jonesy :: 20 December, 2009 10.29am
filed under: behind the scenes, videos :: ::
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.
I’d just about forgotten about it. Back in 2007, old pal Jay Leibowitz called me with a proposition. Six months of plotting, writing, contract negotiations and headaches later, I was in Jay’s living room making five original episodes of Jigsaw for AT&T’s Tech Channel. Jay’s buddy Justin Newman did triple duty on camera/lights/sound, Jay directed, edited, acted as second puppeteer, and helped make the song at the end of the final episode. All I had to worry about was performing for the three days of shooting (well, there was also the last-minute addition of opening credits that had me in my new apartment in Charlottesville a day after moving unloading boxes, filming, with my computer set up in the middle of the bedroom floor, stealing the neighbor’s WiFi long enough to upload the massive files… but you know, that’s how it goes).
I haven’t seen these episodes for a while (I really should get Jay to burn me a copy one of these days). It’s weird, because at the time, the production values were so far above anything I’d produced — this is in-between seasons 2 and 3, mind you. It still looks a bit slicker than the current stuff. I’m not totally sold on the writing, though, at least the first episode; I spent a long time on these scripts, long enough that I may have lost some of the spontaneity that comes from when I just wing it. Or it could just be that I’m looking back at stuff I made a year and a half ago. I’ve doubled the number of episodes since then. Naturally I’ll be a bit better at it than I was.
Enough babbling. I got the email today that AT&T were finally going to go live with the episodes. Might as well, seeing as how they paid us for them and everything. Episode 1 is up today, the rest should be up over the next few weeks.
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YES.
The challenge was to create a new mini-episode of Jigsaw every weekday in the month of February. Today is the final day.
Monday through Friday. 5 episodes a week. 20 episodes total.
Not only did I succeed, but I managed to get all but one of them up before the end of normal East Coast business hours. Only two of them were posted after 2pm EST. And both of those were lengthy renders.
Wish list for season 4?
- MORE RAM. Or perhaps a new computer altogether.
- A better lighting kit. So the lamp doesn’t surge halfway through a take, exposing camera tricks.
- Mic that actually feeds into the computer, for voice over work that doesn’t sound crappy. This may require item 1b.
Comments? Thoughts? What would you like to see in the next season (keeping in mind that I have no idea when that season will be, apart from “at least three months from now”)?
jonesy :: 26 February, 2009 9.13am
filed under: videos :: drunk, kranium, milton, pen ::
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I found this pen in the first couple days of February, and brought it home, knowing that if I got stuck for subject matter for season π, I could always do something with it. I mean, it really does say “Economic Stimulus Payment” on it, with the website of the IRS. Completely boggles my mind.
After a month, I still hadn’t used it. Today would have to be the day. But of course, I also hadn’t been able to figure out a punchline for it. So it dawned on me last night that the punch line could be the delivery. And so, this episode.
Sorry, awesome amazing person who sent me fan mail this morning talking about how much your kid loves the show; I hope you don’t mind a little drunken humor.
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I had the basic idea for this last night, but was too tired to film it. Then I woke up with more of the idea finished, but realized I had to clean my desk in order to film it. Which was sort of a good thing, because the desk was an unusable mess.
File this under “more ideas for weird inventions I may come back to if I ever develop a longer, big-budget Jigsaw for any reason.” If nothing else, this Jigsaw π experiment has helped flesh out the show bible a bit.
One of these days I really should write the show bible.
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