“Sixth” is a hard word to say.

And no. I couldn’t come up with a single idea for today. Or rather, I couldn’t come up with a single other idea. “Six geese a-laying” took on a filthy and ridiculous concept in my mind, and there was no shaking it. The central question of whether it’s three pairs of geese going at it, or some massive goose orgy, has not been resolved. Nor should it. I think it’s up to each person in this world to decide for themselves whether six geese a-laying are really two geese a-laying next to two other pairs of geese also a-laying, or if it’s six geese a-gettin’-their-freak-on.

If you’ve never thought of that before, you’ll certainly never be able not to think of it again. You’re welcome. A belated Xmas gift to you.

Tomorrow: Swans. Maybe I should just go see the new Aronofsky seven times.

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I knew when I came up with the concept that this was going to be a little later posting than I’d hoped.

Yeah, this is one of those “It takes eight hours to shoot four minutes” videos. I’m not entirely happy with the sound, to be honest, but I hit a point where I just couldn’t work on it any longer.

Also possibly the most expensive episode of Jigsaw ever, as I had to buy $50 in D&D stuff. Had to, he said as if he didn’t relish the excuse to finally pick up the Red Box.

Just so you know, all four of them had actual characters generated with a combination of 4E player manuals. Most of the dice rolls are authentic as of writing the episode (earlier this afternoon). I decided not to knock Regibor prone because I didn’t want two prone minis on the game map; I just wanted Kranium’s fallen cleric on the ground, so I fudged the Hulking Zombie’s power. Like any good DM who wants to have a more poetic outcome.

And yes, I am contemplating doing an entire series of “Jigsaw plays D&D”, except I’d probably use Gamma World instead, because I just don’t have that many miniatures, and I’d much rather purchase weird mutants and robots than wizards and trolls. I mean, it’s a pretty slim margin there, but this shit’s expensive, yo.

Yes, this may be the most geeky I’ve ever been. Here, at least.

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This thought struck me in the car on the way out to my mom’s house on Xmas morning. I was cackling enough at the concept of four-legged dove turtles and their hideous, hideous cry that I figured I should share. Decided to push a bit more towards the horror-comedy, at least in concept.

And then I didn’t get started on the episode until almost 1am, so I’m too tired to have any idea whether it’s funny or not. I think it might just be disturbing. But I’m okay with that.

Anybody who draws the monstrous bird-phibians wins some sort of prize.

It’s a good thing I’ve got very little to do tomorrow. Gotta come up with something for French Hens. No idea what I’m going to do for Calling Birds. Or Colly Birds. Whatever the four birds are, I don’t know what that sketch is yet, either. Text me your ideas. I’ll probably not use them. But they make me giggle.

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You know what I forgot to do this morning?

Yeah. Post the video to this blog. Not that the blog is terribly active, but I do hate it when I’m not thorough.

I mean, it auto-posted, but the auto-post doesn’t work great, and this is where the commentary track posts should go, so I really should upload them by hand.

Anyway. Yes. I decided to scrap season four continuity entirely and do a mini-season devoted to rough, mostly improvised sketches based on the 12 Days of Xmas.

It feels really nice to get back to “Whatever makes me laugh today” episodes.

Yes, that sample is an actual Red Legged Partridge, which is likely the species referred to in the original carol. It was easier to sample that than to try and mimic it myself, as I started losing my voice after filming (I blame it on the dehumidity).

So it’s two a.m., Xmas Day is fading into memory, and I can’t really think of anything to say about 12×01. It’s the first of twelve. I’ll not be planning any of them apart from random thoughts while driving or in the shower (or sledding, as it’s snowing here, and I actually got a sled, and a decent shovel, but that’s another story). Also, this episode only took one take, and gives me the giggles in that really good way that all my favorite episodes give me the giggles.

Making Kranium drunk was actually inspired by listening to the radio show Milton and Kranium hosted right before Xmas in, what, 2007? Kranium smelled a bit like Santa that night, too.

I’m writing this while I’m waiting for 12×02 to render. That’ll be up sometime in the morning. It’s a little less sweet, so you might not want to be snuggling while watching it. Or maybe that’ll help. I can’t really tell anymore.

Merry Xmas, all. More soon.

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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.

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