Jim Henson Puppetry Course Videos

Some rare videos from a course Jim Henson taught at the Institute International de la Marionnette in France in 1987 have recently been posted to YouTube.

Twenty years ago Jim Henson taught a Puppetry for Film and Television course at the Institute International de la Marionnette in Charleville Mezieres, France. About twenty puppeteers from around the world attended (I don't know the complete list of students, but they included notable puppeteers Gary Friedman and Rick Lyon). As part of the course the students produced a series of short films, which are now available on YouTube. The actual films include The Box, Making Muppets, and The Rehearsal. There is also some incredibly rare video of Jim training and working with puppeteers, which can be found here and here.

A big thanks goes to Gary over at Puppetry News for generously making these videos available to watch!

Getting Started in Video Puppetry

I got an email yesterday from a puppeteer in the UK who is auditioning for a TV show. He hadn't worked with hand and rod puppets on camera before (his experience was primarily with marionettes and glove puppets) and was looking for good resources for learning on camera puppetry. I sent him some links and I thought I'd share them here for the benefit of any PuppetVision readers who are interested in doing video puppetry, but either haven't picked up a puppet yet or don't have much formal puppetry training.

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!).

Insulting UCONN

Someone sent me a link to an article called Can Puppetry Pay? It's a little pessimistic and written with aspiring Christian puppeteers in mind, but it does address some of the realities of being a professional puppeteer. The part that really jumped out for me was this:

"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.

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