Eye Contact for Puppeteers: How to Master the Art of Puppet Theater

Video Transcript

Hello again! This is Paul Louis from Puppets n’ Stuff puppets. You can find us on the worldwide web at www. puppetsnstuff.com. We are going to continue now with our basic puppet manipulation techniques, and we are going to talk a little bit about eye contact. Basically what that means is, when your puppet is in a scene with another puppet, it is important that you always have this puppet looking at the character that it’s speaking to; or if the puppet is looking into a camera, you want him to look directly into the camera when he is speaking to the camera. Now, I am not working with a monitor here, so I have no way of knowing if my puppet is in fact looking directly in your direction there, but hopefully he is. Another good thing is that if you are doing a live presentation with the puppet, and let’s say you have somebody that the puppet is speaking to, you want to start with a focal point, looking at the person you are speaking to—and it does not mean you have to always speak with your puppet looking directly into the character. In other words, you can have him speak; in other words he is telling a story or reciting a nursery rhyme. Okay? Mary had a little lamb…you can look away a bit, and then come back to the focal point…whose fleece was white as snow, and every where that Mary went…again coming back to our first focal point. So it is important that when the character is speaking, he is not just flaring about with his eyes. Pick one focal point, do your thing, and then always come back to that original focal point. That gives the character more realistic eye contact within the scene. Okay? So when we come back, we are going to talk about staying more involved in the scene, and I will explain that in a bit.

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