Loving it when a Plan Comes Together...

With the 'flat' scenery hanging from the ceiling in my garage and some incidental outdoor footage shot, I was learning a hard lesson. When I was reading the scripts, the way I wanted to shoot each scene was clear in my head,

Contemplating our next move... get a pencil.

which is fair enough, but the brain doesn't always take into consideration the restrictions of the space and the set build. Sometimes I was behind the camera setting up the angle and sometimes I was in front performing puppets. With the best will in the world I couldn't do everything and expect it to magically look like it did in my head. I needed to make notes.

We had learned that too many puppets on screen at once put too much strain on the width and depth of the scenery. To put it simply; the more puppets to fit on screen, the wider the shot needs to be. That means the walls of the scenery need to be deeper to accommodate the shot and not show the room behind the set boards. I didn't have the room for the scenery to be bigger. We needed to stop and think.

Two Characters is best for our set size. And cake, obviously.

I at last began to see the importance of story boarding. Sitting down with the scripts to the second episode ,with a pencil, I drew (in a square that would represent the screen frame) exactly what I wanted to fit on screen and what angle to shoot from. The sketches became my way of explaining to Martin what I felt I wanted to achieve. He could see what I was planning and I could explain it better.
We could now accurately plan out shot sequences, in a much more efficient way. The drawings also allowed me to figure out what would work and what wouldn't before even setting up the camera. Story boarding  allowed me to edit and cut the scene on paper before we started shooting. It was a real time saver. I showed Martin the plans and then explained that I liked the way sit com editing jumps from person to person speaking. It breaks up the conversation,

Scribblings of a mad man, although I calmed down to shoot it.

and it stops the footage being a continuous, single, front facing shot. This trick allowed much more close ups of the speaking puppets, (what we wanted)  and it would make the whole process much easier. We could set up the required shot of one puppet speaking all their lines for the whole scene. Do the same with the character they were talking to, and cut between them to look like it was all done live in a continuous take.

Eat your heart out Lucas Film.

It would be constructed 'in the edit'. Following my drawings we set the shots up and got through the scenes with startling efficiency. Martin could see the shot I was after and he would know the angle I wanted when I was in front of the camera performing the puppets. Sketching the episodes out also gave me the chance to plan out the green screen dream sequences. Between the two of us we could now both play Director, as the other one performed and vice versa.  Planning all the episodes out on storyboards also brought home another thought. It made me realise that I had an awful  lot of props to make before we began shooting the other episodes!!!

On set with the Martin Booze Puppet, and real Martin of course!