Funny how you spend a week building a new set, blowing off friends and family, so to be able to film an Xmas special that resides firmly in the continuity of the upcoming season, only to have two feet of snow drop on you and change everything. For the better, I think.
2009 has been a rough year for pretty much everybody. I like to think there’s a lot of good in there with the bad, so that you get an interesting mixture of joy and melancholy as the overall theme of the year. This carol may have been on my mind for just that reason. Celebratory and sad, almost spooky. I couldn’t add anything to that, so I just had Lump, Frank & Regibor sing the thing.
Snow is hard to film. This is common knowledge. What people don’t talk about is how it’s even harder to record. Falling snow has this sound. A sound that apparently doesn’t like microphones, at least not the cheap-o ones in the Jigsaw bag of tricks. That was the biggest difficulty with this episode. One I hope I overcame.
Jigsaw Season Four is now completely plotted and outlined. And due to the plan of placing this year’s Xmas special somewhere in-between episodes 403 & 404, the new set is completely built. All I need to do now is write the jokes. And build two puppets. And put together a shooting schedule that will account for all of the, ahem, temporal necessities of the story. Oh, and audition puppeteers, because this season just ain’t happening without a second set of hands. But that’s it. I mean, apart from all of the other stuff I have to do.
Happy holidays, everybody. Hope that twenty ten treats you a lot better.
One of the main things keeping me from shooting and posting quick, short Jigsaw videos in the interim between Seasons π and 4 was, I am ashamed to admit, the purchase of my new computer. See, the main Jigsaw set is, in fact, my desk, as hard as that may be to believe.
My desk. My set. My life.
The Jigsaw monitor is my computer, or was; with the purchase of a new, larger iMac, the facing panel I constructed for the old machine is too small to be of any use.
Eetsa too SMALL, you see?
So pretty much the thing keeping new episodes from happening was the lack of a piece of spray-painted foamcore with holes cut in it.
An over-simplification, perhaps. But more embarrassingly true than you might think. Still, this strange hindrance got me to focus on the show a bit outside the realm of structured improv it was sliding into, and also made me remember my mission statement for the show, which I’ve talked about in bars but have yet to overtly state here.
For me, Jigsaw is a constant challenge to myself. With every season, if not every episode, I push myself to try something new, to explore new techniques, to learn new skills. Jigsaw is the place where I can push the boundaries of my comfort zone, secure in the knowledge that even if the end product isn’t as entertaining as I would hope, it’s free, so I can ignore any complaints I might get at least I have done something new, with the hope of becoming a better craftsman.
I could go through the past episodes trying to list everything I was hoping to accomplish, but I think we’d all be bored to tears. Instead, I’ll just let you know ahead of time the focus of Season Four: Writing. Over the course of the show, the content has been getting more and more improvised. Rough outlines taped to a tripod and revised over the course of shooting. It was fine, although it makes my friends in production grind their teeth a bit.
I finally broke the story for Season Four, and it is abundantly clear that this method won’t work. So it’s time to challenge myself in a new way. I’ll have to write the entire season before I shoot a single frame of footage. Twenty episodes, three to five minutes a piece, four arcs, one giant story. Pretty much the equivalent of four half-hour episodes.
Two hours of content. That I want to have completely written in time to start shooting in January. Which, my calendar informs me, is less than a month away. Oh, and if I want to start posting content in January, I’ll need to have most of the shooting done, because the interaction between the four mini-arcs requires me to film episode 401 at the same time as episodes 415 and 419, and 416-418 have to happen before then, and probably 417 and 408 need to be shot concurrently, and…
Well, you can see it’s a big mess. Oh, and I need to build at least two new puppets before I can start filming. Maybe three.
But you’ll be happy to hear the new monitor face is just about done.
Needs glue. And ink. And battle-damage.
With that in mind, I’ll be shooting a video before Xmas. A very short one. Doing triple duty as an apology for downtime, teaser for s.4, and holiday thing. Of course, it would be unprofessional of me to admit that I just got that idea as I was writing this. So I’ll pretend instead that the idea came to me in the shower earlier. Sounds way more writerly.
As I start banging my head against scripts, I will also be forcing myself to add content to this space (“writing begets writing” and all that). I will also likely be posting build videos for the new puppets, so all my new friends in puppetland can look at my process and realize I’m way more clueless than they thought. Hi, puppetfriends.
Okay. That’s a bit of prelude, and I’m out of time. Must run to the wine shop before work, as I’m cooking a chicken later. I will not be blogging about the chicken.
