Little Big Octopus

I've been criss-crossing between my different projects on this blog and this post is no different. The puppet I'm going to talk about here was made for two different films. Having made a big latex octopus tentacle for my friend Daniel Lenneer's film Wavebreaker I thought about putting it in one of my own projects. It ended up in "The King Who Sought Immortality", shot last summer. So both projects now featured said rubber tentacle and both stories needed additional shots of the rest of the octopus. The beast was to be realized as an animated puppet.

This is the early clay sketch, done in Chavant clay (that I always, always use for any kind of sculpture to be cast).

A lot more detailing added and ready for its Ultracal 30 mold.

The mold is cast and the clay removed (we're really moving along quickly here!)

A sculpture for the underside of the tentacles. Another for the top side was also made, but looked a lot less exciting so I'm not showing it here.

The armature for the octopus was made out of very thick aluminum wire. So thick, actually, that I had to grind the top end of each tentacle wire to a thin point. But this little trick added tremendous flexibility to each tentacle when I started animating them.

Each tentacle wire recieved a covering of thick, soft string (the same kind I always use when adding bulk to body parts that need to be somewhat symmetrical.) Yes; it took some time to wrap all that string.

While getting incredibly bored wrapping string around aluminum wires all day long, I took a break for casting the head of the octopus. It was done as a soft, flexible latex skin.

The latex castings for the tentacles, and their molds.

Waiting to be stuck onto the armature...

And this is the actual armature for the octopus. As you can see it's incredibly simple. The green plastic piece of tubing (from a roll of plaster bandages) is attached to an aluminum wire, that will allow for the animation of the head bobbing up and down.

Some very soft upholstery foam has been added to the armature. It's almost obvious now what it's going to turn into.

The eyes have it, both for some dating humans and for some stop-motion puppets. I was never going to go for a 100% accurate, natural look for the octopus. It's a monster octopus and they need certain details to make them look really handsome. For something as non-human as an octopus, this puppet needed eyes that made it look as alive as possible. The coloring of the eye was done in Photoshop and printed out on sturdy paper. The actual eye lenses were glass thingumabobs that you're supposed to put in flower pots. They have a bulging lens-like top and flat undersides, and I've discovered they're excellent for making watery eyes for larger puppets. I painted the slit-like pupils on the underside of the "lenses" and attached them to the printed pieces of paper using hot-melt glue around the edges.

The eyes are stuck to the inside of the head skin using more hot-melt glue.

There! All pieces of skin are stuck to the foam-padded armature. Time to add some paint.

This nasty-looking goo is acrylic paint mixed with Prose-Aide No-Tack glue (also known as Pros-Aide III), thus creating a variation of make-up man Dick Smith's famous PAX paint. It sticks to latex well enough, remains flexible and doesn't cover up smaller details on the puppet.

The paint is simply sponged on, using pieces of old upholstery foam as sponges. I use two of them; one to add the paint quite liberally and one to soak upp the excess.

The coat of paint has been added and allowed to dry.

Now for the neat details. A mottled coat of blue-grey acrylic paint is airbrushed on.

The finished paint job. I sometimes overdo the painted details like highlights and shadows, but I find that I often have to in order for them to show up in my camera.

The big guy ready to get moving on my little blue screen stage.

Sometimes you stumble on really simple solutions. I had to animate the octopus emerging from behind the semi-submurged sub Nautilus in a shot for "Wavebreaker". The model for the Nautilus was too small to work with the big octopus puppet. I needed something cylindrical and at the right scale to wrap the tentacles over. And it had to be blue, so I could matte in a close-up of the Nautilus under the tentacles. I found a plastic bucket in a kitchen cupboard that did the trick perfectly.

Here's an early test shot of the octopus on the hull of the Nautilus. It seems to work pretty well.

While working on this puppet I noticed that my budding latex allergy had reached full bloom. For some time now my eyes have been really irritated, even when using protective goggles, and this time and I actually suffered some respiratory problems as well. It's the ammonia that does me in. This is probably a good sign that it's time for me to go silicone, like many others have done before me.

Goblin Wood: The Goblins

Here's a little photo session showing, in some detail, how the goblin puppets for "Goblin Wood" were made. This is the way I make just about all of my puppets.

The heads of the goblins start off as sculptures in Chavant clay. The head to the right is actually the second attempt at "finding" the right character. Plaster molds were made for each head. Head no 2 had a two-part mold.

This is the head of one of the goblins cast as a loose latex skin. The latex was tinted before pouring it into the plaster mold. Red beads have been added for the eyes.

This is the insides of the latex skin and it might be a bit hard to see, but the red beads are attached to the latex using the thermo plastic Friendly Plastic.

