So, let me tell you a little story.

When I was plotting out season four, I knew that, no matter the filming schedule, there was a high likelihood that episode 405 would be due around the time of  a big trip (in this case, my long-standing engagement to go to Edinburgh Fringe for the entire month of August). I knew in terms of structure, I wanted Milton to do the episode, and that it should be somewhat shoddy-feeling; good, but not too good. Originally I was thinking it’d be a song, but then I got this idea.

The idea being that, as I was planning to be at the Fringe for a month, that I’d like to have some tiny, portable show that I could easily perform on the street in my free time. I started thinking about toy theaters, and how neat they were. And this one title kept going through my head – “Goldilocks and the Three Kraken.”

The first problem I ran into was with the script. I had no idea what the structure would be; I’ve been doing Jigsaw so long, I’m sort of used to two-handers, quick scenes of banter. This, on the other hand, is a long story with a single narrator. Actual narration and everything. And I had the problem of what to do with all those Krakenses. So while the first four episodes of the season were written, filmed, and posted a week early, I didn’t have the script for 405 finished until three days ago.

Which leads us to the second problem: illustrations. Toy Theater requires a ton of little drawings. Each time a character picks up a new prop, you either need a new drawing of the character with the prop, or a drawing of the prop. And the drawings need to be in a certain scale, so they all match each other. And you want a degree of consistency, so the characters all look like they’re in the same world. And I decided that, all things considered, all of this would be easier if I did everything in Illustrator.

A program I hadn’t used since, oh, 2003 maybe.

Eventually, after re-teaching myself how to use the program (and getting used to drawing with the Wacom tablet, which is, after all, what I bought it for), I ended up with 12 pages of little drawings of various weird characters. Which I then had to color. And print out. And print reverse copies of. And cut out. And glue together. And then, THEN, figure out how to operate. (I’d show you the sheet, but for some reason WordPress isn’t accepting image uploads, and I just DON’T HAVE TIME to figure it out right now.)

So now we’re up to Thursday afternoon. The episode is already twelve hours later than I wanted. I’ve spent two weeks solid working on it. Also, I’m supposed to be packing for Scotland. So yes, yesterday’s filming didn’t go as expected. The words “good enough” were uttered quite a bit, as were the words “Oh COME ON” and “DAMMIT DAMMIT DAMMIT” and “FUCK I SUCK”. By six I had all the footage in the can, having gone through about ninety minutes of tape (at one point during filming I rewound the tape twenty minutes because not one second of it was even worth looking at later). Having spent 30 of the past 35 hours doing nothing but work on the episode, I decided it would have to be a day late, because nothing I did at that point would be worth showing. I went to bed early.

This morning came the arduous task of trying to cut the episode into a decent length without losing any content (because to lose content would mean reshoots, and again, just no time). I managed to trim about a minute of weird pauses out of the performance, and added the little black bits to try and separate scenes a bit better. Then I put on the headphones and knocked out a Milton voiceover track.

I hate ADR. Trying to sync voice to a specific action is really annoying. Made more annoying by the fact that, during filming, I hadn’t had time to memorize the script, so I was constantly trying to watch the monitor, grab the puppets I needed, and read the lines, way more frantic than my normal shooting (something of an accomplishment). So there were weird rhythms and odd bounces and spots where the narration just don’t sync and can’t possibly do so. Firmly in “Just get it done” mode, I did as well as I could, and moved on.

Originally, the Milton/Kranium scene at the end was to be filmed. Once I had the toy theater show finished, I realized both a) that it was kind of nice to have just that, and b) filming a whole new scene would take way longer than I had time for. So I tried it as an audio track over the credits. For the most part, I think it works. Which is encouraging, considering one of the upcoming Jigsaw projects I’m contemplating. (teaser!)

In the end, I don’t what I think about this one. It’s better than I thought it was going to be yesterday evening, that’s for sure. I’m not sure it’s possible to do on the street in Edinburgh. I’ll take some new sheets and the updated script and see what I can put together. If it turns out to work, I’ll probably assemble all of the materials into a single pdf that people can download and construct. Even if it doesn’t work, I’ll probably do that. Why the hell not?

So to sum up:

-never try anything new
-especially if you’re supposed to leave for a different country soon
-and if you haven’t used the computer program you need in a really long time
-and you don’t even know how to do what you’re doing
-unless you plan on getting lucky and having it be kinda good anyway.

Oh, by the way, you can now buy Lump T-shirts. Right now, they’re selling at zero mark-up. So, you know, get one. Except you, Bill. I have a proposal for you that could put you in free Lump shirts for some time. We’ll talk when I get back.

See you after Scotland.

