Lovecraft fans are quite vocal about their dislike for half-baked or totally erroneous interpretations of Lovecraft's visions. Hollywood has rightly taken the brunt of this critique. Amateur filmmakers usually avoid taking on stories that demand the recreations of Lovecraft's more elaborate creatures, instead focusing on tales that are driven by suggestions and atmosphere. I enjoy taking the other route. However, instead of burying myself in pictorial research on Cthulhu I just jumped into the creation of my puppet, opting to work as fast as I could, simply driven by my impressions of the character. The head sculpture in Chavant clay was not overworked. I added three eyes on either side, and stopped as soon as I thought I had captured the essence of the monster.
He does a great job of documenting every part of the build process, including this nicely done sculpt for the head.
Having grown up at the tail end of the stop-motion era I have a real fondness for the technique. It's fascinating to see Cthulhu brought to life as a traditional armature puppet.
5 comments:
pretty cool, the final product looks very impressive, i want to see it animated!
Thanks for mentioning my work on your delicious blog :)
@ Ivo Wilson
The teaser pic in the linked post looks wonderful.
@ Richard Svensson
I don't think there's a project you've done that I haven't liked.
Stop motion animation?
They're playing our song!
I'm from the same generation, and I love the technique.
This is so cool. Creepy, and really different-looking from the other stuff I've seen lately. The twitchy, jerky motions of stop-motion are well-suited to eldritch horrors, IMO.
Wasn't there one of those movies-that-never-was that was going to use stop-motion for Lovecraftian monsters? The Cry of Cthulhu, if fallible memory serves.
I recall seeing in some magazine--perhaps Starlog--a few pictures of the models they planned to use.
Someday, if the stars are right, someone will finally do this sort of thing right--Call of Cthulhu was very good, but I guess I mean color, no matter the time period, with the sort of vision that Lovecraft (or at least his modern fans) would approve of.
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