As you might imagine, the characters on the show spend a lot of time eating “sports candy.” The puppets can’t actually take a bite, so I wind up doing one of my favorite theater tricks. The apple already has bite in it but that part of the apple is held upstage so the audience can’t see it. Then as the character takes a bite, I just rotate the apple so the bite comes into view. We usually use a fake apple with the puppets because we can pin or tape it to their hands, but today I needed to be able to put the apple down. There were also a lot of real apples in the scene, which meant the fake apple would look noticeably fake. (It’s interesting that fake apples are fine unless there’s a real one close by.) Now, the puppetry here is not particuarly interesting. It was fun, but it was basic live hand stuff, and we were standing, so it wasn’t even painful. What was interesting, at least to me, was the bite in the apple.
The first one was just a guy taking a bite out of an apple and handing it to me. But as we continued shooting the bite turned yellow, as apples do, which made a continuity problem. So they had to bite another apple. You don’t think about these details, but the prop guy had to find another apple that looked like the first one, and then make a bite that looked the same. It’s the kind of thing that seems simple until you watch someone go through the process. It was in fact, two bites in order to make it large enough to read.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think these bizarre mundanities are interesting.
Anyway, I spent most of today live handing and was only off set at lunch. Tonight Rob has invited the post-production crew over for martinis. He apparently planned for it to be about seven or eight people, but when we left the studio the number had blossomed to thirty. Knowing Iceland, the party will go until three so I’m not expecting to get anymore writing done today.
Here’s my update.
First
Once in the streets of Repp-Virja, the bright mosaic of her family shattered the bland crowd.
Last
Each step made her tunic brighter and her crop more naked.
There is only one sentence between the two, but I went back to earlier sections and added some details that I needed. So I wrote 252 words today.
Here is a secret – lemon juice.
Have the prop dude take his bite and then pour lemon juice over the bitten area. The lemon juice will stop the apple from turning yellow and brown.
Works great for cutting apples ahead of time for a salad as well. Tastes yummy too – although the boy prefers lime juice to lemon.
That came up, but there wasn’t any lemon juice in the studio. We didn’t know that the apple needed a bite out of it until the puppeteer asked for it.
Ah well. I think anything with citric acid will do the job – lime, lemon, orange, etc.