We need to go to the Pub!

The Local Pub gets a well needed make over

Out of the sets I had to build to film in, the one that was a touch 'throw away', ironically was the pub. It was only supposed to be a small filler location in the first episode, because we couldn't fit everyone into the flat at once. As Martin and I continued to write, the pub became a more popular place to add secondary story lines. Playing the pub games in Episode 2 was the most screen time we had spent in any one location up to that point.

Very cheap pub, and we don't mean the beer...

As we made our way through recording the next three installments, it became obvious that the set was going to need a drastic over haul. Newer set builds had started to show it up! 'John's Shed' had raised the bar somewhat and re-dressing the kitchen tiles only made the pub look more drab and lazy.

John's Shed, the place to be - but no Beers mate...

Martin wanted to have more scenes set in the local bar as well (seeing as it's where the actual band spent most of their time!) and I wanted to shoot a music video in there too at some point. It was decided, the Boar & Hare would have a makeover. I wanted to make it nice and light so the puppets would stand out. It would need to be a bland and possibly an unpopular, gastro-theme type pub fit out. Perhaps it could spark up debate within a future episode?!

Gastro-tastic wallpaper!

While I was out having a pint and shopping in Norwich, I came across a great piece of cheap fabric in a haberdashery that would make a great wall covering. It was a pale beige with slightly darker stripes.

If only real decorating was this simple!

I sketched out what walls I would need for filming and bought some MDF panels along with a piece of frame edging to use as a dado rail. I re-printed out the old  'Roast Dinner' and 'Quiz Night' posters. These I mounted in cheap supermarket picture frames so they would look like permanent fixtures.
I also decided to add our very own brand of that well known English Pub snack, The Pork Scratching! Seeing as the pub is called the Boar & Hare, I made them Boar Scratchings - it seemed only fitting.

It's a good start, Pork Scratching anyone?!

It's not quite finished yet. I think I may add another wall and the trusty dartboard will make a return, along with the cheesy horse brasses I had from before! I really, really fancy a pint now though....

Monster Much?

Wilko, purple monster.

Along with the foam headed band replica puppets, I also have a collection of furry monsters I created from the basic sock puppet pattern I downloaded from ProjectPuppet.com. Not only is it fun to build the furry monsters but they also make pretty good presents for people. Unfortunately the two puppets I made for my family have been 'borrowed' back by me, and are living in my front room again.
The possibilities for these simple sock puppets are endless, the crazier the fabric the more fun they look. My very first hand puppet was made from an off cut of purple fuzzy fabric I got from a bargain bin in an upholstery shop. I wanted to build my very own Muppet, I suppose a little in the style of Elmo from Sesame Street. Having found some discarded ping pong balls I set to work on my monster. After sewing part of him to my jeans by mistake and a few early finger burns from my glue gun; he came

Annie-bomnible. Girly monster! :D

Orange-Satch-squash

out pretty well for a first effort. In those early days, I was interested in trying out all my ideas in a simple fashion to see if any of it worked at all. My first music video is a very straight forward affair. Set to an original song we recorded way back in the mid/late 1990's (how long ago!?) I used this opportunity to see if I could get green screening to work, as I was the only one puppeteering, and there were three characters. The results were sort of successful in the fact that it did work - not massively exciting, but it worked. Once I had a small

Quick Weevil music video, puppets on a simple set.

handle on iMovie, I began playing around with effects. I took my purple monster (Wilko - named after Wilko Johnson, who we had seen at a gig in Norwich. Not that they look alike, I just wanted to use the name!) and combined two of my favourite things - Muppets and Ghostbusters. I made the puppet a uniform and a Proton Pack to see if I could use after effects to make him fire it. The job took AGES! (watch it here)

Wilko, Ghostbusting with the best!

It was quite a pain staking process. Although the end results looked nice, it had become far more complex than I wanted. This test footage of me playing with 'Special Effects' only proved to harden my resolve that I would want to do everything as 'live' as possible. If I was having to rely on my ability to add huge special effects to get my puppet videos to work, they would NEVER get finished! Low-fi was definitely my future...

