H P Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time

For those of you familliar with the works of H P Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time" may be one of his more well-known tales. It's a strange story, more sci-fi than horror, and concerns a peculiar way of time travel. The hero, an academic from Miskatonic University, Arkham, gradually goes mad as he starts to realize that his mind and body was kidnapped during a span of several years, and used by a strange alien race known as the Yith, or "The Great Race", who came to Earth in its infancy.
Here they waged war against other, more horrifying aliens; the flying polyps! After conquering their enemies, the Yith focused on exchanging minds and bodies with representatives of the superior lifeform in different ages of Earth's history. Lovecraft's story jolts from the early prehistoric, to (then) present day, and the far future.
You may not be too surprised to hear that it's never been filmed, although I know the Lovecraft Historical Society did an audio play recording of the tale. One reason is probably that the strange creatures in the story would be difficult to portray, without looking too silly. That, however, was never reason enough for me to not do a particular project, so a while ago I started planning a short animated version called "The Rise of the Yith". I built a Yith puppet and did a test animation. My pal Daniel Lenneer found out about this and revealed his plans to make a film version of the very same story. Thus we decided to join forces and attempt an amateur version of "The Shadow Out of Time". Daniel did the live-action bits, and I produced the animated sequences. So far it's shaping up pretty well. We still have a bit to go, but here are some stills from a few finished scenes for your enjoyment (we hope).

H P Lovecraft's Nightgaunts: The Finished Film

The finished short film, ladies and gentlemen:

H P Lovecraft's Nightgaunts

So, what new film projects from the Loneanimator studio? Right now I'm struggling to finish a short video project before Christmas, which means I have only a week to go. This is yet another H P Lovecraft interpretation, namely my filmed version of his poem "Nightgaunts" from his sonnet cycle "Fungi From Yuggoth".

My main reason for doing this is because I found what I think is a very good recital of the text, done by John Hutch on YouTube. I got his permission to use the audio from his video, and recruited my long-suffering Lovecraftian victim Jimmy Bäckström to writhe about and balance on a stool in front of a green screen to appear to be carried off by the nasty nightgaunts. 

 Oh, the joys of amateur filmmaking.

The monsters in themselves are gargoyle-like flying creatures without any face or voice. They have oily black skin and barbed tails, with which they torment their victims by tickling them. I know.. It's Lovecraft's odd phobias wrapped up as monsters, again.

 I made only one nightgaunt puppet, but with three slightly different interchangeable heads. Nobody will probably notice the difference between them, but it's still there.

To make the puppet fly I built a primitive, but sufficient, flying rig attatched to the puppet's back via a screw. When the nightgaunts walk around on the ground, which they will in a brief clip, they won't need the rig, just the threaded holes in their feet for attaching them to my animation stage.

So far the results are not looking too shabby. I got some great tips from Peter Andrew Montgomery Scott to improve my keying techniques, as well as adding better motion blur. I'd better stop blogging and start animating now!

Puppets by Request: The Monster From Beneath the Sea

This is a quasi-Godzilla-like monster I did for German amateur filmmaker and animator Oliver Gröbke. Initially he was interested in getting a good enough replica of the Beast From 20.000 Fathoms, but eventually decided to get a monster of his own design. I had pretty free reins while creating this puppet. I gave the monster human-like arms, that are bigger than they'd be on a real dino, so the creature can grab onto things properly while going on it's rampage.

I made this paste-up to inspire Oliver -not that I needed to; he's brimming with ideas for his mini-monster-epic!

Puppets by Request: The Cyclops

A bit more progress on the "7th Voyage of Sinbad" cyclops I'm building for a guy in the US. As life is keeping me busy with all sorts of fun surprises, finishing something at all this year is taking a lot of time.

I have some patching up to do, teeth and claws to add, some paint and the fur on the legs. And I'll have to make him a big, spiky club, of course.

Umibozu: The finished Short Film

That's interesting: I've always been able to imbed a videoclip from YouTube here, but not this time! Never mind; Here you go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pz64iwUwIs&feature=channel_video_title

Swedish-Japanese Monster Attacks: Umibozu!

Now for a little short film project. Long ago I found a Japanese story about the sailor Tokuso encountering an Umibozu at sea, and discussing the peculiarities of life, horror and truth with the monster.

An Umibozu is said to be the spectre of a drowned Buddhist monk, and usually manifests itself as a huge black head, on occasion accompanied by tentacles. The creature is huge and sinks ships daring to venture too far off the coastline. Of course, a giant squid comes to mind, and it has been suggested that such an animal have been glimpsed and the encounter started off the legend.

  My version of the story features a poor fisherman, rather than a successful mariner. The Umibozu is pretty intact, and has a couple of nasty-looking tentacles.

In early September I shot some green screen footage of my pal Dag Persson dressed up as the fisherman. We concocted a very simple wooden hold for the "oar", which was just a big stick in reality. I took some snapshots of a small wooden japanese boat model a friend of mine has, and superimposed Dag into it. It works fine for distance shots, while close-ups simply show Dag from the waist up. We used a powerful leaf-blower (which made a hell of a racket) to simulate stormy winds. Dag's been in a few of my projects. He was the hero in my "The King Who Sought Immortality", for which he also stood in front of a chroma key screen with the leaf-blower going full blast in his face.

The Umibozu itself was constructed as a very plain hand puppet, just something I held aloft on my outstreched arm and waved around in front of the camera. Since it wasn't meant to convey any expressions I tried to create a distinct permanent expression on the sculpture for the puppet.

I made a two-part plaster mould for the sculpture and cast latex tinted black into the finished mould.

The finished puppet has reddish eyes created by painting on the flat backside of a pair of glass semi-orbs. I also made a jointed latex tentacle, which I animated twice and edited into the shots of the Umibozu submerged in water.

The finished shots make use of photos of an overcast sky, googled lightning images, shots of a CGI ocean I bought some years ago, and some spark shower footage from detonationfilms.com used as water splashes.

It's not a realistic look, but that's not what I was after. The whole film is stylized in different ways.

For example, I chose to include fleeting images of some of the words from the conversation between the monster and the fisherman. The reason for this is simply to add more punch to the visuals, and also to make sure our Swedish-accented English comes across well enough. If you can't understand what's being said, the purpose of the film kind of falls flat.

I'm still editing the project, but it should be up on YouTube during the coming week. Sayonara!