Puppet Kaos -

There’s my new camera and a new script in the picture. I got the camera last week and wrote a new script for a video several days ago. Does that mean there will be a video soon? I hope so, but I’m not so sure since I do have plans for travelling. Regardless, we are back in production! It’s only a matter of time for the release of a new episode.

The camera I bought to replace my old Canon ELURA 100 is a Canon Optura 400. I actually was not considering it in the beginning because it was priced at $1200, which is way out of my price range. I was trying to decide between getting another Canon ELURA 100 or a Panasonic GS320, both of which I can buy new at about $350. But when I saw that I could get a refurbished Canon Optura 400 for about the same price, I decided to go for it. I was a little reluctant to buy refurbished stuff, because I don’t know if there would be problems, but that was a huge saving and I wanted to try it out.

As of right now, I’ve played around with the new camera but I haven’t really recorded anything yet. I’ll write more about it once I’ve actually filmed some stuff with it.

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Actually, I didn’t know that it’s the National Day of Puppetry today until reading this post on Puppeteers Unite. Oops. If I had known about it sooner, maybe I would’ve made a video about it. But anyway, here’s some stuff that’s going to happen around here (puppetry-related, that is).

• I am currently writing a tutorial on how to make Bobby, following up on the posts about how to make Mac and Cheese and Bottle Monster.
• I am writing new episodes of Puppet Kaos at the moment. And I’ll start filming and editing next week!
• Next week, we celebrate the 20-year anniversary of a puppet character’s debut. I’m in the middle of taking screen shots from video footages over the last 20 years, and it should be fun to look at the progression once I put them in order!

Stay tuned.

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Note: Semi-technical and unrelated-to-puppetry post ahead.

Recently I’ve been having problems commenting on some other people’s blogs. I would enter a comment and then it will not show up. It would not give an error message either. And if I tried to send that comment again, it would say duplicate comment detected. So that meant the comment was stored somewhere into the database. So what’s wrong? I did a little bit of Googling around and I think I found the reason. And the culprit? Akismet.

In case you are not familiar with Akismet, it’s a spam filter that’s installed on many blogs. The idea is that it would look at the comment, and if the system thinks it’s comment spam, it would mark the comment as spam and not show it. However, recently it’s been marking all my comments as spam, as long as I enter my web address. Now, any automated systems can have what we called false positives but the system is also supposed to learn from the mistakes when the comments it blocked are marked “not spam”.

Well, it didn’t. Derek unblocked a comment and Michelle unblocked a comment from me, but the system didn’t seem to be learning. Ah, this is all very annoying.

That said, I installed the plug-in myself to observe its behavior. They say to keep your friends close and enemy closer, right? While Akismet is not really “enemy”, I’d like to start using it so I can monitor its behavior and hopefully figure out how it behaves… although it’s a black box and what I can do is probably limited.

EDIT: A few hours after this post went live, I received a comment from “Mark” (from Akismet support, see comment below) that the problem has been fixed. I’m surprised by how fast they responded, especially since I didn’t even try to contact them directly. I did not bother to contact them directly because all the articles I’ve read online said that they got no response when they filled out the contact form on the Akismet website for similar problems. I guess they do check their trackbacks? Anyway, I’m glad that it’s resolved in a timely manner. And I think at least I owe them this quick follow-up to explain what happened afterwards.

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This past month and half I’ve been dealing with a lot of annoyance. First we were evicted from the apartment, because my roommate probably didn’t pay rent and didn’t bother to tell me about the eviction notice. And then a week later, my car was stolen. So since then, I’ve been commuting while sharing a car. And since I had quite a few things to deal with, I couldn’t really make new videos. Besides, for two weeks or so, most of my puppets and video making stuff were locked up in the apartment until I was allowed to go in to move stuff out. Well, at least I got most of my stuff back, except that my video camera was stolen. The experience was upsetting, but it’s also nice to know how supportive my family and friends are.

Anyway, I think we’ll be back to production soon. Yeah, there was a lot of annoyance to deal with but that doesn’t mean I stopped thinking about puppetry and dreaming up ideas. I am hoping to make new videos pretty soon, because I seriously haven’t made one for a while. So stay tuned!

Meanwhile, I’ve watched this video series on Expert Village about movements with puppets by Kate Brehm. Many of the things she covered about movements and weight I’ve already been made aware of by reading about animation and by experimentation, but it was nice to see things explained and better yet, demonstrated again, in the puppetry context. If you are interested in puppeteering, it’s a nice tutorial/refresher. I found the link via the PuppetVision blog.

Recently I’ve also been reading Sherlock Holmes a lot. I’ve loved reading Sherlock Holmes since I was little, and every now and then I’d start reading it again. It’s nice that it was written about 100 years ago, and therefore no longer protected by copyright for the most part. Reading is pretty fun.

Oh, and baseball season started. Now that’s something to be excited about!

Hm, this post totally lacks focus, doesn’t it?

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Thursday morning I was waken up by people knocking on the door. Turned out that it was two officers from Los Angeles County Sheriff, the apartment manager, and someone sent by the owner to change locks. The officer told us to grab our car keys and cell phones and leave the premise. I was told that my roommate hasn’t been paying rent. Oh well, being the good citizen that I am, I just complied. My roommate kept talking and talking to them, saying how she doesn’t have any place to go, etc. But I never understand people that do that though. It’s not going to help you out in any way. I don’t understand people that fight battles that they can’t possibly win, especially when there’s a court order present and police officers enforcing it.

