Christmas Booze...

A Drummers view of Christmas gigs

Chris...Mas! haha

It's that time of year again, when the big jolly chap with the red nose laughs and spreads good will to all. But that's enough about John, because Christmas is nearly here! About 2 years ago around this time I had just finished making the last of the band replica puppets, and really wanted to make a music video with them. My flat at the time was freshly decorated with a Christmas tree and we had been gigging a lot of festive run-up parties. The weekend before the Booze Brothers had a gig at the Salhouse Lodge near Wroxham, and I had recorded the whole gig on video camera. For once, the audio and the visuals had come out really well.

JP and Mike, enjoying the season...

There was a fairly passable version of us doing the Mud festive classic, 'Lonely This Christmas'. We always dig this song out, as everyone knows it and it's fairly easy to perform while drunk. I do remember once, playing it at a gig in the summer just for a laugh, but that's a story for another day… Armed with the audio we decided to make a Christmas video, fairly basically, in front of the Christmas tree. The results were alright - if you look closely you can see bit of puppeteer arm and head at times, but the tissues and over acting happily mask most of the artistic wobbles!

Just enough Christmas Cheer, and 80s decorations!!

Quite some time later, somewhere around the middle of the year, Mike informed me at a gig that he had written his very own Christmas song, and he and JP had recorded it on a four track. After lots of 'Why didn't you tell me sooner?!' rhetoric, he said he would get a copy of it to me, only his immediate family had heard it and he didn't know what else to do with it.
This seemed like a great opportunity to shoot our very own Christmas song video featuring just Mike and James' puppets.

Keeping it simple, I decorated the living room set with tinsel and (the very same) Christmas tree. I had found some really awesome 1980s ceiling hanging decorations at a car boot sale in August, so I HAD to use those as well. Once I had James and Mike in Christmas hats, I let them rock out to the "Christmas Cheer" song from two angles to make the most of the seasonal set.

Christmas Cheer, with a sprinkling of snow!

I belong to a puppet makers forum called puppetsandstuff run by Shawn Sorrell (http://www.wildjokerdesign.com/puppetsandsuch/ ) and during one thread I was following, someone mentioned that having a few lines of the puppets speaking before or after the song made the video better for the viewer. So, with that in mind, I  wanted a small amount of dialogue at the end to round off the song. I had been getting 'green screen' tips from the same forum and thought, what if I make it snow in the flat? That's pretty Christmasy, then I could use my puppet to fret about the mess. After a few hours of editing and cropping the Booze Brothers Band of Puppets Original Christmas Song was ready for unwrapping. So for your delight and Seasonal Chipperness, I present Mike 'The Chalk' White's "Christmas Cheer".

I would like to thank Michael White and James Phillippo for letting me use their song, it's a really nice edition to the puppet song channel, and a nice way to end a creative year for the Booze Band of Puppets. Merry Christmas to all the band, their long suffering families and all the people out there who have watched our videos and come to see us at gigs.

Lets hope 2013 is just as successful.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of the Booze Brothers Band!

Second Guesting... Martin Returns to Blog!

Scripts, or 'Beer Mats'? Nope, mark the table!

Ok, so second part of my Blog on the writing and I have a confession to make – I care about the scripts a great deal. I know Steve has said on this very Blog that he can’t remember which bits he wrote and which bits I did, I find this as incredible as if I’d said I couldn’t remember who made the puppets. I can still go through each script and highlight exactly which bits I wrote, which jokes are mine and what I was thinking when I wrote it. It is probably for the best that I get the final say on the scripts, Steve is nice enough to take it very well when I cut out lines he wrote and re-work his ideas, I’d sulk for a week if he cut out my favourite joke. It just shows that it helps to be passionate about different parts when your working with another person.

I always knew what feel I wanted for the stories; anything mean or cruel wasn’t going to work with the characters we had, so it needed a softer centre. I’ve often been accused of having a brain that works in a slightly different way to other people, I like maths and logic, but have huge love of words. I tend to follow a string of logic, but end up in illogical situations – this is why my DIY skills are terrible. Even to this day, I refuse to try to sweep my own chimney as, years ago, I saw Paddington Bear try to do it on TV with disasterous results. I remember watching that episode and thinking to myself ‘but that’s exactly how I would do it’. The moral I took from this was ‘never try to do anything that can’t be done by a bear in a duffel coat’ this is a life rule that is yet to let me down.

