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

Believable Actions and Interactions Again, I stress, if it is intentional and fits into the script as a viable action, then it is not wrong, but if done out of character or unintentionally, it is not professional and needs to be worked on. This is the last of the five basics, but ties all of the others into one cohesive professional performance. Actions need to look real. If they seem out of place for the situation or it looks as if the puppeteer is just trying to move for th

Keeping Steady Keeping your puppet at a steady height while on stage is important to the believability that the puppet is real and there is a floor under him/her/it. It is totally unnatural for a puppet to move up and down while on stage; unless he or she is doing squats or playing on a remote lift. It is, however, acceptable to move from side to side on occasion. This is another technique that will give a realistic feel while helping the arm to get circulation in it. When ar

Getting On Stage The second most important basic to get under your belt in order to look professional and create that suspension of disbelief that your audience wants to give to your performance in how your puppet enters and exits the stage/scene. The Entrance There are some really bad ways to bring a puppet on stage, trust me I have seen them all and been guilty of quite a few over the years. The bad thing is they are all common mistakes made all of the time. Note: Before go

The Fundamentals of Puppetry The goal of any puppeteer is to make the puppet look as natural as possible so that the message can be projected without distractions. A puppet that makes unnatural gestures or movements will draw the audience’s attention away from what’s being delivered. When the audience is focused on a puppet’s mannerisms they aren’t keying in on the message or the performance as a whole. In order to keep this from happening there are some must do’s that need t

“If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others...” -Tryon Edwards So Why Puppets? Puppets are magical for everyone, every age. They are magic because a puppet can literally be anything we want them to be. The puppet’s life comes from us; from our imagination is where the puppet’s life begins before we even have the puppet on our hand. George Bernard Shaw once wrote that the influence puppets had played in his development as a child was greater than that of live ac