Heading in the right direction.

Heading in the right direction...

Booze Bro Band, mostly 'armless

With a room full of disembodied heads, I felt it was time to finish the job with bodies and arms. This was actually more fun than I thought it would be. With JP's dish cloth shirt and the two front men in their black and white suits, all was going well. Martin had given me his pale blue, long sleeve gigging shirt that had finally given up the fight after 10 years. We felt his was the best way to allow it to live on. John has grey/black motor bike t-shirts, so he was easy as well. I had an old 70's style shirt that I like to wear that was sacrificed for the cause of my puppet and another subtle tea towel would be Mike's wardrobe of choice.

I air dry my dishes now, just so JP isn't naked.

After a year of sketching, gluing and sewing, we were all dressed to impress and ready to rock. Then it struck me. Instruments. My merry band of brothers was gonna look pretty silly miming with no guitars.

It sounds really daft at this point, but I hadn't considered that they would need equipment. I did the only logical thing I could think of. I cried. I thought I could start filming, but props would also need to be built. I did the second thing I could think of. I went toy shopping.
I found a saxophone toy on Ebay that was the right scale, but too long. I cut it down and re-assembled it with surprisingly good results after a spray up. I found a mouth organ from a genuine Blues Brothers disguise kit. I also found a toddlers drum kit which with a little modification was perfect.

John, unusually; not with beer

Axes: ready to grind...

Guitars on the other hand, were not coming up at the right size. I ended up scaling photos of the exact guitars until I was happy with the size, printing the pics out, and using the pictures as templates to cut them out of balsa wood. After a few weeks, we were tooled up with guitars, mics, drums and brass. It was show time!

Rockin in the free world. Well, my kitchen at least...

Lookin For a Fox - and a new arm!

I had earmarked a couple of tracks from a gig we did at the Black Swan rooms in North Walsham and one from a performance at the California Tavern in Hemsby. I was planning on doing all the puppeteering, filming and editing myself to see what the results would be like. I would like to say, it came as quite a shock at how difficult it is to hold your arm above your head with a puppet for anything over 2-3 minutes. I have even more respect for Jim Henson, Frank Oz and crew at this point, it was agony. I shot a few different angles and close ups in front of a red curtain backdrop I found on Ebay. Getting the boys to sing to our version of the Clarence Carter track, Lookin' For  A Fox was great fun, and the results were better than I could have hoped for

Kevin 'Helluvahorn' Ellis: Legend in everyone's Lifetime.

The second attempt was a track we had recorded at the Black Swan Rooms with our original Sax player Kev on vocals.

Run around Sue was a favourite of ours when we played with Kev, and he always performed it brilliantly. I tried making more of a set for this, with a mind to getting it to look like an old bar. I would also be experimenting with green screen so I could have better performances from multiple band members. It took a lot longer than I anticipated, but again, watching the rough footage back, it was actually not that bad.
Once I had edited both tracks together, it became apparent that one person per puppet was a must. Working two puppets, one on each hand, always left one character looking slightly lifeless while you concentrate on the other. It's also nice to have them strumming the guitars instead of just bopping around with them. It had it's merits but working on my own was not really an option anymore, I wanted better results.

Martin came over one night to see how I was getting on. Keeping this to ourselves was becoming quite a task, as the footage was making us laugh. He asked me what was next, as I had shot two music videos - what else was I going to do? We decided to make one more music film. Due to the time of year, we shot a Christmas song with audio from our version of the Mud classic Lonely This Christmas we had taken at a gig in the Poachers Pocket, Walcott the year before.

A bit too much Christmas Booze. Here's Mud in your eye!

With Martin performing puppets with me, there was better movement from the characters on screen, and it all felt bait more lively. We found because the audio we were using was taken from live gigs, at the end of the songs either Mark or Chris (or both) would make some silly remark to the audience - a large part of our act as the Booze Brothers Band. The lines were great to get the puppets to lip sync along with, it really brought the puppet characters to life.

Martin had an idea. What if we were to string the music videos together with one liner gags? Write stupid little jokes to get the puppets to speak to each other as a preface to the songs? This seemed like a really good idea as the music videos themselves may have limited appeal for us to keep making alone. Having taken over a year to build the puppets, discarding them once we had shot three 2 minute songs, seemed like a huge waste. We decided not to reveal the look of the puppets to the band yet, but find a way of getting spoken words recorded to use later for our comic interludes. I chose to pretend the original fluffy monsters were the puppets we had decided to made the videos with, and took the idea to the band. Everyone agreed it would be a fun joke and they would record their lines for us to mime over at a later date. I had been traveling around visiting the band individually as I was filming interviews for a third Booze Brothers Band home dvd.

The Not Hotly anticipated first Movie.

We have 2 documentary films we created over the last 14 years, just to keep for us to look back on, because remembering it all is getting harder due to the alcohol intake. When I finished interviewing Mike and Chris, Martin got them to record a few funny lines he had written and we went on our way.