Thanks so much for the comments and support! Even negative comments are useful.
It seems to be gaining hits very quickly on YouTube, I'm guessing possibly because of its title or its puppet content. (I think that also YouTube hits are very dependent upon the thumbnail you can create, and YouTube offers you crappy options in this regard -- infuriating!)
I've got other scripts I think are much funnier, but are logistic nightmares in comparison (you think one puppet is hard, try five to ten). Part of the reason I did this project was because I could do it all in one tiny studio location. My former studio was 9'x17' -- really small. And this was, believe it nor not, a two camera shoot, so big chunks of it were shot in long takes.
I knew that with green screen, you want a) even lighting of the green backdrop, and b) enough distance between the screen and the foreground subject. Because of lack of space, with point a) I half succeeded, and with point b) I semi-failed, causing lots of color spill onto the puppet. That was a bunch of extra work matting and cleaning up the spill in After Effects. Not fun!
I built a homemade teleprompter for my dialogue, which used two-way glass in a homemade cardboard frame, a netbook computer, and reversed-image text slides run on Powerpoint that I advanced with a foot pedal myself while performing. Pretty clever, if I say so myself, and much cheaper than commercial alternatives.
I won't bore you with further details -- my point is that what I thought was going to be a "simple" shoot became extremely complicated and time-consuming. And expensive! I bought Sanken wired lavs for audio (love 'em), four Photoflex soft boxes of varying sizes, three Lowell Omni lights, and two Canon HF-S20s. All bought on a 1-year 0% interest credit card.
Sweet, sweet debt. But now I own some really nice gear.
