I’m an independent filmmaker and puppeteer in Toronto, Canada who blogs about puppetry and film.
I’m really excited to announce today that I’m going to be offering an eight week, interactive online puppetry course entitled Principles of Great Puppetry. This is an online interactive course that is designed to walk you step-by-step through what I consider to be the various elements of great...
I got an email yesterday from a puppeteer in the UK who is auditioning for a TV show. He hadn’t worked with hand and rod puppets on camera before (his experience was primarily with marionettes and glove puppets) and was looking for good resources for learning on camera puppetry. I sent him some links and...
The New York Times has a story today called Gap is in Need of a Niche. As Duct Tape Marketing points out, if one of the largest retailers in the world is facing ruin because it can’t differentiate itself from it’s competitors what chance does a small business stand if it’s stuck doing the same...
Yesterday I wrote a short piece about the difference between art and craft over at PuppetBuilding.com. People get extremely defensive when you start referring to work as “not art” but there is in a fact big (albeit sometimes hard to define) difference between the...
An interesting essay originally published in the New York Times in 1998 asks the question why do so many people find puppets so creepy? Personally, I think it has a lot to do with the Uncanny Valley, but you can read both links and decide for...
“Podfading” is a term coined by podcaster Scott Fletcher to describe the phenomenon of podcasts abruptly stopping or just fading away, posting fewer and fewer episodes less and less frequently. This happens with blogs and podcasts a lot so I wanted to share ten great tips to help prevent podfading from this past week’s FeedBurner...
Someone sent me a link to an article called Can Puppetry Pay? It’s a little pessimistic and written with aspiring Christian puppeteers in mind, but it does address some of the realities of being a professional puppeteer. The part that really jumped out for me was this: “There is nothing of any value related to...
Crude puppets can be funny, but most videos with them aren’t. Why is that? I think one of the reasons is that a lot of people making videos on the web with puppets cursing and swearing think that just the idea of a profane puppet is a great joke. While that might have been the...
You can learn a lot about composition from a new painting tutorial by artist Bob MacNeil. Following up on last week’s posts on composition and emphasis in puppet staging, take a look at this great multi-step painting tutorial by artist Bob MacNeil. In it he takes you step-by-step through the process he uses to design...
One of the most basic aspects of art and design is composition. There’s been a lot of chatter on animation blogs recently about it, so I thought it might fun to explore how composition applies to puppetry for film and TV. Composition is essentially the act of combining and arranging forms in space to produce...
Paul Louis takes you step-by-step through the basics of puppet manipulation in a new series of video tutorials. A new and much-needed trend on the internet is puppet manipulation tutorials and a slew of them seem to have hit the web in the past week or so. The ever-innovative Paul Louis has a series of...
The prodigy myth is the idea that someone has a natural talent for something, starts doing it at an early age and becomes great immediately. Wayne Gretzky was a hockey prodigy. Bobby Fisher was a chess prodigy. Tiger Woods is a golf prodigy. No puppetry prodigies come immediately to mind, but I am sure there...