Can You Use Pinterest to Get Your Name Out There? In short, HECK YEAH! Pinterest is a great way to get your ministry, non-profit, for profit, club, team, business promoted; and, like your puppet endeavors, it's mostly visual, so it appeals to those looking for your talents. Yeah, Facebook and Twitter are still big dogs in the area of social media marketing, but Pinterest can reach your audience in a way that Twitter can’t and Facebook is just now starting to catch on to. Pint

Represent! Why am I writing a post on logo design when the topic of this blog is puppetry? A logo is the most predominant and most powerful part behind turning your hobby/ministry/business into a brand that people remember, a simple image that reminds people of you when they see it. Unfortunately, there are thousands, if not millions of people out there claiming to be a professional designer. People putting out crappy logos in bulk for cheap. On the other end, you have those

Puppets on The Mission Field We have discussed puppets in the classroom and puppets in medical care facilities, but I would be highly remiss if I didn’t mention the missions field. Now don’t push political correctness on me, I am not selling a particular religion in this post. Whatever you religion, part of it is to win converts, teach about your religion and educate on the fundamentals of your religion, whether to adults or children. Puppets are a great way to do that. Now,

The Kit “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.” In a perfect world, nothing ever goes wrong, the mics never go dead mid performance, the props never break, the cds never get scratched, etc. but in the real world, as the saying goes, “what can go wrong will go wrong” so prepare for it. Back Up Everything Everyone knows that CDs get scratched, misplaced, and cracked. I have seen a computer literally shatter a disk in the disk drive. So the first thing that you want to have in

These are the things that will make you exude professionalism to the people in charge of the venue you will be performing at as well as the audience. Promptness “Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.” - William Shakespeare Being prompt goes hand-in-hand with accountability. Being reliable is important to the team, to the leadership of the team, and to those that the team will be serving. As a leader It is extremely important if you are on the leadership of your

The Performance So, now it’s performance time and you have everything organized and under control. Yes? No? Well, I hope this blog post will help you answer that question with certainty. I always suggest that, along with having a detailed program together (which I will get into later) that you never do a performance before having a minimum of five to six practices with a full-on professional quality run through. The last two practice performances should be exactly like you wo

Gestures Less than 20 percent of communication is done with words. Body language plays an important role in how we naturally communicate. The same holds true for puppets when they are communicating. Some puppets, such as vent puppets and animatronics are designed to have multiple functioning parts for the purpose of gesturing, but most of my training primarily works on the premise that the puppeteer will be using a foam style puppet. Unless you spend for the extra quality or

You Thought You Learned It All? You are probably asking why this is popping up now and why I didn’t add it to the earlier post on Puppetry Basics or; the reason is because if you master the basics, you have the foundation for starting a good puppet team. Plus, if you haven’t mastered the basics, this portion will only confuse the puppeteer. Start with cooking Raman and then move up to General Tso’s. Back to Basics Not really, this is going to show you some advanced modificati

"One of the benefits of puppetry is that a shy person can perform to the utmost of their ability..."

Now that we have discussed all of the basics and got those out of the way, there is a chance that some of you are wanting to move to the next level and develop a team. If not, that’s alright. Keep reading to ge an idea of what is involved anyway, because, if you are going to look into getting into an independent act, this will still help you. The only difference is that you will be wearing all the hats.This is where the fun begins. In this post, I will cover and lightly discu