When Chaugnar Wakes: Film and Puppets

H P Lovecraft, although not commercially successful during his lifetime, did influence a lot of writers and artists. You may have heard of "The Lovecraft Circle", which was a bunch of writers who befriended him and were inspired in one way or another by his work. One such circle member was Frank Belknap Long, or "Belknapius", as Lovecraft nicknamed him.

Long's most famous story may be "The Hounds of Tindalos", which you can find in numerous anthologies, and which has been included in the so-called Cthulhu Mythos. But he also wrote other types of horror and a fair amount of scifi. It's generally thought that Long was not as accomplished a writer as HPL, but he was more successful in his day, and I think his prose may be more accessible to a modern reader than Lovecraft's. At any rate, I enjoy the works of "Belknapus", and for years I've been thinking about how I could build and animate one of his most famous creations, the cosmic horror Chagnar Faugn. This monstrous being (and others like him) appears as the villain of his novel "The Horror From the Hills", a madcap tale of aliens, horrible transformations, strange archeology and death ray inventions.  However, I settled on a poem which Long wrote for Weird Tales, September 1932. It features Chaugnar Faugn before he comes to Earth, apparently, or may simply be a stand-alone piece of literature.

Chaugnar Fagn's appearance is not as abstract as with some of the other Lovecraftian creatures. Basically, he looks like an evil version of the Indian elephant-headed deity Ganesha. He has some kind of wings or fins that can be mistaken for ears. What looks like a trunk is a proboscis with a blood-sucking orifice, and what seems like tusks is a crystalline outgrowth which entwines towards the end of it's length. His body is generally humanoid.

I started with creating these tusks, sculpting them in medium grade monster clay.

A mold container was slapped together using bits of cardboard and hot glue, into which DragonSkin FX silicone was poured.

This is how the actual silicone mold turned out (with the cardboard removed). The clay tusks have been plied out after making a cut down what will be the backside of the mold.

The tusks were cast using Poly-Optic clear casting resin. However, since I didn't have a vacuum chamber to de-gass the material in, all the air bubbles that emerge during the mixing of the stuff was left in. This caused the tusks to become translucent rather than transparent. In my case that was OK, since completely clear tusks would've become invisible as I was animating the puppet against a blue screen for chroma key work. As the silicone mold is pretty thick it snaps tight around the back side cut, and there was hardly any plastic seeping out, creating thin bits of "flashing." In other words, the cleanup of this casting was minimal.

When the tusks were finished I sculpted the head and the front of the torso in medium grade Monster Clay. I used the shiny read half-beads that I often use for glowing monster eyes. I probably should come up with a new trick to create eyes, but what the heck -I like it! This sculpture took about two days to complete, spending a fair amount of time adding textures and details to make it all look strange but organic.

I cast the head and torso with tinted latex from a dental plaster mold created around the sculpture.

 The "ears" (or whatever they are) were made to resemble spiky fish fins using copper wire encased in soft plastic, then wrapped in soft string and covered with tinted latex. Polymorph plastic was used to hold them together. This made the spike bits animate-able, so they could squirm and move in creepy and very un-elephant-like ways.

I used my usual trick of adding skin between the moving parts by encasing the whole armature halfway down into an improvised tub of soft hobby plaster, adding more latex between the tentacle bits when the plaster had dried.

The trunk was made , like most of my tentacly bits, by wrapping soft yarn around a piece of aluminum wire. But I also sculpted a clay trunk, or rather the top side, to give it distinct texture and shape. From a plaster mold poured over the sculpture I could then cast a latex skin added over the wrapped aluminum wire.

The sucker-like mouth was made the same way as the ears, except for that I used clay to embed the armature instead of plaster. When the desired shape was achieved I built up a round orifice with latex and cotton, and also added latex teeth.

The armature was my usual aluminum wire and Polymorph construction. The limbs were covered with muscles created by soaking thin polyurethane foam in latex and rolling up bits of it into long sausages. They were all bonded together with liquid latex, and then covered by extra-extra thin foam to smooth out the shapes.

