• Basic mechanics and movement
• Lip synchronization
• Thought and focus
• Rhythm
• Staging
• Character

Don’t let the “101″ fool you. The goal of the course isn’t just to teach you the basic skills you find on lots of YouTube videos (not that those aren’t important!), it’s designed to teach you how to think about performing puppets and is based on a lot workshops and training I’ve done for a couple dozen puppeteers at the Unraku Workshop in Toronto over the past few years. The course is open to anyone interested in learning more about puppetry; beginners are more than welcome, although the course is probably best suited to puppeteers with at least some prior experience who are looking to broaden their skills and/or take them to the next level.

If you’re curious about my approach to puppetry, have a look at these previous posts on PuppetVision to get an idea of some of the things we’ll be talking about:

• Puppet staging and composition
• Using Puppetry To Inspire Animation
• Choreographing Breath and Thought
• Thought, focus and Achmed The Dead Terrorist
• Rex and Boots: Super Swazzle Puppetry

…or if that’s not enough for you, just read the entire Puppetry Theory Archive!

Principles of Great Puppetry will run every Tuesday night, from July 12th through August 30th. There will be two online “classes”; one at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. EST to accommodate people in different time zones here in North America (I will also consider doing an additional class at a time that’s more convenient for anyone living overseas if there is sufficient interest).

In order to participate you’ll need to have a computer, a webcam, and a reliable Internet connection as well as a hand or hand and rod puppet of some sort to work with. Each class will last approximately 2-2.5 hours and feature demonstrations as well as exercises. A couple of extremely talented puppeteers from around the world will also be joining us from time to time as special guests.

The cost of the course is $100 Cdn. The deadline to sign-up is July 6th, but enrollment will be limited to 12 people per class, so the cut off may come sooner if the course fills up quickly. If you’re interested in participating, just contact me at puppetvision@gmail.com for more details.

None of these resources are new, but they’re all fantastic:

Introduction to Video Puppetry: Manipulation for the Camera
This article by Leo Brodie dates back to the early 1990s and it’s what I first used to figure out how to perform puppets on camera when I started out in puppetry thirteen-odd years ago. Leo was trained by a number of notable puppeteers including Jane Henson and Marty Robinson and this is a great introduction to the basic concepts of on-camera puppetry.

Setting Up A Practice Monitor
Another old-but-great article by Leo Brodie that deals with how to properly set-up a monitor to practice puppetry. A good companion to this is Marcus Clarke’s article on Straight Scan vs. Reverse Scan video monitors, a subject that I’ve mentioned on PuppetVision before. If you aspire to do video puppetry professionally you need to learn the difference between the two and you’ll probably need to know how to work straight scan.

Puppetry Lab
Amy Harder is doing an ongoing series of puppet manipulation exercises, videos and tutorials at her excellent Puppetry Lab site. These are created with live puppet performance in mind, but Amy works with a monitor and most of the techniques she demonstrates work equally well on both stage and screen.

10/01/08 Update: Broken links have been fixed (thanks to Leo for the heads-up!).

If you perform or build puppets for a living (or want to) and you’re closely emulating the Muppet style you’re competing with a lot of other people whether you realize it or not. There’s nothing wrong with building very Muppet-like puppets of course. I like them and so does just about everyone else. Just about everyone makes them too. And uses them. And that’s the problem.

When you’re different, when you’re unique, when you carve out you’re own niche you can pretty much write your own ticket. Of course it’s not easy, it’s hard. It takes a lot of work. That’s why most people don’t do it. Eventually though you have to decide, do you want to be like everyone else or do you want to be one-of-a-kind?

Remember, revolutionaries push the envelope, they don’t hug the middle.

1. Don’t bite off more than you chew
Be realistic about what you can accomplish on a regular basis and know your limitations when making a show. The most popular videos are less than five minutes long and most of the time that’s all you really need.

2. Think non-linear
This is one I hadn’t ever considered before. Don’t just work on each episode one-by-one beginning-to-end in a linear fashion. Work non-linear instead. One example is to record an ending first, then work backwards from that.

