Adding the Extras in there Lads...

Once we had the raw footage cleaned up, edited together and the audio dubbed over, we had half the job finished. I began to make the opening and closing credit screens to top and tail the episodes. I played with several ideas for this, but settled on an edited version of our original Booze Brothers Band logo.

Our Series Logo, with very little extra thought!

I wanted to do a whole 'opening' credits sequence with clips to introduce everyone, but it would have made it far too long. I liked the simplicity of the logo and edited that into the shorts along with all the fades between scene transitions. Martin then pointed out it still didn't quite feel finished. We needed to employ a trick many sit-coms do, a scene setting image to come up that gives a sense of place. We decided there had to be an picture of the outside of the flat and of the exterior of the pub to give a some kind of context.

Where it all happens apparently

Would you go here after dark? I wouldn't...

The Boar & Hare Pub. Seriously, don't ask.

We would also need a simple tune to repeat over these screens as intro setting music  'stingers'. Martin went off to make the music, I set about sorting the exterior imagery.

Martin did a great job of recording disjointed bits of music from our set list on his keyboard: A lilting few bars of The Peter Gunn Theme, along with a purposely wobbly riff of Shake your Tail Feather to name two. You can hear them in the first episode here.

I had a photograph of the outside of my old apartment building in Norwich. I reverse flipped it over and left it at that, I didn't see the need to be too specific about the location of the flat. I was hoping people would just accept it!

I just darkened the same photo for the evening shot and added a few window lights. Along with this I had a similar photo of the pub around the corner from me: The Nelson, on Nelson Street (believe it or not!) in Norwich.

I added our own joke name to the pub building and reversed that image as well. (The Boar & Hare. Long story, and a terrible in-joke with the band... maybe an explanation for another day!)

These would be our scene setting images, giving us a sense of place and Martins tunes fitted brilliantly over the top.

Once these were inserted into the episodes they made it all feel and look much more like a completed project.

They also had the added bonus of padding extra seconds to the length of the shorter episodes. After one last round of footage editing and cutting, we were finished. It was time to hit internet!

But before we uploaded it all to our Youtube channel we wanted to show the band the finished results of our collective efforts.

Do I hear stingers Martin?! No, it's the pizza cutter rattling...

 

 

As luck would have it, we were gigging back at The Black Swan Rooms in North Walsham - the room we first viewed the original puppet film pitch in. We would have the big telly on again while we set up and the band could watch the episodes while we plugged in and sound checked. As we were tuning up with one eye on the screen, people started wandering in, and became quite fascinated with the big TV. Olly the owner of The Black Swan suggested having the dvd playing, muted, on rotation while we gigged that night. Why not we thought, it can't hurt! As the episodes were playing during our first set that night, being viewed by the crowd, they all seemed to love it. In the half time interval, several people came up to us and said how 'like' the band the puppets were and when could they see them online. We started to think, as a project, it was going to be alright after all!  

Black Swan Gig, A small step for Booze, a big step for foam.