TITLE: The Doughboy Chaotic Cookie Cutter Christmas Special (DCCCCS)
STATUS/DATE: 2000-2001
GENRE: Crude Comedy Claymation
APPROX LENGTH: Approx. 5 min
LOCATION: Filmed and Produced in the Shenandoah Valley Woodstock, Virginia

WHAT IS:
The Doughboy Chaotic Cookie Cutter Christmas Special was a short clay animated feature spawned from decisions of what to do with gravy leftovers from Thanksgiving that year. Utilizing the worst of English accents for narration, crude; -real crude humor, epic violence and green Ketchup.

PRODUCTION:
This was an arduous yet fun production process. There was no script set in stone, however we had ideas of what we wanted the characters to do during the course of the short. The piece was animated first then the narration and story telling was written to fit the actions of what was going on. This short was produced a quite a few years before Youtube. Now stuff like this is very common.

The set up in the studio consisted of a regular analog camcorder on a tripod with the outputs fed directly into a computer that could show on the screen in color exactly what what was "in frame". This was a two person operation at all times. One person was perched at the computer while the other was huddled over "the stage" making adjustments to the figurines between frames. The person perched at the computer (when the adjustment was right) would make a call to clear the frame, then capture a still. For the most part it was a straight forward process, however it did not lend any room for any mistakes. If a still was botched in the sequence there was no going back because if the frame was taken out it would not look right.This probably happened once or twice overall.

There were benefits to doing it this way. The main benefit was that there was no shaking or moving of the camera between frames because all still taken were triggered by the computer. Seeing it on the computer monitor was much better than lining it up through the tiny black and white viewfinder. Also even though the stills were at a low resolution (the equipment we were using then), seeing it on the monitor helped pick up fine details, lighting mistakes and shadows that would not be as visible through the viewfinder. This production was very social and clear communication and focus had to be held at all times. After it was all done some original music was added along with sound effects.

One of the most fun but nauseating effects to produce were the sounds when the cookie cutters ganged up on the doughboy in the film and began to eat him. Tjparsons stood close to the microphone crunching almost a whole bag of Cheetos in 10 minutes ( all the while packing them into his mouth like a chipmunk. The end justifies the means, and the sound turned out really well for that particular effect.

Some of the more subtle sound effects such as air whooshing and screeches were made with just the mouth and a microphone.