a good enough thinness, without making the molds to soft and wobbly, I don’t have to make many, or any, cuts in the silicone to remove the sculpture, and later, the castings.

The camera wouldn’t give us any sharp images today, but I hope you get the general idea.

The King Who Sought Immortality: The Film and a Little Extra Film

A little mythological tale of the meaning of life, quite a bit inspired by the Dynamation epics of animator Ray Harryhausen. YouTube doesn't like this clip. For some reason, all the campfire scenes are of terrible quality in this upload, and there are some lines and blips flashing by NOT in the original film. I hope you still find it entertaining. The film is shot with DV consumer equipment and contains some of the worst chroma key work this side of 1985. It took two years for me to finish it, working on other projects in between. I learned a lot from it, particularly what NOT to do next time.

I also made a little clip showing some before-and-after stuff:

Making a Dentist Beastly!

A while ago, I was contacted my Mary Engholm, a costume-making friend of mine. She's working on a Swedish musical stage adaptation of "Beauty and the Beast". She had designed the beast, but needed help with making the actual mask, claws and feet for the character. I saw this as an opportunity to try out making a silicone mask, something which is a bit more complicated than my usual latex masks.


Mary took a plaster cast of Tommy, the singing dentist playing the beast, and sent it to me. Over that, I sculpted a cat-like face after Mary's design (cat faces seemingly being the norm in adaps of this tale).

 An Ultracal 30 plaster mold was created over this sculpture and the clay removed from the cured mold. Now, the silicone mask was created by first brushing a thin layer of  Dragon Skin FX silicone into both the mold and over the cast of Tommy's face. A new batch of silicone was then mixed with "slacker", a chemical which makes the silicone very runny. Some skin-colored pigments were also added to the mix, which was then poured into the mold. The face part, often called "the plug" by the pros, was pressed into the mold, making the silicone mix run out and into all parts of the mold. After about an hour, the silicone cast could be removed, now having a fully cured, but very soft and jelly-like consistency. I added some extra paint to the mask, mixing "psycho paint" (from SmoothOn.com) with red and brown pigments and sponging it on in thin layers. I also added some mutton chops with fake fur. This face mask, with a pair of silicone ears, was stuck onto a silicone face cowl. The whole contraption could be pulled over the head, fitting snugly and not need any glue to be kept in place or to respond to facial movements. I tried the mask on with a wig that Mary sent me. I have a big head, but Tommy's head is even bigger, so my fit wasn't perfect.

  

It does, however look better on Tommy:

Mary will probably add more hair, especially a pair of eyebrows. It'll be fun seeing the finished beast in full costume. This musical is produced by a small stage company in the south of Sweden. The show will probably premiere in March or April, 2011. I hope I have an opportunity to see it.