The Martins, considering Pooh.

I was aware that I didn’t want anyone to be the butt of too many jokes. Much like the Winnie the Pooh stories, I wanted everyone to be a bit dumb in their own special way and comedy would come from the way these very personal lines of logic intersected. The great thing about the A.A. Milne stories is that only Pooh is aware of his own limitations, everyone else ambles along thinking they are much smarter than him.

JP and Wally

With this in mind, I wanted our stories to come from a logical place – in one episode James wants a pet, sees a brick in a pet shop, buys it and takes it home as a pet – a logical set of steps that brings him to the result of having a pet brick or ‘geometric hampster’. For me, it wouldn’t have worked if he had just found the brick or had it given to him, it had to come from a series of logical-to-him steps that puts him at odds with the rest of the band.

Mark & Chris in space. Totally Logical.

The challenge going forward is to maintain a level of quality and not to mess about with anyone’s characteristics just to wedge in a joke or a plot.

It’s a challenge I’m looking forward to.

A Guest Blogger in our midst.

At last, Martin gets to have his say.  He's funny, and he's here all week - so, enjoy!

It's Snow Joke!! Actually, it's Martin.

The Joy and Pain of Writing. Having let Steve take the heavy lifting of Blog writing, I’ve finally caved to his pressure to come up with some content regarding my part in the puppet project.
For a long time, I’d felt a little on the outside of the project. I have made a few monster-style puppets of questionable quality, but it soon became apparent that my skills were not in the model making department. Steve had spent long nights over many months making fantastic foam likenesses of the band, and I’d fulfilled the role of bloke who makes tea and say ‘wow they look good’ a lot. It was fair to say I hadn’t exactly been pulling my weight.

Creative 'weight pulling'. Hard with no keyboard delete key!

When the question came of what to do with the puppets, I saw a chance to get more involved. I had done a very limited amount of writing, but always subscribed to the idea that everyone has a novel inside them (not a pleasant thought; books can have very sharp corners). Blessed with boundless optimism and a head full of bad puns, creativity started to slowly flow. It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention, it could also be added that convenience is, at the very least, the great uncle of laziness. With this tortured metaphor still hanging in the air, I decided to analyse what we already had at our disposal for inspiration.

Wally the Brick, on holiday.

What a brief search of the house turned up, was a poorly made puppet of a hare and a foam prop brick – so these elements became the centre piece for the first bits of writing.


What wasn’t at first obvious to me, was that sooner or later I was going to have to show these draft scripts to someone else. Much like your own singing; what sounds like perfection in your own home may well turn out to be a bit flat when aired in public, it was scary stuff. Luckily Steve got the gist of the jokes in the first drafts and helped me hone them into a more cohesive story. As time went on, it became clear that his stuff was strong on story, but lighter on laughs, whereas my material tended to aimlessly spin round in endless jokes without ever getting to a point. By passing scripts between ourselves, the right balance was maintained.

Hoagie, one of Martins creations.

The first three scripts came together quite well, up to the point where I was prepared to let the rest of the band read, and then commit them to tape. Luckily, my fears of people being upset about how many lines they had, or anyone being unhappy that their character was a bit dim, never materialised – just as well the band are all good sports!

The Chris 'Not Offended' face.

Happy as I was to see the first three recorded, I’m now determined to make the next scripts of a higher quality. Some of the jokes didn’t work as well as they should have and I feel that another re-write wouldn’t have gone amiss – It’s a learning curve and I’m thrilled to have been given the opportunity to be part of it.

Steve & Martin Gilmour :) Go Team Booze.

Media Tarting & New Episode Starting.

We set to work and created our very own Youtube channel and uploaded all the music videos and our 3 episodes to the internet. At the same time I also put together a puppets web page, blogger account, Pinterest Boards, Twitter and started to cross reference all of these to each other. We wanted to get as much coverage as possible to allow as many people to see it as possible. This is a long task (and one that's ongoing!) but we decided 'little and often' over these formats would be enough to drip new visitors to our creations.

The Booze Brothers YouTube Channel. Subscribe Today!!

Having had some success with our first three episodes, it was time to make more. Both Martin and I had exhausted our immediate funny ideas about the band in the first few brain storming sessions. This was going to require us to dig a bit deeper, creatively speaking, and try to make more coherent stories.

Pinterest: Great for photos and stuff. Check it out.