The armature for the goblin head you've just seen the skin of. The "skull" is made out of Friendly Plastic. All jointed parts -brow, ears, jaw, upper lip and cheeks- are aluminum or copper wire covered with a string wrapping. The brow is also padded with thin foam rubber.

This is how the joints for low-budget stop-motion armatures are made. You stick two or three lenghts of aluminum wire together in a power drill and hold the other ends of the wires with a pair of pliers. Gently turn the drill and you've got instant braided aluminum wire. Braided because it will hold up much better under stress and it won't be as springy or wobbly.

The braided aluminum wire is has been covered with Friendly Plastic, working as skeleton bones. The fingers are made out of plastic-covered copper wire. As you perhaps can see, the left goblin has another head than the one shown as a sculpture earlier. This is the first, discarded attempt.

Goblin no 1 has been covered with a wrapping of soft wire, and then some foam rubber and latex. Eventually I removed the wire from the arms and put some cotton/latex muscles there instead.

The goblin has been covered with a skin of latex, also acting as a pair of trousers and a pair of (so far) very floppy shoes.

Goblin no 2 has had his arms and legs attached to his armour. This fish bowl-like chest and back piece was made out of a big acrylic ball (intended as a home-made Christmas decoration). It's been patched-up and had details added using Apoxie.

The head has been added along with some latex spikes and a covering of latex skin on the arms and legs. A studded band made as a Chavant sculpture and cast in latex has been attached along the middle of the armour. As you can see it's been painted a matte black as well. It's pretty much ready for the final paint job now. A small hat and some shoes were also added.

Armour and other details (such as leather straps) for goblin no 1 were sculpted in Chavant and cast in SmoothCast 325 plastic from silicone molds.

The boys are finally finished and ready for animation. They are a mixture of my own concepts and influences from other artists, primarily Arthur Rackham and Brian Froud. It's hard to escape your favourites. They work their way into your subconscious and usually does not make themselves apparent until the work is finished.

My Illustrious Illustrating Career

And now for something completely different. Life is not just about making jolly movies. Sometimes it's also about making money and trying to establish some kind of career. I have no illusions as to being able to make a living out of my animation or puppet building, but I have the intention of making it as an illustrator. I have started out quite modestly, but at least I'm on my way. I first published a couple of books in Sweden, but I really want to branch out in the US, where the big money and the big opportunities are.
I self-published Fearsome Critters at Lulu, a book about the sometimes outrageous creatures of lumberjack folklore. Then I got in touch with Kelly Christiansen at Cyberwizard Productions. She took a fancy to my art and comissioned some illustrations for the humorous fantasy/sci-fi anthology Strange Worlds of Lunacy. After that I did art for L. Frank Baum's American Fairytales (not yet published).

Just published, however, is Night Ship to Never, another anthology, collecting the sci-fi poems of David Kopaska-Merkel and Kendall Evans (some examples of the illos shown below).


All of that was in 2008. During 2009 I'll finish several book projects that I want Kelly to publish for me, and so far she seems to like what she's seeing. Cyberwizard Productions is a small company, but with big ambitions. Ideally I'd like to be picked up by a big publisher who can pay me big money, but since that hasn't happened yet I'll make do with what I can. Special make-up effects artist Tom Savini's motto is "The more you do, the more you get to do". I stand by that too -it is, in fact my experience that it is so. That's how the universe works. You have to show that you really enjoy your creativity and that you're going to keep going no matter what! Comic book creator supreme Alan Moore pointed out that the projects you do out of excitement, just for the fun of being creative without any thoughts of success or recognicion, are the purest acts you will ever perform in your life and those are the ones most likely to succeed. I try to make every work a work of love, weather it's commissioned or my own brainchild. With that attitude I know the result of my efforts will always be the best I can make it.

Goblin Wood Image Enhancements

All of the live-action footage for Goblin Wood was shot in one afternoon. It was a quite sunny day and the image quality turned out OK. But not very fantasy-like. So since then I've been trying to improve the footage according to my tastes. I wanted a softened, almost hazy look to most of the shots. This meant the applying of filters in After Effects and also the adding of stuff that wasn't there when the film was shot, like large fungi, animals and fog.

The story starts out in elf-land, where everything is bright and green. There are mostly trees with leafy foliage. We brought some smoke effects to the woods, but it was impossible to get the damn things working properly. I wanted some hazy sunlight "drapes" billowing in the background, but since the smoke effects wasn't cooperating I added the sunlight afterwards in After Effects instead. I also brightened the image and made it softer.

