I guess it’s a cliché, but a new year makes people look back on what’s already happened and forward to what the future might hold. I was recently thinking about how far puppet film and video on the web has come in the past five years. It amazing to see just how many people out there are building puppets, shooting videos and sharing them online.

Despite that though, I’m starting to wonder if as 2009 begins we’ve hit a bit of a plateau. If you look with a critical eye you can’t help but realize that even though over one hundred puppet videos for the web get cranked out every month, most are still kind of amateurish (and yes, I’d gladly include most of my own work in that category).

Now I don’t pretend to better or more talented than anybody else, but as I’ve been working on a few things I’ve been thinking a lot about how to take puppet film and video on the web “to the next level”. If you’re interested in doing the same, here’s a few thoughts and ideas you may find useful…

Talk vs Action (and music)

Animator Keith Lango recently wrote a post on his blog called Wither the Cartoon? that laments the demise of the “unapologetically gag driven, musically integrated, over the top classic 1940′s style cartoon”. His main point is that classic short cartoon (think the classic Disney and Warner Bros. shorts from the `30s, `40s and `50s) has disappeared from the modern animation world in favour of shows like the Simpsons, which are really more like animated sitcoms. Similarily, I notice that a lot of people who set out to create puppetry on the web are going the “animated sitcom” route and doing skits with puppets that could just as easily be done with actors.

As the old saying goes, it’s better to show than tell. Virtually all of the most successful puppetry videos (e.g. Ode To Joy, The Mysterious Ticking Noise, any of Lejo’s videos) are either musical or mostly musical and they don’t really rely on dialogue.

Great puppetry speaks a language that’s understood by everyone:

Which leads me to…

Better Staging

One of the most important elements of any great puppet film or video is puppet staging and shot composition. Good staging is really important because it creates emphasis (tells the audience what to pay attention to) and has strong silhouettes (makes it easy for the audience to understand what’s happening).

Although some puppeteers understand these concepts really well, it’s hard to find fantastic examples of puppet staging online, so I’ll turn back to animation to show a couple of examples. Pixar are masters of storytelling and staging, as you can see from this video below:

Notice how you can watch this with or without the sound and still understand the story? That’s because it’s well staged. Even when these Wall-E vignettes are built around music, they still work without audio:

Physicality is very important to staging. You can learn a lot about this by studying animation. John K. often writes about physicality and staging on his blog. Another good source of inspiration are the silent films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

Also Remember…

You will never find a large audience for your work just because it’s puppetry. You will find a huge audience for your work if it’s genuinely entertaining (important note: strangers are the best judge of this, not your family or friends). It’s all about telling a good story and creating characters that your audience cares about and can relate to.