Buck-Beaver
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- Apr 16, 2002
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What are everyone's thoughts on the importance of story in their puppetry? What do people think about it? Do people think about it?
I guess what I mean is that most of the discussion here centers on technical things like how to build a puppet, how to puppeteer, lip sync, etc. and all of those things are very important but it's a little bit like learning to walk - it's extremely necessary but it's only a starting point.
Alot of MCers often praise the Muppet Movie (one of my favourites), which I think worked well because it was a good story with great characters and not because it was puppetry. There is a lot of talk all the time about how adults don't watch puppetry and I think it's nonsense, people watch interesting characters and stories.
For example, I read this post on story artist Jenny Lerew's blog about the importance of storytelling in animation and thought it was also very applicable to puppetry as well.
I started thinking about this because I am working with a dramaturge (sort of like an editor) on the scripts for a project I'm about to film and it's been a very educational but very painful process where I find a lot of stuff that maybe I wrote just because I thought of a cool puppet or neat character is getting tosses out because while the puppet/character might be cool or neat it's not serving the story. I was very hesitant and defensive going in to this process, but now I am finding that the result is much better scripts and stories.
Just throwing this stuff out there to hear what people think.
I guess what I mean is that most of the discussion here centers on technical things like how to build a puppet, how to puppeteer, lip sync, etc. and all of those things are very important but it's a little bit like learning to walk - it's extremely necessary but it's only a starting point.
Alot of MCers often praise the Muppet Movie (one of my favourites), which I think worked well because it was a good story with great characters and not because it was puppetry. There is a lot of talk all the time about how adults don't watch puppetry and I think it's nonsense, people watch interesting characters and stories.
For example, I read this post on story artist Jenny Lerew's blog about the importance of storytelling in animation and thought it was also very applicable to puppetry as well.
I started thinking about this because I am working with a dramaturge (sort of like an editor) on the scripts for a project I'm about to film and it's been a very educational but very painful process where I find a lot of stuff that maybe I wrote just because I thought of a cool puppet or neat character is getting tosses out because while the puppet/character might be cool or neat it's not serving the story. I was very hesitant and defensive going in to this process, but now I am finding that the result is much better scripts and stories.
Just throwing this stuff out there to hear what people think.