The Title!

I finally decided on a title for my movie:



This is the rough draft of the calligraphy, by my mom.

See also 1933 and 1935. There are a few more for which clips are not readily available.

Thanks everyone! Now I need more help...

I'm writing the credits for my movie, and it's making me realize how great everyone is to cooperate with my weird requests. So thank you to everyone who agreed to voice a puppet or help with writing or lend us a car or recording equipment. The credits are going to be really good, because I'm having my mom do them in calligraphy.

I made Channing accompany me to the San Francisco Main Library last night to find the perfect font (or "alphabet" in calligrapher-ese) and we also visited the skylight gallery on the 6th floor, where there happened to be a calligraphy exhibition on display. It was quite impressive, and I would recommend visiting if you're in San Francisco. It's free! And, as an added bonus, you can imagine you're me as a kid, because I was surrounded by calligraphy all the time. Some of the calligraphers in the show have even stayed with my family when they were in Memphis for calligraphy-related purposes.

Anyhow, I am hard at work organizing the details of the movie. I filmed all of the curtains and backdrops for the puppet theater.

But there's one serious problem! I don't have a title! Does anyone have any brilliant suggestions? I want something that's short and that doesn't give away the plot.

The main characters are names Paxinosa Easton and Ebenezer Van Buskirk, so naming it after them is probably out. In the meantime I'm trying to read up on gold rush slang.

A Big Weekend in the Movie Studio

AKA A Big Weekend at Home

So, I pretty much forgot to take any photos of the weekend's activities. I will add in some photos for those of you who hate words.

On Friday I actually wrote a script for the entire vaudeville show. Channing and Sunny (who was visiting for the weekend) helped me turn my brilliant ideas into a script, and added in some brilliant ideas of their own. I ended up eliminating the hilarious but dirty jokes that Keith helped me come up with, because I decided it wasn't worth it to limit the audience by including a few dirty jokes. Without them the movie is appropriate for all ages, so I decided to stick with the non-dirty jokes. Those jokes are really good though, so they will soon be available to members of the fan club!

That night we recorded the voices of Pillow and Pillow (Burke and Ty) until the wee hours of the morning. Okay, it was only like 12:30am. I had never met Ty before, but I wanted Burke to cast his co-Pillow so they would be comfortable singing and telling jokes together, and so they could show up at the same time. I think his casting worked out really well. We also ate this pie:



His name was Pyman, and he was delicious.

Then on Saturday I worked at my job, but afterwards I worked on fine-tuning some of the songs. Then I rolled up my hair in some rags in preparation for the next day's shoot. Here is the result of my test-curl, before I combed it out, which almost turned out (after I combed it, which of course I didn't photograph) better than the actual curling:



I was really excited because I used to have to get my hair curled a lot when I was a kid, and it never worked very well because I have really straight hair which was really long for most of my childhood, both of which prevented it from curling very well. I kind of want to start curling my hair all the time, but I'm not going to because I am lazy and because it is a stupid idea.

So on Sunday we set up the greenscreen and pushed all of our furniture to the edges of the living room.



We recorded my song first, because I wanted to do it as soon as I woke up. I was very excited. It's a version of the Mongoosnuffle Shuffle Rag, adapted so it fits with music. Mr. Tusks played the part of Mr. Mongoosnuffles, and he got the attitude right even though he doesn't exactly look the part.



Next Keith (a different Keith!) and Jessica came over to help out. We filmed the complicated giraffe song and dance, which required three puppeteers. And of course none of us know how to be puppeteers, so it was a bit difficult. I think it turned out fine, though. I'm a big fan of doing things I have no idea how to do. I made Keith and Jessica sing songs (the giraffe and beaver) as well, but I'm not sure how they turned out. I'm going to attempt to edit them today. Channing is kind of a confusing conductor, but I figured he would do a better job than me since he has some experience recording music. We recorded some backup versions just to be safe.

Later we filmed the Pillows and Barnaby lipsynching and dancing to their parts. This was hard just because these guys are hand puppets, which meant we had to lay flat on our backs with our arms straight up in the air in order to get them in the proper position.

After that there were only three minutes left on the tape and we were tired so we decided to call it a day.



There is still one more song to film, and a few incidental things for transitions and backgrounds, but the vaudeville show is almost complete! After that's done we still have to film the entire ending of the movie, but it feels really good to have such a big chunk of footage out of the way.

Now to start editing...

PS - Rachel, I'll be sending out your fan club materials tomorrow.

The Poo Paw Team

Here's the team behind the soon-to-be classic song Poo Paw, which was recorded last night:



Mike is the golden voice behind the sort-of-golden cat, Michelle wrote the lyrics, and I forced them to do this.

The song is turned out so well! It's the first one I've recorded for the movie, and I'm really excited to do more in the next few days. Sorry, but you will have to wait to hear its brilliance, but hopefully not much longer!

Here's Barnaby, almost ready to film his dance on Sunday. He's eagerly awaiting the completion of the track so he can get his lip-synching down perfectly.



Big thanks to everyone. I would especially like to thank Mr. Tusks for only occasionally having the terrible hygiene problem that inspired the song.

Now I'm off to get some last minute supplies!