"Excuse Me, Sir?"

Excuse Me, Sir? from Horroble Pictures on Vimeo.



***Please view the film before reading below.***





The idea of shooting a sock puppet film came to me from a combination of the line "Excuse me, sir?" bizarrely being repeated by a co-worker in a funny voice and a short film I had done in college that featured a dark city backdrop that I had made out of cardboard (much like the one in this film) and animal puppets drawn on paper and attached to popsicle sticks.  That film was one of the first I had shot on 16mm which, unfortunately, was severely underexposed.  But some of the visions of a hellish world without much light inhabited by puppets trying to hold together their sanity stuck with me.

Evalena and I had created the set and puppets after writing out the storyboards much earlier that year, but we held off on filming due to the necessity of the fire shot because we didn't have an exterior location to set up the stage and lighting the way we wanted and filming the fire shot inside seemed like it could be unsafe.

Then on Christmas Day, 2014 we decided that we really ought to not wait any longer to shoot the short and figured we would just figure out the safest way to shoot the fire shot inside, where our set needed to be.  After all, it was Christmas. What could go wrong on Christmas?

With our last hurdle figured out and some safety precautions in place, we shot the film and went straight into editing, sound design and ADR the next day.