Our elfin heroine enters the goblin wood. There was no dark spruce forest near where I shot the "elf-land" footage, so that had to be added later as well. The goblin wood-part of the shot is simply a combination of photos that were combined and spliced into a part of the image Anjelica (the elf) didn't enter. In the middle of the shot you can glimpse a winged shadow lifting from the ground. This is a flying bird of prey from Eadweard Muybridge's collection Animals in Motion. I just scanned the photos, coloured them and made a flying cycle that was then imported in the software StopMotionPro and animated.

When the elf enters the goblin wood the mood and the look of the film changes. Everything gets darker and murkier. I added some fog shot against a black screen, downloaded from Detonationfilms.com and a nasty, mole-like animal peering up from his den beneath a rotting tree stump. After that was done I rendered the shot, imported it again and duplicated it in two layers. The top footage was blurred using Gaussian Blur and the blending mode "Multiply" was chosen. This made the image very dark, musty and atmospheric. A bit too much, actually, so the transparency of the top layer was amped up a bit. All of the goblin wood-shots were processed in this way.

The mole-like animal that is briefly visible in the above shot is an old puppet I built for a disastrous film project called Virgin Tears. It actually started life as a musical version of Lord of the Rings! For real! At first we got permission from the publisher Harper Collins and the Tolkien estate to do an amateur version of the story. Then New Line Cinema pulled all the worldwide rights to protect their interests and the film mutated into something different and quite unwatcable. I produced some stop-motion for the project, including shots of the mole monster that was added to scenes previously depicting the encounter between Frodo and a barrow-wight.

Another example of the original shot having the "goblin filter" added, along with some oversized fungi.

More photos of fungi, toadstools in this case. A puppet of a walking toadstool was also included.

More smoke effects from Detonationfilms.com. The eye appearing in the mossy rock was a glass eye in a cardboard socket, that I animated and keyed into the shot.

The elf triumphantly puts her foot on the fallen monster she's just vanquished. We simply put a big stone on the ground where the creature would be placed, and the keyed-in pupped was aligned with Anjelicas foot. Easy-peasy!

Goblin Wood Firefly Puppet

I had high hopes to finish the film Goblin Wood (see earlier posts), shot this past summer, before the end of 2007. I realize now that that was incredibly optimistic (as always), so let's say instead that it'll be finished during the spring of 2008.

In this film the elfin heroine fights a firebreathing, flying dragon-insect-something -a "dragon fly", quite simply. Previously I have built all my animation puppets using latex, sometimes reinforced with cotton to achieve a leathery, shell-like feel to certain parts of a puppet's anatomy. I've used this particular technique for insect-like or crustacean creatures. For the dragon fly I decided to cast the hard parts of its body in plastic and cover the joints with latex.

This monster was sort of inspired by the works of Swedish horror/fairy tale artist Hans Arnold. Check out his web page and you'll see what I mean.

The head of the dragon fly was sculpted in Chavant and a mold in Dragon Skin Q silicone rubber was created for it. The head was cast in SmoothCast 325 plastic. Spikes were added to the back of the head using Apoxie sculpt and a flexible lower jaw was built up with wool string and latex over aluminum wire.

The body was done the same way as the head, with holes drilled out for attaching the legs and the wings. The tail was created by wrapping yarn around aluminum wire and adding cast patches of latex skin from existing skin molds over that. The horns were also cast in latex from different old "monster" plaster molds. Recycle if you can; it saves both time and money!

The wings were a bit of a bother to make. I had to sculpt them as thin as I possibly could and create a silicone mold for them. I say "them" but of course I mean "it". I only sculpted one wing and cast four duplicates in plastic.

The legs were easier to do (I think I did all six in about twenty minutes) and created the way I do all puppet armatures -braiding aluminum wire attaching one end to a power drill and holding the other with pliers. The stiff parts of each leg was built up with Friendly Plastic. Normally this construction would then be covered by foam rubber, latex and paint.

Here are the finished legs and wings attached to the body. I really should do something about the floor in my workshop!

A view of the belly.

A black base coat has been added to the puppet. But how come it's got no head?

Because in the film the monster blows its own head off at the end. I attached a short screw to the end of the puppet's neck, so I could screw its head on and off the body (the creature being headless after the explosion). The eyes are bought from a taxidermist's supply house.

The finished puppet was painted with acrylic airbrush paints. The joints for the wings and the legs were covered with sewing string and tinted latex.

For animation the puppet was mounted on a flexible support rod. It was simply two thick pieces of aluminum wire braided together and stuck to a block of wood. The wire was covered with thick, soft string painted blue. Thus the support rod could be keyed out with the background.

Two stills from the film showing the fire fly on the prowl in the woods where I shot most of this project. Atmospheric filters and motion blur have also been added. In the last photo the heroine has shot a pine cone-tipped arrow into the snout of the monster, which acts practically like a flame thrower, and jamming it. So I guess you can figure out what happens next. KA-BOOM!