That fez was a gift from Gil Hova, like 12 years ago. You can’t tell, but it’s about to fall apart. Little, horrible bits of dry-rotted red felt were cascading out of the thing every time I bounced, getting in my eyes and turning my sweaty forehead into a gritty, bloody mess. I should probably toss it out. But it’s hard to throw away a fez.

What should I say about this episode? A lot of post production with the sound. A lot of time spent wiggling and jiggling the sounds. In the end, I’m not terribly happy with them, but you hit a point where you have to throw up your hands and say “Good enough.” Initially, I wanted Kranium to be building something, but the ratcheting noises I was doing just didn’t look right. (Noises didn’t look right? Yes. That’s what I said.) I settled on having him writing, which is not a foley I wish upon anyone with as spare and cheap a set-up as I have. As for Milton’s legs… let’s just try to retcon those out of our minds when I do finally manage a sound effect I truly like.

This episode also represents the last one of the pre-written scripts. 405 is conceptually finished, but the actual words are still… fluid? Is fluid a nice way of saying “I haven’t finished writing it yet”?  Fluid will have to do. I must admit, 405 is kicking me up and down the road with big, spiky boots. Largely because it’s a completely different kind of writing than I’m used to. Really, it’s the kind of thing I used to write decades ago, but those brainmeats are atrophied from disuse.

But anyway. Back to 404.

This was my favorite thing about making this episode:

I did first check to see if I could find an image in Google Image Search of a bear licking a kitten. But drawing it seemed somehow more betterer. And that’s when I remembered I owned a Wacom tablet. Sure, I use it exclusively rather than my crapped-out mouse. I just haven’t ever drawn anything with it before. Wasn’t absolutely sure where to start. Eventually, I’ll get to know Illustrator and do these drawings properly. For now, I just scribbled this in Photoshop in about five minutes (including color). It makes me giggle every time.

Speaking of my crapped-out mouse… okay. Back in episode 402, I discovered I had a need to cue up multiple video clips, one to start the episode with Milton watching it, one to be the weird gameshow countdown clock (that, okay, I didn’t need, because I’m not sure the joke actually works at all, although that is more the fault of my craptastic SFX job than the script, but anyhow I certainly couldn’t have predicted that as I was filming). Enter the wireless Logitech mouse.

This mouse has been with me for quite some time, and the rechargeable battery on it was about dead, meaning I’d have to charge it every four hours or so, which is no way to compute. The battery death led to the Wacom purchase eventually, and since then the mouse usually sits in its charging cradle for the rare occasion that I need to use a mouse for something (you can often see the mouse in the background of episodes shot in the main lab). Last season, I used it once to press play on a video clip before filming. For episode 402, I remembered that I could completely remap all of the buttons to different functions.

So I opened up VLC and made a playlist of the two videos I needed for the shoot. I remapped the left and right mouse buttons to flip back and forth between playlist items, and mapped the middle button to pause and play. I taped the mouse to the floor by my foot. So, while filming, I was able to start and stop the video playback with my toe, and skip to the track I needed, all without having to get up.

Except I would have to get up occasionally, if I let the last video finish playing, because then VLC would revert to neutral and I’d have to open up the videos again and resize the window to fit the lab monitor cut-out. But it did save a bunch of work, and meant I could cue up multiple videos during filming. Even if the edit meant I only actually needed one up at a time.

Sigh.

BUT I WAS TALKING ABOUT 404.

This script started out a lot longer, if you can believe it. I’m not used to having these characters have heavy moments. Kranium’s monologue is very much the thing that runs on repeat inside my head whenever I’m not creating things. Maybe minus the alien invasions. The sentiment is real, at any rate. It also touches upon my thoughts on the value of entertainment. It’s hard, sometimes, to justify wiggling dolls in the air in front of a video camera when the world is so filled with horrible things. I could be feeding the hungry, or cleaning oil off of pelicans, or building homes with Habitat, or protesting mountaintop removal in the coal industry. But frankly, I’m better at wiggling dolls in the air than I am at any of those things. And I may not have a huge audience, but presumably those of you watching this (many of whom ARE feeding the hungry, saving wildlife, building things, preserving things, protesting things) find some value in what I do. A five-minute respite from the heaviness and importance of the world and the work we do in it. Even if it’s just five silly minutes about a robot shouting a lot, if it makes someone’s day easier to handle, I have to believe that’s worth the time and effort I’m putting into it.

So. On to 405, where Milton will put on a puppet show of his own. It should be up at the normal time. Provided I can get it built. And filmed. Before then. Yikes.

If it turns out well, I’ll be taking Milton’s puppet show to Scotland with me. More on that next week.

