Ruffus The Dog’s Christmas Carol is now online and available for the world to see and share. You can even watch it here:
It would help a lot if you go to the YouTube site to Like and Comment on the show. That kind of audience engagement – *cough*buzzwords*couch* – really does make a difference.
We’ll also be posting it to our Blip.tv channel and a bunch of other sites very soon – as in: as soon as I can get my shit together to do so.
I promise to write a whole bunch more about how we made it, with photos and clips, and what our next steps will be for the Ruffus project – but for now you can check out what other people are saying by checking out their posts and leaving comments:
Please share this show with as many others as you can. It’s our gift to everyone for the holidays.
Download links will be posted soon – and if you want to watch the earlier Ruffus episodes you can find them on the official Ruffus web site.
And if you really really like JP Houston’s song “Merry Merry” you can find it on our Bandcamp site as a free download. It’s an immensely catchy tune and deserves to be heard over and over again. Enjoy!
Cheers.
P. S. Comments here are also appreciated. Tell me what you think of the show – I’d really like to know.
The full production will premiere online on December 17th. We’re also having a screening at the Revue Cinema that day where Ruffus will appear in person to answer questions. I’ll probably be there too.
On that same Saturday we will also be hosting a public screening at the historic Revue Cinema here in Toronto. Showtime: 11:00 am.
Here’s the poster for the show.
Not bad, huh?
Limited copies of the poster will be printed, signed and sent to our generous Indie Go-Go donors. There’s still time for you to get yours by visiting our Indie Go-Go campaign page and making a donation.
If you are in the neighbourhood – that would be Parkdale, west end of Toronto – and if you’re up for a family friendly matinee screening of a Christmas classic then come on by. After the screening there will be a brief Q&A with Ruffus – live on stage! The pay-what-you-can box office proceeds will be donated to the Toronto Public Library Foundation.
The holidays are fast approaching and I made a promise last year that our Ruffus The Dog’s Christmas Carol would be finished and released by then. Here’s how you can help make it so.
When we started the project we attempted, through Indie Go-Go, to raise the full $8,500 we expected we could scrape by on to make the whole thing work and release it to the world. We only managed to achieve $2,090 but that generosity from our supporters convinced us to carry on and go ahead with the shoot. I’ve blogged about that before – here and here and here – and here’s our original Indie Go-Go pitch.
Well now, after almost a year of gradually, inexorably (if not continually) working on the post production of the show we are coming down to the wire. The many favours and dedicated sweat equity contributed, in addition to the much needed cash, have carried us almost to completion but once again we find ourselves in need of real money to ensure the project gets finished at the level of quality it deserves and to enable us to release it to the world on time for the holiday season.
The show will be released online for free streaming and downloading with the option to buy DVD copies, songs, posters, calendars, t-shirts and (hopefully) a graphic photo-novella. But it’s gotta all be done and ready for release before December 15th.
Our clock is ticking.
If you can contribute that would be freaking awesome. If you can’t you can still help us with word-of-mouth, just telling people about the project.
Full Disclosure: When I refer to “we” on this project I am mostly referring to “me”, since I’m the guy who has always chosen to wear too many hats. Hey – I got a fat head – might as well use it, right? But I always say “we” because I am not a one-man-band; I rely upon and have benefited from the extraordinary generosity of my friends and family – all of them colleagues and collaborators in this work with me. I couldn’t do a thing without them.
Thanks in advance for your generosity. If you have any comments or suggestions or if you have any questions please feel free to post them here or via email.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back in the basement and keep working on the show.
I know – I know – it’s been months since I last posted anything about our online holiday special: Ruffus The Dog’s Christmas Carol. What can I say? I’ve been busy. I had to pay the rent. My car had a flat tire. My suit was still at the cleaners. My dog ate it. Insert applicable lame excuse here.
Actually, I have been working on it and as it slowly nears completion I eke out small portions to share with other people to get their opinion and to just generally let folks know I’m not neglecting the task at hand.
Here’s a few more.
As you may recall from previous posts about the production and some behind the scenes footage – this production of Charles Dicken’s classic is just a tad out of the ordinary.
We shot this thing in my living room. We used green screen in a very small area with no prepared background elements prior to shooting. It was all very much a seat-of-your-pants kind of shoot. Everyone who worked on it wore several hats and helped out with everything that needed to be done. It was a lot of fun.