Arms and legs were padded and covered with skin separately and then joined together to form the body. The feet were also cast from clay sculptures.

The torso was completed with a head supported by a skull made from Polymorph and the armatured ears and trunk. The rest of the body was padded with thin polyurethane sheets covering bundles of cotton balls.

The foam bits were covered up with bits of latex skin cast from old plaster molds used for a number of puppets.

The puppet was painted with a unifying layer of tinted latex before getting a dry brushing with greenish grey latex.

The tusks were simply attached using hot melt glue. They stuck very well to the Polymorph skull that way. The finished puppet is pretty large, around a foot tall.

If you started reading this blog post by checking out the video posted at the top you'll know that old Chaugnar isn't the only puppet. He's being monitored by a bunch of aliens with eyes on stalks. These characters were just the one puppet, made in bits and assembled. The head was sculpted in medium grade Monster Clay.

The body, which is a space suit, was also sculpted in clay, here seen upside down.

 Originally I had the notion of making three puppets with slight differences, so I cast three heads and three bodies in latex. However, I soon realized that to make them discernible from each other I had to make them more different than I wanted, so in the end I decided to just make the one puppet, representing the whole alien crew.

I also sculpted some other bits of tech that would be cast in latex and attached to the spacesuit.

I wanted the arms and legs to be tentacle-like so I made them very simply by wrapping soft string around aluminum wire to build up a shape, and then covering that shape with sturdy macrame yarn, and lastly with tinted latex.

Here's the spacesuit body assembled.

And here's how the finished alien(s) turned out with head attached and a greyish metal color added. The eyes are tiny Photoshop print-outs covered with drops of Glossy Accents scrapbooking plastic.

The backgrounds are my usual mix of stock footage, mainly from Videoblocks, where I have a yearly subscription. Some backgrounds were made in Photoshop using stock images from DepositPhotos, where I also have a subscription.

Overheard On A Saltmarsh: Puppets and Film

The above video is my latest project; a very short adaptation of Harold Munro's prose poem "Overheard On A Saltmarsh." This short piece seems to be a perennial anthology favorite, and I've heard a few people say they read it in their schoolbooks. Basically, the poem is an argument between a goblin and a nymph, overheard by whoever scribbled down the text. In that context you're not really supposed to see the arguing creatures, only hear them somewhere out in the marsh. Of course, it was no point for me to make a film without showing the characters.

I've recently replaced my old tired PC laptop with a brand spanking new iMac, and I wanted to give my After Effects a proper test run on my new hardware. This short film seemed to be a good subject. And having bought a Mac also meant that my usual animation software of choice, StopMotionPro, was out since it won't run on Macs. Instead I invested in Dragonframe, and this film also gave me the opportunity to test that out as well.

Both characters are speaking in the film, and their mouths were animated, but in two different ways. Let's start with how the goblin was made.

The two artists who have defined the look of goblins and nasty fairies in pop culture more than anyone else are probably Arthur Rackham and Brian Froud. I tried to stay away from their interpretations and come up with something of my own, a creature which looked like he could live his entire life in the swamp. I made this goblin a sort-of mix between a toad and a rodent. This head and torso is sculpted in Monster Clay medium grade.

Hard dental plaster was used to create a sturdy mold over the sculpture.

Tinted latex goes into the mold, keeping the latex thick at certain spots and thin at others. The ear isn't cut off in this photo, it's just flopped down over my hand. I've also glued a small black plastic bead in place as the eye.

The goblin's mouth needed to be very flexible, since he had lots to say in the film. To give me the best flexibility when animating I simply made a loop of aluminum wire wrapped in soft string and then covered with latex. In this photo I haven't joined both ends of the wire into a loop yet. The joining was made using a mix of super glue and baking soda.

The armature for this puppet was actually built up one bit at a time, adapting it to how the padding of the torso turned out. The padding is bits of polyurethane foam, some of it soaked in latex.

