We whip-pan from Leo & Donald to Amanda and then to Vonky in the glass case as Donald demands to know where his daughter is.

This is a low stationary shot with the camera set directly on the floor. Donald appears clutching his paper towels, causing some concern for Leo and Amanda. Leo helps Donald with his overcoat, causing the Bounty to fall and bounce toward Amanda. That happens a little too quickly so I think I’ll work the paper towels into a future scene so we know they’re there.

We see a pantless man enter the scene, dragging a stretch of toilet paper stuck to his dress show. There is only a slight focus pull here.

I originally planned to have Donald’s pants down around his ankles, but I figured I wouldn’t be able to animate him stepping up that step. Turns out that was a mistake. I could have just put the pants around one ankle. Oh well — it’s too late now because I had already animated the next two shots when I remembered this. So now I’m trying to come up with a place to show his pants coming off his feet in an earlier shot. Hard to do when there is timed music involved. We’ll see…

This is a tracking shot that swoops in, under the theater marquee. Right on cue, Amanda emerges from the airlock, assisted by Leonardo DiCaprio in a tux. She is suddenly wearing a business suit and high heels.

Here I go full frame versus 16:9 with a vignette, to sell the idea that this is a film noir production inside POSERS.

The heels are extremely difficult to animate her on, since I’m not using traditional rigging. I’m relying solely on my ability to pose the puppets using their own weight and balance. So there are occasional falls that take a lot of time to reset.

This is a 592-frame tracking shot with a deep focus pull on both ends, starting from The Joker slurping a soda, to our sexy Assistant Director holding a movie clapboard. It took two or three weeks to set this up, running through over a dozen test shots.

This is one of the few live video shots in POSERS, since it was important to catch those animated LED lights in their natural sequence. There are significant technical challenges when mixing live video and stop motion animation. I know what the solutions are, but they require new feature requests from Dragonframe and some custom Arduino programming on my side to create pausable/steppable sequence controllers for the lights. The Dragonframe team also stepped up to fix a few overspeed warning bugs for their new Digital Focus feature.

The music is based on Neal Hefti’s classic Batman Theme, lending this shot a surreal retro feel along with the natural bokah effect. POSERS is probably the shortest film ever with an intermission.

The USS Enterprise fires a single Photon Torpedo upon the Louvre.

“Give me a ping, Vasily. One ping only, please.”

Kirk orders Sulu to fire on the Louvre.

I’ll be replacing this shot with puppetry, but I don’t have a Chekhov to rightly take the navigator seat.

However, I did just acquire this set of 3D printed Star Trek chairs in 1:6 scale from a fellow Trekkie in Glasgow. (The cast isn’t yet posed to replace this shot, but you get the idea.)

This is the epilogue for POSERS, but it’s pretty much done. Except that if I have the energy later, I’d like to replace some of live action with stop motion. I do have the flags, Kim, Trump, Dennis — and Kim’s sister is coming soon from China, I hope.

Donald Trump’s infamous meeting with Kim Jong-un in Singapore on June 12, 2018 was a big inspiration for one of the subplots in POSERS, because it represented the normalization of two mafia-level, sadistic dictators.

I had long referred to Dennis Rodman as Trump’s Ambassador to North Korea, but CNN’s Chris Cuomo really sealed the deal by interviewing Rodman in Prime Time.

So to a part of that interview, I added layer upon layer of music and dialogue — including Kim’s character voice from POSERS and Trump’s actual voice as a public figure saying the most absurd things to Kim, caught on a hot mic.

In the background we hear the Summit’s venue playing a tinny, sappy song I recorded directly from the same Barbie Princess record player we saw earlier in the Bunker of Evil.

And in a headset surround sound effect, we hear a News Director (played by my sister-in-law) try to call shots amidst the chaos and technical difficulties — including a network Chyron operator who goes rogue for comedic effect.

In the end, Rodman essentially concludes the North Koreans are good people, and that his friend Kim Jong-un is perpetually misunderstood.

The scene fast-forwards to the infamous 2020 presidential debate in which Joe Biden tells an out-of-control Donald Trump, “Will you shut up, man?”

And then we end our show with our News Director aghast. “TV doesn’t get any better than this,” she sighs as she pops a beer. “And that’s a wrap.”

I haven’t posted in a long while so I have a lot of catching up to do.

Act 6 will feature the shortest and most expensive scenes in POSERS. I’ve built the largest two sets that I can fit in my tiny studio. They’re roughly 84 inches long, 32 inches tall, and 48 inches deep.

The first set is the exterior of a fictional theater at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, complete with an elaborate LED lighting scheme.

The second set is the adjacent grand entry hall with enormous picture windows overlooking the tarmac. That set will feature an animated, motorized moving walkway that I am custom-building.

Both of these subscenes will feature my most ambitious work yet. Or at least that’s how it always feels during the terror of preproduction.

Today I spent hours addressing the additional requirements of my trademark examiner.

Lt. Sulu is at the helm, doing an internet search for “midget porn.” But that’s not quite what comes up on YouTube.

I just tonight added Lt. Uhura to these first few shots. She’s preggers, and dancing with cat bells.