"I'm Happy You're Here" is Wrapped

Hey folks!

As some of you may know (if you spend time on our super cool discord), Freddie and I were asked by Ashly Burch (of Mythic Quest, the Horizon video game series, and Fan Friction fame) to direct her spec pilot for her wonderful show I'm Happy You're Here. Here is a little video of random BTS clips our producer Tracy Ip took during the four days of production.

Ashly is going to potentially crowdfund I'm Happy You're Here and/or send it to studios to try to get it picked up. I sincerely hope it does well, as I adore her script, and selfishly want to work with puppets again.

The show is a riff on Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, but geared for adults. The spec pilot focuses on Anxiety, but the idea behind it is to talk about all sorts of mental health and other adult issues. Like all of her stuff, it's sincere and informed, but also incredibly funny, which is what drew me and Freddie to the project.

We also got to do another stress test at our new stage space, as we tore down the Nail House boxcar set and we had Ash's bedroom set built. We also set up two small green screen stages for the tons of puppet footage we needed.

It was also my first time working with actual puppeteers. I grew up with Sesame Street, and especially the Muppets, and, since I lived near the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, I would watch puppet shows all the time. As I got obsessed with the classic silent clowns like Chaplin and Keaton, I grew to admire puppeteers even more with their precise physical animation of these inanimate objects. I'm happy to say that working with them was as wonderful as I would have hoped. Our Puppet Fabricator, BJ Guyer, made the puppets and was one of the performers, and then Ron Binion performed the main puppet, Winston.

Truly just astonishing to watch these guys work. They can go from talking random tech/shop talk about fabrics, different metals for rods, the newest car mechanic chair to help them get low enough to perform, and then within seconds, jump into bringing an inanimate object to life, respond to your direction instantly, improvise a joke that slays the entire crew, and so on. Really fun, and very impressive.

Anyway. I hope Ashly and her team show more of the project as it comes along. And we will be sure to update you all on how it's going. But for now, we are fully back on Nail House (and WAGD). But what a wonderful little break we got to have, working with one of our best friends and some puppets.

 Matt