There was quite a buzz in the puppet blogosphere recently about Figurenschneider, a German puppet company run by Norman Schneider. I'm not sure who was the first to spot the site, but I saw mentions of it on the dotBoom Blog and Thistledown Puppets among others. Norman's puppets have a unique, hand crafted and time-worn quality to them that you see in a lot of European puppets (especially German ones) for some reason. They look a little different and I think we need more of that in puppetry, especially here in North America.

What I thought was most refreshing about them was that they don't look like they were made with Antron Fleece.

Antron Fleece, if you don't already know, is the material most commonly used to make Muppet-style television puppets, so much so that it's often referred to as "Muppet Fleece". It has a heavy pile (meaning it's fuzzy) that disguises seams and it can be dyed to any colour. The only problem is that you can't buy it at your local fabric store and for along time the information about how to order it was a jealously guarded secret in the television industry. That all changed about eight or nine years ago when thanks to the internet. Once "the secret" was out lots of puppet builders started working with Antron fleece. As more and more people started using Antron fleece I started noticing that more and more the puppets I saw on the internet had the same sort of "Antron look" to them.

I designed many of Bear Town's characters when I was a teenager in high school. Although back then I didn't work with Antron fleece, I was - and in many ways still am - heavily influenced by The Muppets. As I start rebuilding the Bear Town puppets I've come to realize that unless I want to redesign all of them I'm stuck working with a style of puppet that could end up looking very Muppety or derivative if I'm not careful. So the challenge then is how to do I make Bear Town's puppets more visually interesting and original?

I don't have all the answers yet, but I think one of the best ways start is try working with materials other than Antron Fleece and experiment with using different materials and different textures. Whatever I do, I want Bear Town's puppets looking less like this:



And more like this:



I'm also thinking I should review an old blog post I wrote for PuppetVision called Rules For Puppet Revolutionaries.

Posted by Andrew at 8:02 PM | Permalink

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