How to Manipulate a Puppet for TV and Theater

On behalf of tvlesson.com, my name is Paul Louis. I’m a professional puppeteer and puppet builder. In this clip, I’m going to talk about puppets for theater or live events and puppets for television. There’s a big difference in terms of how they look, and in terms of how they are operated. Friends, this is a character here, which is kind of close to my heart, it’s Gas Gorilla. Now Gas Gorilla is a character that I built about 15 years ago. And he was originally used in live shows. He’s kind of what I call a patriot puppet, meaning a puppet that you built at home out of odds and ends and you know, if you see stitching in him, it’s perfectly acceptable because you know, you’re in a theater, and you’re far away from the audience at times. Even the way you perform a puppet in a live show, for a theater crowd, a puppet can be really over exaggerate all of their movements, because the fact that they are on a wide stage for a big audience, so you can be really big, and actually he doesn’t talk like that. He kind of speaks like that, and he can really big when he performs on stage. Now, when you’re doing television, it’s entirely different, entirely different animal, no pond intended. And this particular animal again, is Gas Gorilla but this is the new and improve Gas Gorilla, this was created for television series I created called Jellybean Jungle which is back on the 90’s. Now, this gas Gorilla was made for the television screen, meaning when you have a close up of him, you will not see stitching, okay. So it’s a little bit different, you have to remember, television you’re confine to a little screen, little box so to speak. So even when you perform, your movement has to be more real than if you are performing in a theatrical live event, because you’re confine to such a small square space. How was that? Pretty good Gas. So that’s the big difference between puppets for TV film, and for theater. So you have to keep that in mind when you’re performing in those different types of venues. Again, theater, very big, TV and film very, very small. And the way you make the puppets, there’s a logic behind how you design and build those puppets. Now, Gas the Gorilla for TV was not built by myself, it was designed by myself but we made sure that we got high quality puppet builders who specialized in building puppets for TV and film to build Gas the Gorilla and the puppets behind me. So think about that when you’re performing for TV and when you’re performing for a theatrical production. On behalf of tvlesson.com, this has been Paul Louis. Thank you for watching.