This is a post that I wrote over two years ago while working on the television show in Iceland. At the time, I held it because there was no way I could talk about this stuff without giving away that we were doing a circus episode. Well, the episode has been out long enough now that I can post.

So here you go, puppetry flashback.

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April 26, 2006

I did loads of stuff with one of the puppets on a highwire. We had one shot that was really fun to do because it was hard. The puppet had to hold on to one of those bars that tightrope walkers use to balance. I have no idea what they are really called, but we called it the stripey pole. So, normally, you’d tape the rod to his hands and either have someone outside the frame holding the end of it, or you’d put a rod on it. In this case, an actor needed to take it from the puppet in the shot. Which we would normally do with live hands, but the way it had to be framed, there was no way to do either of these and make it look good.

So, I put on a greenscreen top, and used the wrist-entry left arm. (Maybe I should stop and explain that with live hands I have a choice of entering the arm at the elbow or the wrist.) I pulled the green shirt sleeve over the entry sleeve and they keyed my arm out. This mean that everything in green was invisible on camera–it’s very cool. So, it just looked like the puppet was holding the stripey pole and then we could pass it to the actor.

Maybe you have to be a puppeteer to know that this was nifty.

After that, it was more stripey pole action, but I just held the end of the stripey pole out of frame.

We finished the day with a trashcan shot. I know. I thought I was finished with trash too, but no. I was the periscope which had too peek up from inside a trashcan. They painted the fiberglass trash can today and it was still degassing. Mmm…let’s sit inside the container of toxic fumes.

I don’t think so. I requested and given a respirator. Because there wasn’t room in there for me, the periscope and a monitor, I also had to use the VR goggles, all of which were oh-so-attractive. The shot itself was fairly simple. I had to make the periscope peek out of the trashcan, look around, and then an actor had to jump on me. Great fun.

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And just so you can see what a trippy, trippy episode that was to work on. Here’s the music video and the closing number.

For the last week I’ve been writing 2000 words a day, with the goal of finishing a novel by the 24th. I spent an equal amount of time writing today and wound up with an overall wordcount 90 words shorter than yesterdays. Mind you,today wasn’t a day designated for editing, I just couldn’t get the tail end of the chapter to go where I needed it to and finally realized that it was because the beginning of the chapter had an unnecessary complication.

Interesting twists are all well and good, but this one would have created a plot hole the size of Yankee Stadium. I was wasting time in the tail end of the chapter trying to patch something that I shouldn’t have introduced in the first place. There are times when I’m going along and I realize that I’m writing for wordcount, rather than plot. So, cut! Rewrite.

As a result I have a tighter, tenser scene and no gaping holes. Best of all, a finished chapter.

Now I just need to write the next 2000 words.