A slight new puppet deviation...

String, buttons and blue foam

For those of you who don't know, I'm a graphic designer in my everyday life - this puppet stuff is a hobby we try and fit in around working and gigging with the band. Currently I work as part of a marketing team for a mattress selling company based in Norwich. One morning we needed to come up with a simple Youtube video to be used as part of an internet campaign that could be done in-house and turned around fairly quickly.

How does he smell joke.. etc.

The company had an already existing mascot that I thought would be fairly easily made into a simple hand puppet. (Any excuse to try making up another puppet design). I suggested it, and in my lunch hour I made my way to a local furnishing shop and bought some blue foam, some buttons and a few sheets of felt. That evening I quickly made a character mascot puppet to use in a fairly simple commercial that we had sketched out, and were confident we could shoot it within the confines of the small back room space we had available.

Super cheesy!

The next morning I printed out some cartoon skyline buildings and a few of the key company messages to appear on screen. The idea was to have the puppet fly over the buildings, with key messages coming past like clouds as he races to deliver to the customers. This would be set over the already pre-existing, radio advert. It took three of us to shoot it in the end. One person to work the puppet, one to fly the clouds and a third to pull the skyline backwards to make it look like he was flying! Have a look at the finished video here.

Micheal Bay style budget filming... or maybe not!

It was a lot of fun for a morning, and it worked well enough for us to make the video and upload it to the business Youtube account. I took some photos of the puppet to keep on file, and then realised that I could use the puppet design some more for promotional point of sale posters. I posed the puppet in a few different angles and converted the images into cartoon outlines. These are now being used instore and on the side of one of the shops. What began as a throw away idea, bloomed into a popular key message campaign that decorated all the stores for a few months!

Getting a lot of use from our new puppet. Checkout in store now! haha

All good fun, and a lot less irritating without the music! 

Next week, we return to the Booze Boys... and some unsettling props for the new episodes.

See you then!

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!

Och Aye The Booze Bro Puppets!

Tartan up our logo screen!

Happy Burns Night for
the 25th January!

Here in the Booze Brothers Band camp, we do like a drink. Any excuse for a beer is always a true cause for celebration.

Around this time of year I tend to remember the Christmas/New Year periods from when I was a kid. Martin and I would often spend that holiday with our family at our Grandparents. Our Grandfather Joe was a proud Scotsman, and would rarely let the chance pass to remind us of that! After a few drinks the songs, poems and stories would come out. Sometimes to the chargrin of our 'Londoner' Nan!

Joe Gilmour, our Grandad.

In the setting of their living room surrounded by photos, paintings and various Scottish nick-nacks and hairy highlanders we were entertained and learned about our family Tartan and of course Robert Burns the poet.

Burns Night is annually celebrated in Scotland on or around January 25. It commemorates the life of the bard (poet) Robert Burns, who was born on January 25, 1759. The day also celebrates Burns' contribution to Scottish culture. As far as we could tell though, it seemed to be an excellent excuse to get together and drink!

Our version of a Hunting lodge!

We decided it would be a bit of fun to make a small video to celebrate Burns night and an opportunity to write our own poem. It took a few re-writes, but eventually we had a few lines that weren't too terrible.

As always, we new we could rely on Chris to read it out for us; any excuse to try out an accent! We collected together as much tartan and Scottish looking objects as we could find to decorate an 'open fire' set to deliver our short ditty. We wanted it to have a dark, cosy fire side feel to it and Chris delivered it in a quiet intimate fashion. The Scottish accent wobbled a few times, but I think he did a passable impression! (No offense intended!!)

I don't think we will be winning any poetry awards with our composition, but it was a bit of fun to do. So all that remains is for us to wish you all a cracking Burns Night, don't forget your Neeps, Tatties and Haggis! Remember to open up the good whisky and get yourself a good book of Robert Burns Poems! 

To watch our efforts, click the link here to go to our Youtube channel.

Happy Burns Night on Friday 25th January Everyone!

Happy Burns Night from the Booze Brothers Band Puppets!

Bacon Really is the centre of the universe!

