Sushi misidentifies James as the actor from The Hunt for Red Octopussy — a portmanteau of two related films. Hilarious? I think so.

Okay, here we go with my first flying scene. Degree of difficulty? Yes.

The murder hornets we met in shots 105 and 107 have gotten curious while James and Sushi try to work things out.

I went through a dozen setups for this key shot, and settled on creating a bridge from my camera table to my set table using a steel yardstick. The space between those tables is where I need to maneuver in order to animate the scene.

These hornets came with stands, and the yardstick has all the inches marked off, naturally. So the goal was to make the Boss Hornet jump off the cherry tree and fly over to the Vespa for a better look.

If you look close in the bottom right shadows, the smaller hornet is already on the patio, playing with (and wearing) the hat James threw over there previously.

Okay, so how do we pull this off? Through a process called rigging and de-rigging.

First, for every shot in the sequence we take two exposures. These get put into separate timelines by the Dragonframe animation software. You can use multiple exposures for just that — typically different F-stops. Or you can use them for creating background plates for shots like this.

A background plate is an exposure that has everything except the flying object that you’re animating.

Then you take the real shot of the flying object either held up by a stand, or hanging from a string.

And finally, in Photoshop, you erase the rigging in the top layer, thereby exposing the background within the area you erased. This must be done for every affected frame, and then the video is reconstructed in Final Cut Pro from the processed frames.

And like magic, the flying hornet’s stand disappeared from the composited clip.

So for each frame, I moved the hornet’s stand by a set number of inches, easing into it from the jump-off point, then accelerating, and then slowing for an air-brake landing with wings spread.

Yes, it’s painstaking. But so is life. And the payoff was awesome, watching my wife’s jaw drop the first time she saw a buzzing, flailing piece of plastic fly across my studio. And better yet, a friend actually asked me if that was CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery)!

When the Boss Hornet lands on the Vespa, I made sure to animate the Vespa rolling back to sell the audience on the physics of the situation. I mentioned that I own an actual Vespa, so a sound effect of something hefty (like me), jostling that real scooter with a satisfying ‘clunk-clunk’ completes the illusion.

Don’t forget the power of a good sound effect!

Oh — before we leave this shot. The green screen you can see through the open door will be filled in later with a properly angled interior shot.

Here’s Sushi directing James to the village’s nearest gay disco. And again, since now James has leaned back, her arm is strategically posed for the big reveal.

Sushi and James have both watched his hat crash into the flower pots. This is an homage to how, in the old 007 movies, James Bond always showed off his hat-throwing skills to tease Moneypenny. But now he can’t seem to hit the broad side of a minka, let alone a coat rack.

While Sushi never seems to mind that James just used her water fountain as a urinal (perhaps because this isn’t really her house), she did just notice that James’ fly is still wide open.

Now I could have shot that from her POV but we’ve already established that James has a nice dick and there’s no need to belabor that point since we have a story to tell.

Also this is our first hint that Sushi might be — could she be? Topless. Here I use another trick from Austin Powers and the old Pink Panther movies. Over the next few shots I’ll be intentionally obstructing Sushi’s amazingly perky breasts. This trope shall be known henceforth as ‘titillation.’

In this shot, Sushi is upset at coming face-to-face with a maskless stranger, but he happens to have a mask handy at the front door for such occasions — just like my wife does.

When tossing an object from one puppet to another, you can pull the old knife-throw trick used in live action shows. Here, there’s enough stiffness in the mask’s fishing line ear straps to hold it up in the air, thereby simulating centrifugal force for the fraction of a second necessary to achieve the sleight-of-hand illusion in the next shot.

(We’ll cover actual flying animation in future scenes.)

James is startled in mid-pee when Sushi greets him with “Konnichiwa.”

The camera angle here is intentional. James is not only physically taller than Sushi, but we perform a tilt down in the next shot to introduce the notion that James is a misogynist, conditioned to look down on women.

That watercolor wallpaper behind the rosewood screen is a placeholder. It’s a green screen shot that will be filled with an interior shot later.

Notice Sushi’s mask, and the flowers behind her — both pink. That tree is also made in Thailand from plasticine. Meanwhile, Annette Pardini (@mydollasylum on Instagram) has made quite a few custom costume pieces for POSERS, including what I affectionately call Sushi’s “face diaper” in this scene.

James hands Sushi his business card. This was a live action shot with my wife and I wearing latex gloves. As the card passes from James to Sushi, we again transition from B&W to color. It’s the subtle things…

This is basically Buddha’s reaction shot with James wondering out load, “How dew Oi flush dis ting?”

We pan up from James’ POV to spy a urine-sprayed security camera, which shows James’ transgression in its lens reflection as we see the sliding panel door opening behind him.

This is my first instance of some tricky animation being intentionally downplayed. It sends a message to the audience that this film is less about its technical execution and more about the story that’s about to spew forth.

So yeah. That’s a puppet penis. And this just became an R-rated film or a TV-M show. So brace yourselves.

James, in his state of desperate deterioration, has mistaken the Buddha water fountain for a Japanese toilet so he ‘Rainbirds’ all over its face.

Feel free to be shocked, offended, disgusted or amused by this. I don’t care which. It’s entirely up to you, the audience, to make whatever metaphorical or karmic sense you want of this. My job as a filmmaker is simply to provoke. That’s the contract.

Technically speaking, these Phicen male puppets come with silicone penises in three glorious stages of erection. For this shot, I filleted the biggest one open, down the frenulum with an X-ACTO blade, and inserted a stretch of 1/32” silicone tubing that was about 18 inches long. On the other end I Super Glued a medical syringe. Then I filled the syringe from a glass of water with a couple drops of yellow food coloring.

It took a few tries to get the glue formula right, so the tube would not get blown out. Cyanoacrylate did the trick. And I had to tie the shaft closed with fishing line at the base. But by far the biggest problem was catching a good squirt for each exposure. That was super hit-or-miss, which resulted in a lot of swearing on my part as my wife witnessed from downstairs.

Now add to this the fact that for each fill of the syringe, I could only get two or three good squirts. And after each try, I had to remove James’ cock from his hands and from between his legs, and siphon up more urine through the penis before posing it back for the next try.

So yeah, this shot took two nights to “pull off” but I think the results are reminiscent of classic bathroom humor scenes in comedies like Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and Me, Myself & Irene. Especially in terms of wall soakage.

“Oi’m burstin’ fer a piss.” — James Bondáge

This was a fun MOCO shot where we follow the swing of James’ mallet against the gong. This type of camera work is an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s scene in The Shining where Jack chops through the door with an axe, and the audience is made to feel the sheer, blunt force of each blow.

But here we witness James resonating from his strike, canceling out the forces of his own tremors. Voice actor Robbie Howlett really sells this with the aid of a vibrato effect, although the line I used was intended for a different scene. Such is the magic of filmmaking. Juxtaposition springs at you from unexpected sources and from all directions. It’s a film editor’s job to reconnect those nerves in new ways, once severed.