millsworks

Thought I’d take a stab at explaining what it is I do when I’m busy not answering the phone.

I just posted a promo for another episode of Ruffus The Dog. It’s a simple little thing, and was fun to do but there are a number of interesting layers to the process of creating it that I’d like to detail here.

First – the promo itself:

Short, sweet, cute – all the stuff it needs to be.

It was shot in front of a blue screen cloth in my home – in my dining room in fact. An easy three light set-up illuminated the backdrop and the characters. My son operated the camera and helped set up the lights and backdrop. The whole thing took about an hour to shoot. It would have gone faster but I was lying on the floor instead of standing – which is preferred for better puppetry – and since I’m an old fat fuck now and no longer as adept as I once was at working a character whilst doing sit-ups there are some rough edges to the performances. Too fucking bad – it’s good enough.

Here’s a picture of an old guy with a puppet:

The background image of the bookshop was culled from one of the existing Ruffus episodes. I performed both Ruffus and the Sheep which was a wee bit of a challenge because there wasn’t any audio playback or fancy-schmancy method of replaying the previous take with one character while shooting the next take with the second character – I just had to wing it and hope I could be consistent with my timing of the lines.

I did okay but I think the overall pace is a bit sluggish. Next time: faster and funnier.

This, as you saw in the above clip, is what the composited image of the two characters together looks like:

The separate blue screen passes with Ruffus and the Sheep were then cut and composited together in Final Cut Pro on my laptop. For the compositing I used the DVMatte Pro plug-in from DVGarage – it does way more cool things than I could be bothered playing with, I just slapped it on and gave it a little light-wrap and that was it. Easy peasy.

Of course, because I was in a hurry, I fucked up the lighting. There was not only a lot of blue spill on the laptop in the scene – which made it half-disappear during the composite – there was also an uncovered window in the room I was shooting in which had the shifting light of a partly cloudy day playing on everything. That’s sort of light-shifting shit can be fine with characters that are moving around but it made the foreground elements of the computer and the books look pretty dodgy as they went light and dark throughout the scene – so I did a quick Photoshop paste-up job on a frame grab of just the foreground and slapped that on as an extra layer to keep everything solid.

Oh – and the Sheep footage was all shot as closeups so it had to be reduced in size to match with the shots where the Sheep and Ruffus appear together. Fussy little stuff.

Here’s an image showing the separate layers that went into making the final image.

All this dicking around in post took only three hours to complete but it took a dog’s age to export as a Quicktime movie (I’m only using an old, original, MacBook Pro for this stuff and it’s pretty much had the shit kicked out of it over the years, some of the keys are missing, the case is corroded & scratched, there’s some kind of weird scum on the screen and the whole thing smells like an old book made from recycled underwear – just so you know) and then, naturally, I found some minor mistakes and had to fix them and re-render the whole thing. That actually happened twice. Eventually it was finished and good enough to post.

The audio sucks but I was in a hurry and it’ll be better next time.

I know my professional colleagues and friends in the industry are probably shaking their heads and muttering: “Mills, Mills, Mills – what the fuck are you doing this for?” but I’m actually enjoying the DIY aspect of the work. It’s very much like the days of my youth I spent in my friend Bryan’s garage making crappy little stop-motion Super-8 films with our tripod strapped to the lawn mower as a dolly. It sucked, sure, but it worked.

Will these little promos help drive traffic to the Ruffus web site? I have no metrics on this at the moment so I have no fucking clue – but, as I said, they are fun way to play around with easily accessible tech and it’s a proving ground for other material I want to shoot with Ruffus and the other characters, expanding this material beyond the existing episodes.

We shall see.

In time I’ll be collecting a bunch of interviews and photos to showcase how the original Ruffus episodes were created – which is more for use on the Ruffus web site than just for this blog but I’ll be sure to share a bunch of that here too.

Let me know what you think.

Cheers.

P. S. Be sure to check out the full episode of Little Red Riding Hood on the Ruffus The Dog web site.

UPDATE: Since this post I’ve jammed another episode online for the Ruffus web site. It’s Little Bo Peep and it features a gloriously heart rending song – sung by a dog – in a dress. Go figure.