Puppet Sets

[D'Snowth]

I've been curious about something...

Are puppet sets (long term or limbo) built on a human scale, before being raised for use for puppets? I couldn't help but notice that in a number of Muppet sketches, inserts, etc, the sets seem unusually big in relations to the puppets... or, at the very least, the walls seem really tall compared to the puppets.

 

[crazy chris]

i would imagine that the muppet show had to build the sets to be compatible with the human guest stars.... but if a movie/show was just for puppets it could no doubt be scaled down....

im running into the same question when contemplating building the backstage set for our muppet show project... do i build it as a backdrop at a smaller scale...or do i actually build it to fit a human as well? ...

cc

 

[D'Snowth]

You have a point, but I was refering to strictly puppet sets, not necessarily sets that would also have to be compatible with humans.

 

[crazy chris]

i see what u mean... could you give us some examples...

cc

 

[Buck-Beaver]

Ideally you would build to puppet scale, unless there are humans in your project, in which case you need to find a balance, which can be tricky (pro-tip: if you're working with human actors, use bigger puppets..it makes things easier!). Either way, unless you're building everything from scratch, usually, you have to cheat scale a lot.

These are photos from a film I directed in 2010, we didn't bother using exact scale, we just started with walls that were 4'0 high (slightly less than 1:2 scale) and worked everything out based on that and sourced stuff from all over the place, trying our best to make it all look like it fit together properly.

The chair and couch were children's furniture, the coffee table is actually a child's stool and the bookcase was meant to hold CDs or DVDs, we just put small props in it to make it look larger than it actually is (the phone was full size and wasn't actually used in the film).

You can see a little more of the set here, the table against the wall was actually a narrow table (human scale) meant to go in a hallway. Our set dec team just chopped the legs off of it. The chair was found somewhere (we had it in storage for ages), there's a laptop on top of the table that's actually a tiny netbook, the phone was a vintage toy, the couch cushions were custom made.