The teeth are cotton dipped in latex and shaped with my fingers. They're attached using more latex as a bonding agent. The aluminum mouth wire is now stuck to the inside of the lips.

These little yellow sausages are actually strips of thin polyurethane foam, soaked in latex, allowed to dry and then rolled up. I'm using them as muscles to create organic shapes on the arms and legs. The good thing about this particular material in comparison to using rolls of cotton or strips of ordinary polyurethane foam, is that it will compress slightly, but mainly retain its shape. Which means that you can bend the limbs and have them look more natural and organic than when using those other mentioned materials.

To pad out the back of the puppet, making it look bulkier without adding a dense material, I used cotton balls. These will create a bulbous bulk on the puppet's body, but still allow the spine to bend and be animated very well.

This is how the foam sausages look when attached as muscles on the arm.

Here the whole puppet has been padded with latex-soaked foam and regular foam. The latex skin is pinned down to the foam using liquid latex as a glue.

The cotton balls on the back are covered with a thin sheet of foam.

The goblin covers his modesty with a loincloth made from lizard skin (bits of latex cast into a skin mold). Parts of these latex bits are supported by thin aluminum wires, so the loincloth sections can be animated, swaying to and fro as the goblin moves.

The finished goblin puppet is dry brushed with tinted latex, and weird bristles or hairs made from cotton dipped in latex now grow from the character's head. Also, bits of extra adornments have been added in the shape of small beads and bones made from cotton and latex.

Like with the goblin, I wanted to make something slightly unusual with the nymph. In the end I think she turned out fairly conventional. All of her appearance is built up around her eyes, which are acrylic doll's eyes. I sculpted this bust in medium grade Monster Clay.

For the casting procedure I separated the neck and the head for easier casting. Tinted latex created the skins of the pieces, and thin strips of polyurethane foam soaked in latex were pressed into these latex castings before they were removed from the plaster mold.

A bundle of aluminum wires wrapped in soft string goes up through the neck, and is attached to the head using Polymorph thermo plastic as a bonding material (also creating a skull for the head.)

Latex-soaked foam is pressed together around the armature, slowly shaping subtle muscles, which are then covered with tinted latex.

Here's a snapshot of the process. The legs are being covered with wrappings of foam that have been soaked in liquid latex and allowed to dry.

The legs and arms are given circa five layers of tinted latex, puddled on using pipe cleaners as brushes. I'm speeding up the drying process using a heat gun on its lowest setting.

Since her torso won't be exposed, no skin is added there.

To create a spiky, unkempt hairstyle I'm cutting bundles of hair from the collar of an old coat, using latex to glue it down onto the head. When the latex dries it'll turn transparent.

The nymph has a small dress or top made from brownish leaves. I sculpted a few leaves in clay and created a plaster mold over them, so I could cast a bunch of them in latex.

The finished dress is given a dash of acrylic airbrush paints painted on with an ordinary brush to create some shadows within the shapes of the leaves. This puppet does not have any attachment points in its feet, like most of my puppets (the goblin, for example). Instead she has a t-nut in her posterior, so I can have her sit absolutely still when animating her upper body. The glass beads, over which the characters argue, are from a bag of trinkets I've collected over the years for use in my puppet projects.

The nymph's mouth is not animated on the puppet, but separate elements created in Photoshop are animated to move in sync with the speech of the character. I'm using photos of a real mouth.

As for who's talking, I'm doing the voice of the goblin, pitched at a lower register, and the nymph is an Irish lady doing voice overs for fun and profit.

The actual marsh is represented by footage of a British marsh by a lake, and the close-ups are reeds and grass that grow around a pond in my garden.

This was a fun project to do, though the process of syncing the animated mouths with the recorded speech took quite some time. It's not 100% perfect, but it does get the point through, I hope. I'll do some more folklore-themed projects this year. It's a subject very dear to my heart, and I haven't touched on it in my videos as much as I'd want, so far.