3. Buffer your output
This is a really good suggestion, “bank” episodes so that you have several done and ready to go before you launch your series. This provides insurance in case you get busy one week and also spares you the curse of always scrambling to meet a deadline.

4. Keep your space organized
This one is pretty self-explanatory I think. Being organized helps you be more productive.

5. Be consistent
Release episodes on a predictable pattern, where that’s daily, weekly or even monthly.

6. Return to the thing that got you started
When you feel disillusioned or uninspired always remember what excited you and made you want to start the series in the first place.

7. Get other people involved
By having other people involved in your projects you become accountable to them, which helps keep you focused. More hands also make less work.

8. Conserve Time and Money
Be conservative and efficient producing a show. Sometimes having money can be a bad thing, because then you’re tempted to spend too much of it. If you are spending money on your show, spend as little as possible.

9. Use tricks to jump-start the creative process
Make a list or keep notes on what jump-starts your creative process for times when you feel creatively blocked. One of the habits I personally got in to in college was to keeping an idea book. Whenever an idea for character, story or just a funny line pops in to my head I jot it down or make a quick sketch in my idea book.

10. Quit before you fade
You won’t do anything forever so plan how you’ll end your show. Having an exit strategy provides a light at the end of the tunnel and motivates you to get your best stuff in now rather than saving it for later.

You can also read a great article on podfading in the archives of Wired Magazine.

“There is nothing of any value related to puppets and puppetry being sold at any university that you could not get at very little cost through instruction at workshops and festivals or free through your own study and experience. At this writing only the University of Connecticut is even offering a degree in puppetry and that degree is worthless in terms of improving your chances of being employed as a puppeteer.”

It’s very un-Christian of me, but I call bulls–t on that.

I do agree with the author that you don’t need to have a degree in puppetry to be a puppeteer (I don’t have one and most of the puppeteers I know don’t either). I also agree that there are lots of great skills and information that can learned at festivals and workshops, but UCONN’s Puppetry Program is almost universally recognized throughout the puppetry community as being exceptional. It may not be right for everyone, but calling its degree “worthless” is insulting to the school and reveals a real ignorance about not only it’s program, but also the puppetry accomplishments of its alumni.

There’s a long list of extremely talented UCONN alumni working as professional puppeteers today, including folks like Pam Arciero, Frankie Cordero, Tim Lagasse, Jim Napolitano and Jennifer Barnhart to name a few. In fact, possibly other than past employment with the Muppets, the biggest common denominator amongst the top tier of professional puppeteers in the United States is an association with UCONN.

–

12/12/06 Update: Rob Saunders, another UCONN alumni, adds his thoughts here.

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 case back in 1989 when Peter Jackson made Meet The Feebles, the novelty has long since worn off. I don’t mean to suggest that puppets and profanity can’t work, just that in order for it to be funny there has to be something more substantial to it.

The media often attributes the success of a show like South Park to crudeness, but if you watch the show carefully you realize that the crudeness is really just window-dressing on some very clever comedy. South Park may feature talking pooh, a gay Satan and lots of little kids cursing and swearing, but it’s also an incredibly sharp satire of American society. Most episodes are filled with lots of very intelligent ideas that are also really, really funny.

I’ve read that many great comedians like Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld have a theory that comedy works better without profanity. The theory goes that people tend to use profanity as a crutch in comedy so by deliberately not using it you’re forced to come up with better ideas and write stronger material. This is important because people don’t laugh at swearing or even at jokes. People laugh at the funny idea behind a joke. You can tell a joke that involves sex or swearing, but it’s the idea that always gets the laugh, not the profanity. In puppetry, if you’re going to use profanity it should be the punctuation mark on a really good joke and not the joke itself. Otherwise your work isn’t funny, it’s just crude.

BTW this isn’t intended to be a jab at any particular person or video, just written in frustration after wasting time watching what seems like the umpteenth zillionth unfunny video on YouTube of puppets using the F-word.

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 an illustration. It’s an interesting read and the principles he discusses can be easily applied to design and staging in puppetry.

Link via Drawn.

Composition is essentially the act of combining and arranging forms in space to produce a harmonious whole. Composition can be used to control where the audience will look, when they will look there and for how long. Rather than go through the all fundamentals of composition here, if you’re unfamiliar with it I recommend reading this post on the ASIFA-Hollywood blog along with the links it mentions.

