Monday, August 26, 2013

Stuffing the Passer - Season 5 Premiere

This episode is not a "movie". It's not "about" Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like, it's crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam.

"Should we roll around in it, just once?" irishoutsider asked, nervously eyeing the the pile containing $970 worth of nickels. We still hadn't found out why PayPal had disbursed the proceeds of our crowdsourced fundraiser in such a peculiar denomination.

"Inadvisable. We can't let this go to our heads. Also, I read somewhere that one in five nickels in circulation has traces of the herpes virus."

"I assume that's untrue."

We were in a poorly-ventilated conference room. There were too many puppets. We had access to too much money, too much equipment. Little by little, we went insane.

"The memory card is full again," irishoutsider stammered. I had puppets on each of my hands and a chroma-key green mask pulled over my face. He could still see the wild rage in in my eyes. He knew he should not have interrupted me.

"Put it with the rest," I hissed through gritted teeth.

He turned and looked at the mountain of memory cards - gigabytes upon terabytes upon petabytes of puppet footage. We had thrown out all of our food to use the pantry for storage. We were starving. Some of the footage was once-in-a-lifetime performances of heart-rending pathos. Some of it was the 16 hours I spent howling like a wolf. Christ only knows what was what -- we never labeled any of them.

The first print of this episode was 4 days long. We couldn't print it to DVD, so I just mailed our mainframe server to the producers. The next several re-edits trimmed out most of the interpretive dancing and all of the Norse mythology. When I finally got the episode down to 13 and a half minutes, I garroted the guard the studio had posted outside my door and escaped into the moonless night, naked as the day I was born because how the hell else do you work with Final Cut Pro X?

I found a WiFi signal in that swampy bog and uploaded our beloved monstrosity. It belongs to the ages now. Enjoy.

Sunday, August 04, 2013

Stuffing The Passer - Ignition Notification

I'm sorry we keep doing this dance every year. You know that dance where the football season ends and then the House Rock Built goes dead silent for seven months, shrinking away into nothingness on your RSS feed, a wraith of a wraith, howling its tuneless silence through the echoey chasms of the nethernet. Perhaps they died. Or got arrested. Or got elected to the United States Senate and had to disassociate themselves with the noxious rantings they wrote on this site.

Well, we're back. Perhaps you weren't quite as scared this time around because you heroes did pony up 970 GLORIOUS DOLLARS to persuade us to keep up the craft. Then again, that wasn't like a legally binding contract or nothin' -- we could have taken that money and blown it on opium and enormous uninformed wagers at unlicensed greyhound tracks in Thailand. And, okay, actually we did. But good news, we hit a glorious superfecta in the 9th race and turned your $970 into a cool 20 grand. We dutifully socked away your original 970 and blew the winnings on absinthe, face tattoos, and ten greyhound puppies that now that I'm thinking about it we totally forgot about and left at our gate at Suvarnabhumi Airport. I'm sure they're doing fine there.

That said, we've been busy beavers this summer rebuilding our entire puppet laboratory. We now have six COUNT THEM SIX new puppet friends, an elaborate green screen setup, a fancy condenser microphone, and some high-end video editing and 3D software. We even have $18 left over for our, um, legal defense fund. We're going to be riding the very bleeding edge of "permissible use" this season, ladies and gents. Buckle the hell up.


Right now, we're working on the "feature length" season premiere, which will be double or maybe triple the length of your typical Stuffing the Passer video. Don't worry, that's not going to be a permanent thing this year, we just thought we'd give you something special to kick off the season with. Principle photography has wrapped on that, and we're in the vigorous editing process. God willing, that will be released the week before the opening game.

And without further ado, the teaser trailer for season five. Enjoy.


Because of Obaaaaaaaaamaaaaaaaa!

UPDATE: Looks like the original upload was not the HD version. My bad, I exported it wrong. I updated it to the higher-res version #learningcurve