Anyway, we had to leave the premise. I just went to work. It’s interesting that I’m pretty calm throughout this whole thing. I mean, it did annoy me that I have to spend time dealing with this stuff, but I refuse to let this event become the focus of my daily life. Though I’m going to have to move home (actually, there weren’t much to move since we couldn’t really take too many things since we had to leave immediately) and then commute to work from there, I’m still going to be doing the things I do. I’m still going to go to work. I’m still going to be working on this puppetry stuff, speaking of which, I have a little bit of news:

That very afternoon, I went to the UCLA campus for a rehearsal. I haven’t mentioned this project on this site yet, but I’m going to be puppeteering in film student Allyson Schwarz’s new film: Seamus and Magellan. The rehearsal was pretty chill and fun. It was more for the cast members to get familiar with each other. Here’s the story: When ten year old Sam’s older brother, Jonas, leaves home, he is forced by his mother to start growing up. When his goth sister, Anna, tells Sam about the “forgotten brother” locked away in the closet, Sam’s imagination goes into overdrive and out comes the seemingly harmless imaginary friends, Seamus and Magellan, who are all about fun and games, though not all the games are harmless. I will play Magellan who is this stuffed koala that comes to life. Should be a fun project to do.

Oh, and we rehearsed in a TV studio in Melnitz Hall (That’s the film department building at UCLA). And I got to see the TV studio control room. It was pretty cool. There’s this huge panel with lots of bottons. The cameras weren’t on, but you can still press the buttons to switch to different cameras (though in that case we just see different kinds of static), and then there are also buttons for all kinds of different wipes. That was interesting to see. I know a lot of cutting and wipes can be done in post-production in movies, but in TV, where you have multiple cameras rolling at the same time, those are the tools you use. That was cool to me.

Filming is this weekend. More updates about the film later!

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I’ve just installed Comment luv. This WordPress plug-in will grab the title of the most recent post and provide a link to it if you leave a comment with your website/blog if it has an RSS feed. (If you have a blog, then it probably has an RSS feed.) Now, as far as I know, most of my readers aren’t bloggers but the ones that leave comments often are. But either way, I thought it’s a fun and nice plug-in to have on this site!

Now I can check that off my new year resolutions list (which I sort of have).

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2007 has come to an end. Now it’s 2008. This year, I will

1) Keep the website running and updated: They say that an average blogger burn out after 6 months, and if they can keep going after 6 months, it will keep going for quite a while. I started doing serious posting in July 2007 so I’m around the 6 month point. We’ll see what happens.
2) Make a new header for this site (or at least try) that has pictures of puppets
3) Install the Comment Luv plug-in that Bloggrrl recommended
4) Make more puppets (possibly learn how to use a sewing machine?)
5) Make some music for the videos instead of always use Creative Commons stuff

Mark my words.

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Hi guys. I am going to deviate from my original set schedule of releasing an episode every Wednesday. What I realized is that sometimes I am trying to rush things out by Wednesday night and I end up dropping certain shots that’s harder to do. And sometimes I have an episode idea queued up just because I can’t possibly finish everything within a week. (And by a week I mean one or two nights… what? You don’t expect me to work on these videos every night, right? Nobody is paying me to do this full time. :-P)

So yeah, I will keep on releasing new episodes, but not at such regular intervals. Having a deadline has its benefits though. It really keeps me thinking about possible sketch ideas all the time so a lot of ideas come to me nowadays. (They are not always good ideas but some of them are.) So since I already have that going, having a strict deadline becomes less important.

Thanks again for supporting this podcast. Oh, did I mention that there won’t be an episode tonight? :-p

PS. I am thinking the next episode would be tofu-related.

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Puppet Kaos is now on Puppet Madness!

Puppet Madness is this new video site that hosts puppet videos. It’s like a puppet video Youtube. Man, all these specialty tubes nowadays: I already knew there’s GodTube for Christian stuff, FoodTube.net for recipes and other food goodness, and now there’s Puppet Madness.

Better yet, currently three of our videos are featured on the homepage! (But of course, that obviously tells you that there aren’t that many users yet… :-P) It’s quite a new site and I’d say there’s still quite some tweaking to do. For example, I can’t find a support email or FAQ page, which is quite strange. Some buttons aren’t working properly and they are cropping my videos sort of weird. I like the simple interface though. And they have some serious marketing to do… videos on the front page shouldn’t be getting less than 10 views!

Would this site take off? I don’t know. I don’t think there’s enough people that would care about puppets enough to regularly visit the site to have significant traffic to compete with YouTube or other hosting services though. I view it more as a community and forum where different puppeteers and producers can post their videos and look at each other’s work. I like the design of the site though. Hopefully it gets bigger.

If you want to see the Puppet Kaos page on Puppet Madness, here’s the link:
http://www.puppetmadness.com/membervideos.php?uid=67

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Hi all, there will not be a new episode this week (aww…), because
a) I’m waiting for my newly purchased green screen to arrive (I hope it does, since I haven’t had anything delivered to this new address yet)
b) I’m going to finally check out Avenue Q tonight!!! (Oh man, I’ve wanted to see it for years.)

So here’s what to expect this week:
a) my review on Avenue Q, while it was fresh in my mind
b) how to make Bottle Monster (who is, in fact, very similar to Mac and Cheese)
c) perhaps some other production notes?
d) a green screen test video if it arrives early enough

And I’d like to thank you all again for checking out this blog.

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