The Booze Brothers Band of Puppets

Me and Martin - Not Helping much.

Over a cup of tea (the way all creative processes work best) Martin and I threw ideas around for scripts to make these small 3-4 minute episodes work. We scribbled down wacky stuff, old silly gags and not much else. We ended up putting each other off.


Our idea was to get a small decent joke, deliver it in the best way possible and then end with a full song video. This would give us our time quota. We read that anything on the internet longer than 4 - 6 mins, people tend to switch off (unless it's super-awesome, which was a bit of a stretch for your first work!). We wanted the first episode to introduce everyone's character, to show off the puppets. As there where so many, we felt a song at the start with opening credits seemed the simplest and quickest means to get this to work. But that meant we couldn't end on a song as well. Two would make it all too long. The music videos we had shot so far, seemed to stand fine as they were. So perhaps the songs should be separate from the episodes? That would mean writing more dialogue to perform, making our task more difficult. It was time to split up. Martin suggested writing ideas down for episodes and then swapping notes and working on each others material. We could repeat this process until we had something we both liked. I really went for this idea as I could leave him to it, and I could get on with building the sets. I would let him worry about the scripts!

A Flat wall... Literally

Not very Blues, but it's home!

We decided that we would present the band as all living together in a flat in Norfolk (like the 1960's Monkeys TV show) It would be a simple apartment that would utillise a hallway, a front room and a kitchen. We felt all house bound activity could be done in this format, to keep the sets to a minimum. We also chose to add a Pub setting, giving us another area to populate with the band. With three possible locations (Front room, Kitchen, Pub) we could split the puppets up and accommodate several small stories and jokes per episode. I somehow had to make this all work in my small single garage, and still have room to set up lights and a camera to film the action. It would be a squeeze! Armed with some ply board, a few left over tins of paint and wall paper, I constructed two double sided boards that could be hung from the ceiling and spun around. One side would construct the lounge/sitting room the other the hallway and kitchen. Due to the height of the puppets I wouldn't need to worry about ceilings or floors. I hoped tables, pictures and props would disguise any gaps or corners.

The Boar & Hare Pub, great location for beers.

Home Sweet Foam!

The only picture I knew I wanted to put on the walls was a few fake Gold discs and a copy of the cover of Kevin Ellis' Bands first record: Red Hot and Blue. Because it's awesome. With that finished, I added a few horse brasses to the white painted walls of my garage and ta-dah, I had a pub interior. Sorted. It was time to report back to Martin and see if he had written all the scripts!

The first drafts of scripts we had, were almost done. Martin had taken the many scraps and snippets of ideas and crafted 3 complete 3min (ish) episodes. Over the course of a week we swapped the work between us, editing the others writing and handing it back again. Most of the gags and laughs came from Martins' head, I ended up tweaking the dialogue to fit how I saw the video would play out. We had an introductory episode, featuring everyone in the band. Then two other episodes that introduced John as a tutor figure and another on James simply wanting a pet. It was time to call in the guys and record the audio!!

At Home with the Booze Brothers Band Puppets!