Last weekend we drove in circles around the mission shooting footage in which Pabst gives some bad advice about biking like a boss.  

First thing we had to do was pick up a child’s bicycle at Thrift Town and build a stand to keep it upright and allow the pedals to spin.  Then we drilled holes in Pabst’s boots and wired them to the pedals so that when they were turned from bellow, his legs would rotate too.  The posable wire in his hands made making him grip the bars a snap.

Our good buddy Ben (who takes pictures)  was kind enough to man the wheel while we crouched in the back of his truck to get the background we needed to make the cycling look real.  Meanwhile our equally-the-best pal Elsa laid on the other side of Pabst to operate his second hand and keep the pedals rolling while we shot.

The footage came out better than we’d expected.  It was a bit harder than we would’ve liked to keep the lighting ideal while avoiding getting pulled over by the police, but in the end it all came together.  You really can’t ask for a prettier back drop than San Francisco.

We also shot some footage of Pabst’s advice on how to dress to impress.  For him, it involves flashing rainbow disco balls and all of the jewelry you can find.  We hope to shoot the final footage for the next short this weekend.  Fluctuating weather conditions and day jobs have made filming the final pieces a bit problematic, but we’re confident we can get this wrapped up before Thanksgiving.

Two of the nicest days San Francisco has seen all year… why not spend them inside behind a folding table giving people little bits of paper?  

Frown Town came to the Alternative Press Expo this past Saturday and Sunday! I brought James along for the ride, and sat him right on the corner of my table. Those big eyes filled with world-sadness and indescribable fear sure can bring in the foot traffic.

The mustachioed fellow to my right is my pal from grad school, dw, selling his usual array of beautiful screen prints and comics. Frown Town brought the goods, too:

That’s a sweet poster, free promotional postcards and mini-cards, and our hero, James Rumsey’s foot. The postcards, which I created new for the convention, were a roaring success. Here’s a closer image of them:

Some time in the doldrums after the noon rush on Sunday, a young woman staggered up to the table, visibly addled or touched. “Why is he so sad” she kept asking about James. But he could only stare.

Who’s got two thumbs, glitter face paint, a potentially racist headdress and knows how to party right?  This guy.

I recently wrapped up Pabst’s new party headdress. It’s emblazoned with various personal sigiles since its genesis lies entirely in narcism. Hence we’ve got the Tecata eagle atop the Pabst blue ribbon — here gold because color pallets trump all else — and a bicycle gear dead center — not pictured.

Turkey feathers wouldn’t do this party person justice — french prononciation, like the electro band — so I slapped on some sparkly fabric and peacock plumes.  Respecognize.

With his headdress — replete with bells — in place it was time to take Pabst out for the first round of filming on our next video.  Destination: Hard French.

Hard French is an afternoon barbecue / soul dance party in the Mission.  It’s just about the best time to be had on a Saturday before dark and folks there dress like it’s halloween every day.  Shout out to my dog Cory — not an actual dog — for taking a break from his revelry to help out with the shooting.

The crowd seemed pretty into him as we were continuously swarmed by camera phones.  We even popped up on Instragram a couple of times, albeit with the hashtag #fisting.  The only downer was the series of preternaturally disgruntled ladies who thought his headdress was racist, but after I explained to them that yes, I’d read Guns, Germs and Steel and no, the squishy pink puppet with purple hair was not — surprisingly enough — a xenophobic rabble rouser there to rain on their polysexual, ethnically-ambiguous parade nor make light of the plight of the Indigenous American Peoples, but was rather operating on a level above their perceived affront, a level called satire or maybe just style without borders.  Any old way, we’ll be shooting more with Pabst as soon as I figure out how to get him to ride a fixed gear. Stay tuned.

Hey internet! The first ever episode of Frown Town, “Are You My Boy?” is alive and kicking. Check it out and get chuckling.

The episode stars Geer Kerebekian (performed and voiced by Andy Warner) and Judy Swinehopper (performed by Steven Foundling and voiced by Jess Mele). The scoring was done by Ash Ryan, the theme music by Megan Keely and the episode was filmed and produced by Allen Price. A bajillion thanks to our kickstarter backers for their infinite patience and astounding generosity, especially Eric Striffler and Daniel A. Hamblin, our executive producers. Also thanks to Avi Ehrlich for being an awesome PA on the shoot!

So what’s next? Well, we’ve got two other episodes coming down the pipeline, one starring Pabst Tecate (a.k.a. Trey Awesome) and a follow up to this episode, featuring the Brothers Rumsey. We’re workshopping scripts, building props and might start shooting as soon as this weekend. With the small production crew, each episode will take a good chunk of time to get done, but we’re learning with every shoot and we hope you’ll stay tuned.