Rather than pick on a bad puppet film or show (there are sadly a lot to choose from) I decided to show you this example from Mr. Meaty because it’s a great series, I just don’t think that it’s well served by this particular shot:

Take a look at this for a moment. When you glance at it quickly where do your eyes go? Mine are confused and sort of ping pong between the two characters on the left and the girl on the right. I don’t instinctively know where to look. Why it that?

The problem is that the shot isn’t well composed and has a number of problems:

The middle of the frame has a lot of foreground and background clutter, which splits it in half. On one side there are two puppets who are overlapping each other and on the other a puppet who’s face is mostly obscured by its hair. Almost everything in the shot is the same height and there’s also a lot of dead space at the top of the frame. I can imagine the work that went in to designing and building these puppets, the props and the set. They’re all fantastic, but the basic composition of the shot is selling all that hard work short.

Remember that this isn’t a bad scene, it’s just that the camera got put in a less than ideal place. One possible solution (a favourite trick of director Brad Bird) is to lower the horizon in the shot. By positioning the camera lower and tilting it up the horizon line will drop lower in the frame, everything will appear to be at a different height and the shot will have an overall sense of depth. An added bonus is that when the camera is tilted up it’s easier to for puppeteers to keep their heads out of the shot.

Whenever you’re staging scenes with puppets you want to make the scene as clean as possible. The shot can be very detailed, but it should always read clearly. Good composition helps you do that. With one glance at a shot the audience should be able to tell exactly what is going on in it. A trick I was taught in film school that you can use to test how clearly a scene reads is to switch off the audio when watching a scene. If you can still have an idea what’s going on with no sound the scene has been well-staged. If not then there are likely some problems.

Now let’s look at the opening credits of another Canadian children’s series, Wimzie’s House:

I’m not sure who directed the shots in the opening credits of this show, but they clearly knew what they were doing. The sequence starts with shots of several different characters. They are all nice and well-balanced with out being too tight or having too much dead space in the frame. I especially like the one above because it’s a dutch (tilted) angle, which makes it more interesting.

It’s usually impossible to prevent characters from overlapping in a shot staged like this, but here they are all visible once they pop in to frame and can be clearly read by the audience.

Sometimes bad shots happen to well-directed shows. I think there’s way too much dead space in the top of the frame here, but I’m not sure how you could stage this differently to avoid it. Despite that, notice how the scene is kept clean without lots of distracting props and that door in the background is framed off-centre so it doesn’t split the frame in half. Even though it was less than ideal situation someone was clearly thinking a lot about this shot.

This is my favourite shot in the whole sequence. The shot is at an angle to make it dynamic and interesting, Wimzie (the main character) grabs our attention in the foreground while her pals come in the door in the background.

Another great shot. Seeing it in the opening credits out of it’s original context I’m not sure what they were trying to achieve with it, but notice how your eyes start out on Wimzie and then get drawn up the neck of the guitar. It’s an interesting shot with very sound composition.

Wide shots are a curse when you’re doing puppetry for film and television because you can usually only shoot puppets from the waist up. In a shot with multiple puppets that creates lots of dead space at the top of the frame. One possible solution to this problem is to stage the action on two levels like they did here.

Another solution to prevent too much head space when lots of puppets have to be in a wide shot is to put the characters in the upper half of the frame and use a foreground objects like these couches to fill out the shot. I like how the couches are carefully positioned so that the viewer’s attention stays focused on the puppets. There is still a lot of dead space at the top of the frame, but that part of the set isn’t lit so the audience will likely just ignore it and focus on the puppets.

Wimzie is the star of the show so in the final shot of the sequence she’s letting us know by being right out in front here while the rest of the characters are in the background and inside the house.

These are just some random composition examples. You can pull both good and bad shots from almost every show. The important thing is that a good working knowledge of composition can help you make every shot better.

If you’re looking for some great tips on framing and composition from a master filmmaker you should download Brad Bird’s Notes on Composition (it’s a .pdf file). I also highly recommend the inexpensive book Setting Up Your Shots by Jeremy Vineyard.