Let Your Creativity Flow I am a big proponent for teams to come up with their own concepts, scripts, and programs for two reasons. The first is the financial factor involved. It is so easy to spend a fortune to get permission to use other people’s material. The second is because is gets the creative juices of the group to flowing and helps pull the team together when they are racking their brains to come up with ideas and creating the script around their characters as opposed

Let It Glow, Let It Glow, Let It Glow Black light shows have almost become a standard with puppet performance, so much so that there is now a market just for black light performance. Black light can be used in a number of different ways and add effects that are difficult, if not impossible, to recreate any other way. Every professional puppet team should have some level of black light performance in their arsenal of productions. In writing this post, it has been brought to my

You will find that the way your lighting and sound are set up can sometimes make or break a performance. Here are some tips that will get you going in the right direction from the start. I only wish that I had someone savvy in these areas when I first started out. Hopefully you have access to some professionals of whom you can pick their brains. About the Sound Chances are that you will rarely, if ever, find yourself in a situation where just using your voice and a portable C

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

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

Don’t jump the gun If you haven’t read the previous blog introducing ventriloquism, click here to read it first. Consider it mandatory homework before learning the cheats. To learn these techniques without having a grasp of the basics will lead to sloppy ventriloquism. Now for the cheats Even though learning the techniques will make you an expert ventriloquist, there are some cheats that you can do to accomplish a good ventriloquist act. The visual perception of the audience

Make It Original, Make It Yours Developing Set puppet characters can be a fun way to get and keep team members involved. For them to know that the character they do is their character and no one else can do it gives them a sense of pride and responsibility to the team. I always suggest that every team member create a character; whether they use it or not. This will really come in handy when the team does return engagements and uses a set character because audiences will know

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

Now that you have the basics of your team on paper and you have your team in place, we need to discuss a few things that will make or break this newly birthed team. Practice It is vital that you have a weekly practice time. This is the only way to effectively work on programs, keep well trained on the fundamentals, work out the muscles that will be used on a regular basis, and develop that team mentality. How and when you run your practices is also important. It will be easy