We’re coming in on the home stretch of the first Frown Town short and sorting out a lot of odds and ends in the process — from music and scoring to rotoscoping in fire effects frame by frame.  

Our first video is all cut together and just about ready to go.  It looks like we’re going to be a week late on our deadline as we’ve run into some turbulence finding a girl suitably spastic to dub in Judy’s dialog.  It’s apparently a lot harder to lisp like a Dungeon Master than I’d realized.  In the meantime, we’ve added in a beautiful theme song written and recorded by the incomparable Megan Keely and punched the proceedings up substantially with a phenomenal score by Japan’s own Ash Ryan.

While the musicians were doing their thing, I spent some long hours in Adobe After Effects rotoscoping in lighter flames frame by frame.  It’s both harder and easier than it seems, involving taking footage I shot of a lighter and tracking it along to the video.  The effect came off pretty well and saved us from accidentally setting the puppets on fire while we were filming.

There was also a crucial shot that we only got one take on which was pretty much ruined by Andy’s being totally visible lying on the ground throughout.  This was also resolved with the cinematic magic of After Effects, as I painstakingly matted him out and gave Geer some legs to boot.

We already had his legs on file from our misguided attempt at building a massive photographic archive of the puppets from every angle to attempt to complete the project as a sort of animated collage.  Oh the follies of youth.

While we’re waiting to record Judy’s dialog — early next week — and finally wrap up the first short, I’m gearing up pre-production on the follow up, which last weekend meant spending $75 on craft supplies to make Pabst Tecate (formerly Trey Awesome) the hipsterest headdress in all of Frown Town.

From the smog choked skies to the sewage clogged gutters…

The production is chugging right along, voices are being recorded and footage is being post-production’ed. But everything needs a strong beginning. So… the opening title sequence. We decided to do a callback to the original concept art and the ditched sets and do an animated opening sequence. It starts up high, focused on a billboard with the show’s title, then crawls down along the filthy brownstones.

The names graffitied on the walls are the four involved in the production of the first episode. They’ll change depending on the crew on each successive film shoot. Below that, moving more slowly on a different layer to create the illusion of depth, are the grubby old victorians.

As these pass by, fog (the sweet sign of San Francisco summer) closes in from both sides, the screen fades to white, and the episode title appears.

It’s all downhill from there.

All together the whole sequence will last about 10-15 seconds at most, and be accompanied by a delightful little theme song about sadness.

Oh. Hey, Internet. You been standing there long?

Two years is a while, huh? Sorry about that. Andy up and moved to grad school in the frozen east and the thing about puppets is they take kind of a lot of hands. More than two anyway. But now he’s back and with him, Frown Town returns from its long hubristic hiatus. We’ve scaled back our original delusions of grandeur and are now tackling the material in the form of shorts. Here’s swearing the first one will be released by our second Failiversary: September 15th, 2012.  Now is the time for the rolling of sleeves: there’s work to be done.

First thing’s first:  Finishing up the squirrel puppet.

Here’s Fuzzy Britches in all his dim-witted glory.  We’re gonna be operating him with fishing line to give him that meth-head-with-the-jitters quality city squirrels tend to have.

Speaking of meth, we also had to make Judy some sugar sticks. After considering various varieties of iridescent flake glitter, I went with these small plastic beads to fill in for the sweet stuff. They read beautifully on camera and roll right off her. Glitter never comes off. Glitter is forever.

Since building sets proved prohibitively time consumptive and would severely limit our camera angles, we’ve opted on using real locations for this incarnation of the show. I stumbled upon this vacant Victorian in the Panhandle awhile back and figured it’d be just the spot to get our frown on. If only the neighbors could have just chilled out and stopped calling the cops on us, but they couldn’t and they did: twice. Two times. Fortunately, the day of the actual shoot the house’s owner showed up first and he kindly let us finish filming despite of the boys in blue.

In another uncharacteristic bit of luck, just before Andy came back to town, local filmmaker Allen Price offered to help us out with filming, editing, finding voice actors — pretty much whatever we needed.  We also had the on-set assistance of our new buddy Avi Ehrlich of the Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club.  He took production stills and helped out with puppeteering when four hands just weren’t enough.

Here’s Judy laying out with the storyboards, which were completely essential.  With so much to keep track of  — from the police crashing the party to Judy’s arms ripping off twice from overly-aggressive gesticulation — having a map of what had to get shot was the only thing that got us through the shoot in any kind of shape at all.

