52W: W2 - Puppet Short Film

January 24, 2023

I decided to centralize my posts on my own website according to POSSE principles.
The original post is on Substack here: https://52weeks.substack.com/p/week-2-puppet-short-film

This week I created (the first scene of) a short film with puppets. Here it is:

I discovered that making stuff in the physical world has a lot more constraints than making software does! With software, I can copy code from StackOverflow or ChatGPT, but there’s no equivalent shortcut to set up a filming studio, create costumes, learn how to animate a puppet with my hands, and film and edit. I’m posting this week’s update well into Week 3, as I ran behind schedule and a number of things blocked my process. It was a really fun process though!

Tools I used

  • A ‘naked’ blue puppet, ordered from Etsy

  • A furry purple puppet

  • iPhone 13 camera

  • A green screen

  • 3 LED lights

  • A tripod

  • A wireless lapel microphone

  • Puppet costumes made from scrap fabric, hot glue, and pins

  • Pixabay - royalty free sound effects

  • Protake - manual iOS camera app

  • Soundraw - AI music generator (for the title sequence)

  • Pexels - royalty free stock video

  • Final Cut Pro

  • Canva

Context

My concept for this week started just before Christmas when I decided to make stockings for my housemates to hang above the fireplace. I made a trip to the fabric store and grabbed a bunch of fabrics and a hot glue gun, and got to work.

I put a ginger snack and some seaweed in each stocking

Making these furry things - surrounded by fabric scraps, faux fur, and the nostalgic smell of hot glue - got me working with my hands and in the zone at my ‘workstation’. With the glue gun still smoking, I couldn’t resist grabbing an old sock and cut a few holes in it. The results were.. underwhelming:

This is… Joe the Snail

This puppet was hard to use - 2nd and 5th fingers control its snail-like eyes, the cardboard mouth was in the wrong spot, and the compression elastic in the sock gave me minor wrist strain - but the seed had been planted.

I did some web browsing on puppets and ended up watching Jim Henson’s early puppet shows. He started his career in the late 50’s with a series of wildly successful commercials for Wilkin’s Coffee:

I love the range of emotion and expression possible with only eyes and mouth, so I decided to get a naked puppet and make custom costumes for it. Here’s the one I got from Etsy - dubbed ‘Mozzie’:

Mozzie in action

Process

I knew that in order to make a half-decent film I needed to pay some attention to lighting and sound, so I found a video giving some tips specifically for puppet films. My key takeaways were:

  • Have a 3 point lighting system - front left, front right, and a rear light - to get detail and depth for the puppet

  • Get a clip-on microphone so I could have crisp audio while moving the puppet in weird ways

I also wanted to try a green screen so I could superimpose stills from around the house and the neighborhood.

After a lot of trial and error and cable tetris, here’s how the setup turned out:

To test the setup and my puppet skills, I put together a lil’ lip syncing and dance ‘B-reel’:

Now all I had to do was think up what I wanted to film.

My first idea was to compile ‘catch-phrases’ of each of my housemates, I wanted to record each person saying their phrases and incorporate that into a film somehow. It was a fun exercise, but not everyone had easy sound bites, and I felt blocked at several points in the process.

Next I attempted to use ChatGPT to write a plot, but it came out super bland and uninspiring. I’m pretty sure I could have gotten a much better result if I spent more time on prompt engineering, but instead I decided to do it the old fashioned way and write a simple script myself involving a mice infestation, a strange guru in the basement, and a series of flashbacks for each housemate. The film would be set in the house, so I took photos of the house to use a scene backgrounds put on the green screen.

I started making the costumes for the characters - here’s where my stocking-making skills came in handy - and discovered it’s quite challenging to make things look good and stay on the puppet with a short timeframe. Particularly the hair, without damaging the puppet with pins, kept flopping off during filming. My partner Paulina was my savior here - she sewed together a costume for the ‘Simon’ character. We decided it would be easier to have just one costume and record other characters as humans.

Every step of this process took much longer than I thought, so I had to rein in my ambitions. I decided this week’s finished product would be just the first scene of a longer film, perhaps in a later week I can complete the whole thing. The final Act 1 is 2 minutes long - I’ve included 5 minutes of additional unpolished ‘teaser’ footage that could go into later Acts if I return to the project. Here’s that full version:

Investment

  • 20-30 hours

  • $100-200 on gear (I will return some for a refund)

Learnings

  • Puppets are hilarious, and bring out a new side of people interacting or animating them

  • Making costumes is very time consuming!

  • I wildly overestimated how much I could accomplish in a week

  • Being an artist/creator is hard! And potentially very lonely

  • My arm gets sore/tired when I hold it above my head for extended periods of time

  • Lighting for film is tricky

  • Writing scripts/plots is hard

  • Sometimes what seems like a great idea in the shower ends up looking stupid on camera

  • In the above case, I noticed some self-doubt in my creative abilities

  • Inspiration is fickle, can’t force it. It’s hard to work when not inspired, especially creatively

  • Lip syncing takes practice

  • Recording audio is tricky to only record the things you want and reduce background noise

  • Sound effects can transform a scene from boring to engrossing

  • The first 80% of this project flew by fast. I found it tough to stay motivated for the last 20%. I felt like I’d gained the experience already, getting to the finish line didn’t teach me more. Except the skill of getting to the finish line

  • I showed the unfinished project to one of my housemates, he loved it and gave me fresh energy that carried me across the finish line.

  • Sharing my work out is really motivating!

Next steps

  • Finish the puppet film (ie film + edit Act 2 and Act 3)

  • Spend some time thinking about sound design

  • Bring the puppet to a social event and see what happens

  • Find another puppeteer and host/film a puppet improv theatre