One of my earliest ideas when I began to get into puppetry, was that I could produce videos with my puppets which have a little bit of fun with some of the strange things you see on social media platforms. My first attempt at this was a couple of years ago when I filmed the “Dog Food” video. The skit was based on a story that my friend posted on his profile, but it was one of those written memes which had been altered and reposted several times, so it just floats around the internet being reinvented. I took the opportunity to adapt the dog food story into a skit for my puppets.
This week, I saw another type of these posts which asked people to share “the last photo they took on their phone” in the comments. I felt like this could work as a puppet video, and put something together trying to put my own spin on that original post. I also repeated the text in the body of my post, just so my intent was clear. Four people responded with photos in the comments.
So, seeing the responses, I realized that I could now respond to their comments with a video. I was going to respond to each individual comment with short videos, but this seemed like a lot of extra work so I decided to combine them into one, longer video. The video evolved into a reaction video to the photos. I also wanted to find a way to use different puppets, so I could change things up.
The photos were of a sunset, a meme, a picture of whiskey, and a picture of an apartment unit someone had found while researching apartments for their mom. My reaction to the meme and the sunset were pretty straight forward, but I knew that I needed to be a little bolder when reacting to the picture of the whiskey. The photo of the apartment, however, gave me the idea of introducing a sort of Paranormal Activity type of video footage into the skit. I knew that I could use the actual photo of the apartment as a background, and integrate my characters into the setting.
This was also the second video I produced inside my new set up in my bedroom. During the last couple of weeks, my wife and I have been working on re-arranging my bedroom so that I’d have more space on one side for videos. We basically flipped where the bed and my desk are located, so now I have some room to set up my green screen and record videos pretty easily. The only trick was placing the camera so that only the green screen showed, and also dealing with a handful of mishaps, usually involving the tripod my camera sits on. I have them on a cart I can wheel around as I get it into position, but if you bump it everything topples over, USB cords are pulled free, and my computer loses signal from the camera. It is all pretty annoying.
Speaking of annoying, this video which came together pretty well turns out to have a pretty big flaw in it that I can’t fix: there is a buzzing sound that can be heard for approximately 85% of the video. I’m not quite sure what caused it, but I think that it could either be a lose connection as a result of all the shifting around, or maybe the TV I was using as a third monitor somehow introduced some kind of feedback. In the future, I’m going to need to check the sound using my headphones, just to make sure that everything is okay there, because it wasn’t a sound I could hear while I was recording.
When I realized that there was a problem with the audio, I at first thought that I would need to re-record all of the scenes, but I realized that it would take a couple of hours to capture everything again, and decided to just go with what I had. I used a lot of takes which were 1 in a million, as proven by the number of false starts and flubbed up takes that I removed from the footage. I’m not saying that all of my performances were pitch perfect, but just that they were the best of the worst.
This also introduced a new approach for my videos, which might be described as “puppets respond to something that’s superimposed onto the screen.” After watching 1,000 hours of reaction videos on the Internet, I have often thought that I could do something similar with my puppets. It might even be fun to find ways to integrate them into a clickbait video or meme using the green screen.