Since we’ve been warned never to go back on location again, reshoots are impossible, so we’re making the best of what we got and we’re on to editing the video. Now all we need do is re-dub the audio, add some minor effects and an animated intro and we’ll at last be ready to release the first of what will hopefully prove a continuing series of Frown Town shorts. We can’t thank you enough for waiting, especially all y’all who gave us money to get this thing done. No one was more disappointed than us when the project collapsed, but we think we got it back up and running right this time and we don’t aim to give it up again. Stay with us.

Just when you think the earthquake’s over, the city bursts into flames.  Isn’t that right, Mr. Gilliam?

When it comes to puppetry, many hands makes light work.  Just the two hands makes work more or less like a black hole, sucking in time and enthusiasm like light and matter.  Since Andy hightailed it out east I’m down to just the two.  But fret not, puppet pals.  Things don’t always go as planned, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still go.  We’re exploring with new methods to make this thing a reality.  Namely, photographing the puppets from every angle and animating them digitally, a nifty method we picked up from the astonishingly creative folks over at Tiny Inventions.

First thing’s first.  Since we already blew our budget on AV gear, I knocked together some umbrella lights the old fashioned way: with spray paint and umbrellas.  And some $10 work lights from the hardware store.

Here’s Andy’s arm dressing and posing the kids in front of a neutral white background.  It’s like school photo day if kindergartners required assembling.

And here I am in the garage giving Geer his moment under the spotlight.

Then Andy arduously Photoshopped the photo assets and put together  this test animation: look mom, no hands.

We’re feeling pretty good about the look of it, but also exploring other options.  I’ve been doing some tests performing the puppets one at a time in front of a green screen and then compositing them together.  There’s a world of possibility for how we can still pull this off, and we’re excited to devise the best way to do it.  Quite likely we’ll end up with a hulking hybrid of some sort, utilizing whatever techniques are most effective on a shot by shot basis.  If you ask me, that sort of curious amalgam would suit our show just fine.

So stick with us and we’ll walk this winding road together.  There’ll be some pitfalls and an awful lot of backtracking, but the best adventures happen when nothing goes as planned.  This is an adventure.

Well folks, we gotta cut corners somewhere, so rather than pouring the same inordinate amount of time into our storyboards as we have into all the other aspects of this protracted production, we’ve opted to bang them out quick and sloppy, like the war in Iraq.  What?  The war’s still going on… well, that certainly doesn’t bode well.  For a lot of things.

Like so many of the most profound and enduring films of our generation, Frown Town opens on a closeup of a pile of garbage and a squirell puppet very nearly getting set on fire.  Submitted for your consideration, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

A little later, we meet our hero — James Rumsey — who is promptly hit in the head with a rock.  So it goes in Frown Town.

Here’s rather an extended sequence in which the bullies steal James’ suitcase, hurl some fairly creative American Indian epitets at him and then chase him through a hole in the fence.  It’s a battle of strong beliefs and little sense.  Once again, the similarities to Iraq abound.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. We beg you, internet, forgive us for our prolonged absence from the sublime world of bloggery. We have cool stuff to show you. We here at Frown Town HQ realize that this blog has now undergone a distressingly long period of laying fallow. The reason ain’t for lack of dedication to the project, but merely the crushing inevitability of summer. I went to Senegal for three weeks to visit my recently-relocated-to-Dakar-girlfriend, Steve lost track of himself amidst some fog-induced psychological breakdowns, and the wheels of Frown Town turned slowly. But we’re back in action! We’ve been fine-tuning the script, story boarding and starting to do preliminary voice recording. For our Kickstarter funders, we’ve been arduously photographing and composing the puppets for the super sweet poster that’s heading your way soon. Here’s the final result:

Piling up a puppet pyramid is one of those feats best achievable through modern technology (Photoshop), so we posed each tier of puppets individually against a black background with plans to stack them digitally.

Then we broke out the tripod and Steve lovingly photographed them with our new Canon 7D.  Thanks, Kickbros!

Judy, Trey and Patches, given the way they splayed out from the center, needed to be arduously arranged and photographed individually.

Countless hours of scrupulous Photoshopping later and we had the basic composition. The existing logo (at the top of this blog), worked great to anchor the webpage, but was too complicated for smaller compositions. We wanted something that could be more versatile, and not always stand out as the dominant design element. Since Henson’s basically a demi-god to us, I took inspiration from Fraggle Rock’s awesomely cartoonish branding and came up with this:

Steve aged the heck out of it and integrated it into the poster. The final product looks nothing short of awesome.

I’ve also been working on another bit of swag for our Kickstarter folks, a Frown Town t-shirt featuring Phauntleroy Rumsey. In many ways, he’s the real heart of the show:

We’re about to send these guys out to the poster and t-shirt printers, and we’ll mail them out as soon as we get ‘em back.