All the backgrounds – our virtual sets – are being constructed after the edit was completed. We had to get the timed cut done so JP Hosuton, our composer, could record the soundtrack. He worked with a lot of rough images, layered un-composited green screen shots and a lot of frames with just text describing what the hell was supposed to be going on.
The task of creating the CG virtual sets has fallen to me and I now find myself esconced in my basement edit suite working on a Hackintosh (thank you, Mark!) with just Final Cut Pro, PhotoShop and Cinema 4D to craft and piece together the necessary elements for all 230 separate shots – most of which contain 4 to 10 layers of footage. Wheee!
Sounds like work – but it is fun.
I am liking what is coming out. It looks good. I wish it was going faster. I wish I had some staff to do things for me – like get another beer. I wish – well – as they used to say: “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Wishing won’t get me closer to completing the work. All there is for me to do is to just fucking do it.
And that I am.
Here’s a song clip for you. It’s one of JP’s great tunes – it takes place during the visitation from the Ghost Of Christmas Past where she shows Scrooge how his lust for money lost him love for Alice.
Let me know what you think.
There’s more to come. Much more.
Cheers.
P. S. It is definitely odd to be spending the dog days summer cutting together snow scenes.
Here’s a brief clip from our production of Ruffus The Dog’s Christmas Carol. I’m posting this to show what I’ve been up to these past few weeks as I continue to work on the edit for the show. The audio isn’t properly mixed yet but I’m liking how this whole thing is looking.
When we first produced Ruffus for television broadcast we had a very low budget and managed to get creative in pursuit of our solutions to make the show and tell the stories we wanted to share with our young viewers. Our puppet characters were shot in a studio against blue/green screen – we would shoot one show each day and then spend another week shooting all our backgrounds. These backgrounds were cut-out water colour paintings – mounted on cardboard and set up on a rotating turntable. We took that idea from the Fleischer Brothers who did similar things for their animations with Popeye and other characters.
Our similar approach was a simple solution to the very big problem of how to craft multiple sets and locations that looked different from just a flat painted background. And it was fun moving the individual miniature set pieces around to make a new scene – very much like playing with a toy theatre. I liked it.
But that gave the show a very particular look. It worked but it was decidedly low-end. For this production of Dickens’ classic tale we wanted to achieve a richer look – and, of course, with an even smaller budget. Insane! The shoot was 4 days and has resulted in a 37 minute final cut. We couldn’t afford a studio so we shot in my living room with a very minimal lighting kit. The original shows were shot on digi-beta and cut on an Avid. My respect for our editor, Frank Moressa, grows with each day I work on this and bang my head on the keyboard.
This was shot on a Sony XDCam – generously donated for the shoot and operated by Kit Pasold and is being posted on a Hackintosh using Final Cut Pro. My dear friend, Mark Achtenberg, (a very talented editor, writer, director) donated the hackintosh because my plan to cut it all on my laptop just wasn’t feasible with the file sizes of the HD footage.
High definition is awesome!
I’m used to working fast and loose on my productions. I honestly expected to be able to complete the post work on the show in just 3 weeks. I did the final timed cut in a single week in order to get the footage to JP Houston to work on the music score – and he has delivered an outstanding set of tracks. But when I saw how good our footage was I fell in love with it all and wanted to be sure our backgrounds could live up to the same visual standards.
This time the backgrounds are all being created in Cinema 4D. We didn’t have that kind of tech at our disposal back when we did the original shows. The ability to build the sets in three dimensions and light them and choose our camera angles to match our shot footage is an incredible treat. The clip above is just a wee taste of what’s going on inside that big black hackintosh box I’ve been working on. I’m trying not to get too fussy with the work – there’s flaws throughout but I’m happy with what we’re getting and intent on making this production worthy of everyone’s dedication in getting it made and to ensure it has an audience and a life long after it’s been completed and released.
The work goes on. I’ll be posting some more clips and photos next week. Onward!
Cheers.
P.S.
Here’s one of the Fleischer cartoons that used the table top model system I described. They called it the Steroptical Process and it was created in response to Disney’s innovation of the multi-plane animation camera – which provided true depth of field to cel animation.
