Rounding off the edges...

You will always find us in the kitchen at parties... now it's finished!

 New episodes voices recorded, and the quality was improving. It was time to fix some issues that had been bothering me. I was really happy with the set of the apartment, but I wanted to improve parts of it to polish off some rough corners. The main concern for me was the quality of the kitchen tiles. For speed I had printed out grey squares on A3 paper and covered them with sticky back plastic to add a shine. In my head the idea was great, but in reality, it was rather poor!

Much easier than REAL tiling!

DIY Puppets Style

I hadn't got enough paper or plastic to cover everything I wanted to and the shiny surface didn't look very nice on camera in the end. I needed something simple and practical that was also lightweight and would give me the effect I was after. I remembered when I was at school we had small polystyrene squares that were used for making printing patterns. We would score the squares with a pencil and roll ink onto them.

I thought those squares would be great as kitchen tiles! It took me a lot of poking into corners of the internet but I eventually found a company that could supply them for me. When they arrived I set to tearing the old plastic off and gluing the new tiles on. It looked great, and it wasn't anywhere near as reflective as the old plastic. I also managed to cover more of the wall to give me a little extra depth to film with.

Hanging the pics in the hallway, well done JP.

For the hallway, as seen in the first episode, there are two empty picture frames. We had always planned to put relevant images in these as they became apparent. One was filled with a picture of JP with his pet brick and the other is a rock n roll photo of Kevin Ellis as his was the first puppet video I finished.

While I was in the garage mending the kitchen set I found some more sheets of plywood. It reminded me of the tongue and groove in my house. I thought if I drew lines on it with a fat black marker it could work as a shed. In the Space episode there is mention of a shed for John and we had recorded a skit of John performing 'Duelling Banjos'.

I set to work building a shed set for his puppet to live in. I had some small tools hanging around that were the perfect size along with a children's Builders hat and spanner set. Once I had knocked some nails in to hang them up, the shed set really came to life! With a hanging string sign to complete the look, John's Shed was also finished. 

John, proudly at home in his shed!