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!).