Although the look of what the Fleischer’s came up with was outstanding they used it sparingly in their productions because it was craft-heavy and labour intensive to make these juicy miniature backgrounds.
As you may have noticed I’ve been posting a lot about our efforts to get Ruffus The Dog’s “A Christmas Carol” financed through contributions from the crowd-funding web site IndieGoGo.
The time has run out for that effort and while we didn’t raise the full $8,500 we were hoping to, we did clear over $2,000 and managed to garner a bit of attention for the show itself. It’s all good.
The process of using IndieGoGo was an interesting learning experience. I have no doubts we’ll bring other productions forward through that site. The level of participation from contributors is a difficult one to anticipate; I’m sure everybody thinks their own project is the absolute most bestest in the whole universe. There are a lot of great recommendations from the operators of the site on how to best leverage awareness of your project and ensure you are getting the maximum return for your efforts – but it is up to you to make it happen.
Did I do everything humanely possible to guarantee full or even excess funding of “A Christmas Carol”? No, of course not – I’m a lazy procrastinating slob with too much work in front of him and preternaturally shy about blowing my own horn. We did have a lot of help from many people out there – friends, family, colleagues and total strangers – to which we are indebted. It’s gratifying and humbling to see others get out and make noise in an effort to help us in this quest.
Thanks to you all from the bottom of my sordid little heart.
Today is Tuesday – next week, on Monday, we will begin shooting “A Christmas Carol”. I’ll be documenting the entire process here on this blog and probably on another site set up just for that show. There will be photos and tweets and possibly a live video feed on UStream. We can’t get too ambitious with all that because we do have a show to shoot and that is, perforce, ambitious enough in its own right.
When it is all finished and ready for release it will, of course, show up on the official Ruffus The Dog web site as well as its own online location, and right here and on YouTube and anywhere else we can place it.
There’s a lot for me to do between now and when we wrap the shoot – as well as thereafter with our tight post-production schedule – and while there is plenty for me to be raving, raging and ragging on about (TSA, Copyright, Internet Censorship, stupid cat videos, Net Neutrality, the Singularity, government corruption, cool art, corporate malfeasance, fascist hijinks and general monkey assholery to name but a few) I shan’t be able to indulge my usual blog musings in earnest for a while. That doesn’t mean you won’t see things posted here – I am, after all a lazy procrastinating slob – just that my posts may be somewhat minimal for a few more weeks.
After all is said and done will it have been worth it?
Of course! I get the chance to play with my friends in a creative endeavour and tell a great story in our own way and show it to the world. What’s wrong with that? Paying the bills would be nice too but that’s gonna have to wait until we’re finished this – then I’ll go out and get a job and complain about it at length here.
In the meantime, I’m taking great comfort and inspiration from a slender little volume I picked up at our local bookshop – The River Trading Company, on Queen West (the real Queen West: Parkdale) – where I found it perched in their front window display of nifty holiday stuff.
It’s an Atlantic Monthly Press 1920 reproduction of the original edition.
I don’t believe in omens and signs but I’ll take what I can get – and this will be the book Ruffus reads from in the show.
Once again – my deepest thanks to everyone who contributed and supported our fund raising efforts – our creative team will now strive to make the best Ruffus show possible. Keep tuning in for updates.
Relax. Breathe in – breathe out – repeat if necessary.
It’s all good.
I’ve already posted about our funding efforts – you can find some of them here and here and here.
We don’t have nearly as much money as we intended to have in order to pull this off – but that’s not going to stop us. The production is going ahead as planned. If you – or anyone you know – can help by contributing even a few dollars via IndieGoGo it will go a long way to helping make this exercise in creative insanity just a little less impossible than it already is.
I may make it sound like our efforts to release this production of “A Christmas Carol” online by December 21st are nothing more than a folly doomed to failure – but actually I’m delighted with what we’ve been able to achieve in such a short time with so few resources. This is going to be an amazing show. It would not have been possible without the dedication and determination of the talented team who have come together to help make this happen.
You can help too. Visit http://www.indiegogo.com/ruffus-the-dog and tell others to do the same. We’re counting on you to help get us across the finish line with enough in hand to make this journey work.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go finish my storyboards, render more CG virtual sets and make a Flying Spaghetti Monster – you know – for kids.
Today I posted this short video as part of our last efforts to raise productions funds through IndieGoGo for “Ruffus The Dog’s A Christmas Carol”.
