A good friend and director buddy of mine Bernhard Pucher of Iron Box Films asked me to do some SFX for a music video he was directing.

I met Bernhard years ago through the website – Shooting People and have remained good friends and supplied props and some SFX work on some of his music videos and short films over the years.

The video was for a Maceo Plex song called ‘Vibe your love’

Bernhard had the idea that he wanted a girl to form/emerge out of a growing puddle of black liquid and asked me to come up with something.

I had recently watched a favourite film of mine – Videodrome by David Cronenberg and it gave me the idea to use a sort of flexible material trick, similar to the tv effect in the film.

I tried out a few materials and found that a latex glove material gave the best results for stretching far whilst still retaining a good ‘shape’. Gloves were obviously too small for what we wanted so I cast large sheets of latex by pouring liquid latex onto large sheets of Perspex. When set it gave me very large, thin sheets that I could be attach to the back of holes cut in the frames.

I then tried out a few camera tests to see how it would look.

After showing B the footage, he liked it so I went about making frames representing the walls of the set with the appropriate sized holes in it for pushing arms/legs through it.

I made multiple frames so we could get some different shots then when ready Bernhard and his team came down to the glamorous location of ‘my cold workshop in Wembley’ to shoot the footage.

We filmed it all horizontally so that the black liquid (which was actually gloss black paint) would not run away and give the weird pooling effect Bernhard was after.

I was the lucky volunteer who laid down underneath the rig and pushed my hand/arm/face through to get the cool footage you see in the video @2:12

Me doing my best ‘blob’ impression

The growing puddle effect was made by attaching a syringe to a hole in the set-board then squeezing the black liquid through. When flipped on its side it looked like the puddle was growing on the wall.

The second part of the shoot was on a full size set. Here we used a large-scale version of the latex vertically so the two actors could interact with each other through the latex.