Types of Moving Mouth Puppets: How to Master the Art of Puppet Theater

Series Summary

Puppets are inanimate objects used to tell a story in a play or presentation. Usually puppets are characters, but not always. The puppet is either operated directly by a person’s hand or indirectly by the use of strings or mechanical controls. There are many different kinds of puppets including the hand puppet. The function of controlling this puppet’s mouth and head is done by the puppeteer’s hand. If the puppet has arms, then these are usually controlled using the other hand or sometimes a rod or mechanical part will be used. There are other types of puppets including marionettes, supermarionation puppets, rod puppets, light curtain puppets, shadow puppets and ventriloquist dummies.

In this series of educational videos, you will learn more about the art of puppetry. Our puppet expert relates an introduction to puppetry and then shows you the basics of holding a hand puppet. You can learn how to move the mouth of your puppet and how to lip sync appropriately. Watch a lesson on moving the puppet arms with rods and learn how to use body language for the puppet. Making eye contact is important in any kind of theater, and especially in puppetry. Get tips on this and many more aspects of puppet theater including dancing tips, glove arm action, voices and making puppets walk or run. Watch as our expert demonstrates tips for TV puppeteers.

Video Transcript

"Hello! This is Paul Louis from Puppets n’ Stuff puppets. You can find me on the worldwide web at www.puppetsnstuff.com. On behalf of Expert Village.com, I would like to welcome you to our puppet manipulation techniques tutorial. What we are going to do today is, we are going to demonstrate the way we operate a basic moving mouth type of puppet, the type of puppets that you see on television or films and in many theatrical productions as well. So I am going to show you the type of puppet that we are going to be working with today. This is a basic moving mouth type of puppet. And as you could see he is pretty big, but he is also very light weight, and that is important because our hands are going to be up in the air for quite sometime. So you want to make sure the puppet you are working with is a light weight puppet, although sometimes you will work with heavier puppets, but for our purpose today, we are going to work with a light weight puppet to make it a bit easier on our arms. Also, we are going to be working with another type of puppet right over here, this is a gloved-arm puppet, which basically means that he has a glove for an arm. Okay, and I am going to show the difference between the two and how to operate the two. So when we come back, we are going to work on hand holding. We will be right back."