The process of using IndieGoGo has been interesting and I’m pretty sure it will prove to be useful for other projects we come up with in the future. Our initial goal was for $8,500 which was a painfully low amount considering how ambitious this production has become. With only 5 days left to our IndieGoGo deadline we have only managed to secure about 20% of our goal – but we’re forging ahead with production regardless.
I’m sure I could have done a better or more aggressive job of promoting our efforts to raise funds but all excuses and caveats aside – I’m a puppeteer, dammit! We did manage to get a very nice mention in BoingBoing which helped draw a lot of attention to all this nonsense we’re up to.
Luckily, I’ve been blessed with a team of friends and colleagues who are both dedicated and talented. Their generous contribution of time and skill will be what makes our version of “A Christmas Carol” really shine.
Our shoot days are coming up fast and I’m looking forward to the four days of hilarity and hard work that lie in store for all of us.
The miraculous Jane Edmondson, assisted by Tatiana Hernandez-Deutsch, has been creating wonderful miniature ealry Victorian wardrobe for our cast of puppet characters. And our designer, Karen Valleau is crafting new puppet characters and just finished an exquisite snowglobe with St. Paul’s Cathedral inside.
Earlier this evening I had a Skype call with our composer, JP Houston – he’s currently in L.A. recording and rehearsing for a European band tour – and he’s been sending me demo tracks of the songs for this production and they are frickin’ awesome. Unfortunately he won’t be able to come to Toronto for the song recording sessions so we’ve been organizing a back-and-forth effort with him sending tracks here – we record the vocals and send them back – and so on and so forth until my brain melts out my ass.
It’s all fun and games until someone’s brain melts out their ass.
And for those who know me well – today I found myself alone in the kitchen making production sketches – and involuntarily let loose with one of those maniacal laughs.
Felt good.
Please, do what you can to help us out – or at least encourage others to help – every little bit is greatly needed and appreciated. The finished show WILL released online on December 21st. So there.
Here’s the original IndieGoGo pitch video:
And here, of course, is the widget that leads you to our IndieGoGo pages:
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go edit some footage of Sinbad the Sailor and these two pigs, Ray & Harry, the Hausen brothers.
The song in it, composed by JP Houston, is probably one of the weirdest dreamy and hallucinogenic songs I’ve had the pleasure for performing for a kids television show. Another remarkable thing about this particular episode is that we only had five puppeteers for that day so the cast o’ thousands was created using layer upon layer of puppets being dressed and re-redressed to helped form a visual crowd. Nutty stuff you have to do when you don’t have a budget.
Speaking of budgets – we’re less than 2 weeks away from the end of our fund raising efforts over at our IndieGoGo pages and we are no where near reaching our target of $8,500. Those monies are meant to cover the hard costs associated with putting together this production and it is a paltry amount. We’re sued to working with small budgets – but come on!. $8,500 for a half hour holiday special with 3 original songs, CG virtual sets and a cast of puppets in period costumes?
That, ladies and jellybeans, boys and gorillas, is a frickin’ bargoon!
So PLEASE tell everyone you know to chip in however little they can so we can get this production made without having to resort to pulling a Bakshi by making the last half of the show into a post-it-note flip-book of the storyboards.
No matter how much – or how little – we raise we are doing this and it will be freakin’ awesome.
Here’s a glimpse of the CG Victorian London we’ll be “shooting” in:
Our shoot dates are set for Nov.29th to Dec. 2nd. The edit, CG effects and audio mix will be done within 3 weeks after that so we can meet our release date of Tuesday, December 21st.
What we are trying to accomplish is, admittedly, insane – but that means we’re the right people for the job.
Tell your friends. Tell your family. Tweet this. Digg it. Promote it. Share it!Give what you can. Many thanks.
Cheers.
UPDATE: We’ve been featured on the IndieGoGo pages – again! Don’t know how long that will be up – but there it is. Thanks IndieGoGo!
I'm going to be slowly making some changes to the website both in format and content - and I'm pretty sure even the URL will change.
It's going to be more of a personal news aggregator with a featured video blog from yours truly. We'll see how long that lasts. So bear with me - thanks.
It's going to be more of a personal news aggregator with a featured video blog from yours truly. We'll see how long that lasts. So bear with me - thanks.