John Bacon, always delivering the goods!

As I mentioned before, John wasn't able to make it on the night of the vocal recordings so he came to Martins house the week after to drop his lines in. As expected, John read his lines with gusto and delivered a great performance without any need to have people to bounce off. He even began ad-libbing a few lines to add to his part - some funny words and phrases. Martin had also asked John to bring his banjo.

Fueling Banjos - John recording the licks.

John's Shed Logo for his section on the web.

Centre of the universe John Bacon and John Bacon!

In our first three episodes the 'stinger' tunes between the scenes were all made by Martin on his computer. John had offered to record some live banjo licks to add to the mix. John has always been an exceptional banjo player, but he doesn't get the chance to play it in the band as there is no call for it. Some would say there is no call for him to play the fiddle in the band either - but that doesn't seem to stop him!

A mic was set up and John began playing many small riffs and tunes for us in 10 to 20 second long blasts. He also regaled us with stories and facts about his banjo and playing style in-between the tunes, it was a very loud and fascinating hour!
Once he had recorded a few he was happy with we briefed him about what we wanted to do next. We were looking to add more content to our channel, so we felt a 'Johns Shed' skit would be great. We could get his puppet to build or explain anything we wanted and use it as regular content. I had spent a few nights building a replica banjo for his puppet and had brought it to show him. John was thrilled and said that doing a few run throughs of the Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith classic 'Dueling Banjos' would be great to use.

In John's Shed Video, all the dialogue for this is made up by John on the spot, we really loved the line "Don't Touch anything!" so it will be staying and used again for future skits. It took John a few goes to nail the song and warm his banjo up, it had been in his roof for over a year and he claimed to be a bit rusty. We didn't notice any problems with his playing as he rattled through it all so quickly! But watch til the end of the video for the outtake! ;)

The Prat Pack Return

''Don't panic, I've brought beers!" was the first thing I heard as I entered the front door of Martin's house. Mark, Chris and JP were standing in the lounge around a Microphone, as Mike handed out bottles of lager. Martin was hunched over the computer trying to set some levels for the audio we would try to capture, in-between the lulls of anarchy.

Scripts and Creating juice

The new scripts had been emailed out before hand, but only Mike had read them through; also he'd prepared and brought his own props! Now the band had lived with the results of our first few efforts, they had all brought their 'A' Game with them for the new episodes. There was definitely a competitive edge in their eyes, they all wanted to be the best actor.

After many a run through, we got it nailed. The scripts came alive and I could see in my head their respective puppets delivering these lines; it was going to be alright. These definitely had the potential to be better than the first three we had made. The acting was improving, or the writing was proving easier to act! With a few gaffs, coughs and crack ups re-recorded it was all in the can. (unlike the a fore mentioned beers). The only person missing was saxophonist John, he had been unable to make it on the night, but we weren't worried about him. He had been a stand out performer last time, so we knew he could deliver his performance at a later date. We had other plans for him anyway….

Over acting & over drinking. Oscar performances all round.

It had been a while since we had uploaded any new content to our Youtube Channel. It would take a while to film and edit these new three episodes and get them online. We thought it would be great to film some smaller videos that added to the puppet universe, perhaps fill out the characters with their own small sections. Making content to self circulate around the web is really difficult. For a potential scene that takes place in John's Shed, I had to build a new set I wanted to get cracking on it.

If you can tap into something that is already trending, it becomes an easier climb to get your name out there. The moustache growing for Men's Health awareness - Movember - seemed like a nice thing to do. I decided to record a video that explained the rules as stipulated by movember.com and put it out for people to reference to make sure they were doing it properly.

Spiffing 'stash - shame I can't grown one for real!

I cut out a black card moustache, stuck it to my puppet and just read the rules in front of the tongue-and-groove in my lounge. With a vignette filter laid over in the edit, it looked rather old school! I up loaded it to the puppet channel and went to bed. In the morning it had got more over night hits than any of the other videos in such a short space of time! The great thing about it is that I can use it year on year, re-trending it as it comes around. In the same way, Christmas videos come back and become popular every year.