One of the biggest challenges in on-camera puppetry is simply keeping your head out of the way. It’s frustrating to do a great take, only to discover during playback that their head is right smack in the middle of the shot, but if that discovery happens after you finish shooting it can be a disaster (it happens – even on professional shoots – more often than you might think).

In this tutorial Philip Stephens explains why this sometimes occurs and offers some helpful hints on how to do deal with this when it happens using simple techniques and free software like Wax and GIMP. There are of course more sophisticated ways of tackling this problem (most of which involve much more expensive software), but this is a simple and effective post-production fix that could be very useful to anyone making their own puppet films and videos.

Check out Philip’s YouTube Channel for lots more helpful puppet and filmmaking tips!