Learning about different types of puppets, how they work, and their origins helped me better understand the differences in type and how to control movement. It also helped me better understand the reasons why puppets were created in different ways, helping me inspire my own ideas for our puppet show. I then did a deep dive into the origins of Punch and Judy, the show I’d grown up seeing in British seaside towns and the like. This helped me understand how over decades this show had developed and how the makers had developed the puppet’s physical form as a glove puppet.

I really enjoyed working collaboratively as team to both create the puppet as well as researching and developing ideas for our show and indeed the narrative for our show. This helped me learning how to communicate ideas and understand different perspectives. One of the ways we worked collaboratively was delegating different roles in the making process as well as having a group meeting where we all showed our research and showed our ideas of where the narrative could go. For this, I created this mood board to visually present my ideas. This helped us understand what core theme was at the centre of all our stories and how that could be translated into the final show we were producing.

I really enjoyed the making process as I learnt a bunch of new skills and techniques in the workshop such as cutting using the bandsaw, learning how to carve the foam, sanding and creating the intricate wooden joints and texturing and sealing as well as painting the puppet. These skills will go on to become really useful in later projects and understanding how the NTU workshop works and is laid out will really become beneficial in future work. Working collaboratively with this meant we could all do separate elements to complete the project on time as well as understanding what each of us was doing.

Working on the movement and lighting elements was really exiting as we did lots of research and development such as watching various puppet shows recorded on YouTube and playing with different lighting techniques to get the idea of a heartbeat and fire inside someone. We played around with gobos, different types of fixtures and sounds to create something new. This gave me a really well-rounded look at whole the lighting rig works in the Waverly Theatre and how to create show control elements for a live performance.

The performance itself was a really exciting element, giving us to perform in front of a live audience helped us understand how theatre work and how to professionally and smoothly run a performance both from the puppetry movement aspect and from a technical aspect with lighting and sound. This as a really exciting process to explore and create our final puppet show. I was really happy with the final live performance and a really excited to work with puppets again in another project soon!