Again, over a tea one lunch hour we tried to pin point the exact traits the group had, that would be able to be stretched into more episodes. We sketched out rough character profiles, and after some quite frank smack talk about our fellow band mates, we came up with the following collective points: Being a little over weight. Being totally skint, and needing more gigs. Once we had written down how many characters were built, it suddenly dawned on us how many we had at our disposal. The cast was growing, which brought more possibilities. Another structural point Martin raised was, having two stories happen per episode, that made it flow better. It would also allow us to feature more people in each episode. Two separate stories split between seven 'actors' (very, loosely speaking) was simpler than seven people in one story. Martin also harbored a secret ambition to write an episode set in space. Great Martin, thanks for understanding the limits of my already built scenery!!

Start of the 'Alien Objections' set... Will it fly?

That night I sat and emptied my head onto paper and produced a smattering of passable jokes and concepts. Once typed up I emailed everything to Martin. Several miles away, he was doing exactly the same thing (just, his stuff was better!) We proceeded to read each others work and edit out what we didn't think would be funny, or be able to be achieved. We repeated this process over several evening and lunchtimes until a week of writing had produced 3 more decent episodes. Reading them back was great. Collectively it was becoming difficult to remember who had come up with what, so they really felt like a joint effort. Our new set of episodes would be 'He ain't Heavy', 'Cash Mosh-ine' and 'Alien Objections'. With scripts polished, some new characters rounded up, it was time to rally the troops and get the voices recorded...  Quick, turn on the Booze Signal.

The complete cast so far. Gonna need a bigger garage...

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.

I want to deviate slightly and talk about our props and extras we have. Props are great fun to make, it was one of the processes I enjoyed the most. The first three episodes would need me to create books, newspapers, company logos, pizza boxes, talking cakes and a 12" Mexican. (?!)

Mixing his sciences, with rude words?

In our second episode, Martin wrote some jokes that revolved around a mix of Pavlovian Psychology and Immanuel Kant Philosophy. He wanted his puppet to be reading a generic book to introduce the scene, but not a real one. I did a quick search on the internet for some images and cobbled together a pretend book jacket to get the point across. This would turn out to be the least weird thing I would have to do.

Generic Pizza 'Bor. Norfolk Speak!

One night after a Booze Brothers Band gig at the California Tavern, we all drove to the Caister Kebab shop for some well earned sustenance. Over a combined order of 3 portions of chips, 4 meat feast 9" pizzas and 2 half pound burgers I remembered that I was going to have to make pizza boxes for a scene in the first episode. I wondered if I could scab a 9" pizza box as a template to use later? As I was trying to get a discarded pizza box off one of the band without loosing any fingers, the owner asked me what I wanted a dirty box for. I explained (as best as I could, trying not to sound like a nutter) what I was hoping to do and he disappeared into the back and came back with 4 brand-new flat packed boxes for me. If I assembled them inside out, they were plain white pizza boxes! All I would have to do is design a simple logo, and stick it to the lids. Another job done!

A growing Empire perhaps?

Discount Dave was another creation of Martins for the third episode, his voice was kindly recorded for us by Voiceoverman in a studio under the supervision of Doc at Radiojingles.com. I threw together a cheap looking logo for his 'Discount Empire' (in the high street, above the kebab shop, in the high street) It's one of our favourite clips so far. We will be using Doc's services again for a new character, Hoagie Hare… (watch this space!)

A 12" Mexican, obvious. Named Paddy, not so much.

Talking of newer characters, The 12' Mexican (that for absolutely no reason whatsoever is now called, Paddy) was really fun to make. He is a foam tube with yellow felt and black buttons for eyes. His awesome hat is a mini sombrero I found by luck on the internet. With the very last piece of my black fluff I had left, I made him a moustache. The fact he doesn't speak at all is a bit of a relief. Who would want to try a Mexican/Irish accent crossover? Yeah, thought not.

He'll be on Page 3, it's where the buns and baps are.

James' pet brick (called Wally) was a rubber brick Martin had in his house for ages, I think he got it one Christmas and had no idea what to do with it. It only features in the 3rd episode so far, but it does feature on the cover of the newspaper Mike is reading; in a rather heavy handed (albeit quick) plot point spoiler.

For the three new episodes we have written, I will be needing to build a lot more props. Magic Hair in a Bottle, a set of logos for two new businesses, a shed set and a whole space ship set. But that's all for another day!

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!