My video host, blip.tv, have some really cool features for their users. One thing you can do is look at viewership stats second by second, to see where people tend to stop watching, or to see what bit people, upon rewatching, skip to. And sometime last year, I went through the videos and collected a rough list of “Things That Seem To Hurt Ratings.” The list included:

-songs
-long explanations of stuff
-title cards
-Milton shouting

So as you can see, I’m working my way through the list and putting everything in there.

This was a fun episode in terms of exploring some new camera set-ups, trying to use a few basic set pieces and create multiple spaces out of them. It wasn’t my initial thought going into season four, but it seems that this season I’m going to be trying to get away from my patented one-shot look. It’s been so long since I’ve thought in terms of multiple camera angles that I’m having to really think about how it all works. This is going to be more obvious in 404, where I needed to match turns and compose over the shoulder shots that didn’t distract and still have angles that allowed important action to be visible. You know, stuff filmmakers have to worry about. Anyway, it’s an interesting experiment.

One nice thing is, of course, I don’t have to try and get through three pages of dialogue without a mistake. I don’t know if my performances are getting better on the puppetry side of things yet, because I’m still getting used to the monitor. But by the end of the season, it’ll be interesting to look back and see if there has been any improvement.

My character voices are out of shape, though. That much is for true. They’re all slowly drifting back towards my voice, and it’s something I need to work on.

The other thing I really need is a double-jointed right arm. It can either be a transplant, or some bionic upgrade, but I’m finding with these weird camera angles that I’m not physically able to get all the movement I want out of both puppets. Yes, the answer would be to hire another puppeteer, and put the stage more than four feet off the ground. Sure. That would be the SMART way. But I’m too full of myself for that. Clearly.

And yes, I am strangely obsessed with Hell’s Kitchen. I hate the format, I hate the way reality shows twist all human interaction into a horrid middle school cafeteria incident, but Ramsay… there’s just something about Ramsay that I can’t deny. His passion for food and complete intolerance for incompetence is strangely comforting. Sometimes, when I can’t yell at all the idiots surrounding me for fear of social repercussions, it’s nice to let Gordon do it for me.

Let me just offer my sincere apologies to everyone who actually thought I was ending the series. There was a surprisingly large number there, judging by the comments across the internets.

Let me also thank Andrew over at PuppetVision Blog for his exceedingly warm and encouraging post welcoming back Jigsaw. He’s been a great supporter over the years, not to mention an amazing resource for new puppet work online and off. I’m thrilled that his hiatus has also come to an end.

Now. To the episode at hand. What should I talk about.

In my quest to push myself to do new and different things with every season of Jigsaw, I have made some alterations that you may notice, and some you may not. On the list of obvious things is the new secondary set; you saw it in 401, behind Lump, you see bits of it in the montage here, and will see it again in 403. It’s nice to have a monitor-free set to shoot against once in a while, both because I wanted to be able to have a standard secondary location, and also because it’s sometimes a pain to come up with stuff to put on the lab monitor.

Side note: why do all the new Apple products have to be so damn shiny? The old lab monitor, a c.2006 iMac, had a lovely matte finish to the screen, so when I was shooting, you got almost no reflection. Now it’s like I’ve put an obsidian mirror on set. It took me maybe two hours just to light the lab for Milton & Lump’s scene, because the screen was throwing things off. No grood. Anyway.

One thing you may not consciously notice but that I think will come across over time is that I’ve started using a bit more of a professional monitor technique while filming. Up until episode 401, I have only ever been able to see my performance live by squinting at the flip-out viewfinder on my camera. That meant a lot of rewinding and rewatching and resetting scenes, not to mention the fact that it was mirrored, so the thing I was barely watching didn’t match the final film. But recently I bought a little Toshiba portable DVD player that has a line in, and now I have a large screen that sits right in front of me and shows me what I’m doing. As any TV puppeteer will tell you, monitor work is tricky, because you have to train your brain to go right when you want to go left, or rather go right when your brain thinks going right means going left, or something. To get an idea, open up a webcam and flip the image so it’s showing you as you really are, rather than a mirror image. Now, try and comb your hair.

Yeah. That’s the trick.

Point being, you get a much better sense of your own performance watching a live feed. You also get a better sense of screen composition, so you can make the effort to balance the shot while you’re shooting (instead of my old method of watching the take afterwards, then trying to adjust from memory during the next take). At least, that’s the idea. It’s still a pretty new skillset, and I don’t pretend to be great at it yet. Hopefully, you’ll be able to see the end result in better puppetry and better overall look for the show. Or it’ll look basically the same, only it’ll take me less time to film. As a worst case scenario, the latter ain’t bad.

Oh, and to answer some questions you might have about the final sequence: no plans, about a day, gaff taped to the hood, twelve or so, the lost and found bin, melodica, yes, GarageBand, two, advert and chunkfive. If I missed an answer, leave the corresponding question in the comments.

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.