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Puppet commission checklist
This week I was contacted by someone for a set of custom-made shadow puppets, and it got me thinking how useful it would be to have a checklist of all the things that I should ask/do when in such a discussion. If you’ve been around the various puppetry forums, you will have noticed Andrew Young from PuppetVision previously offered up a creative commons version of his ‘Puppet Pricing Calculator’, an Excel file which is designed to help you calculate how much to charge per puppet. Well, in that same vein, I’m offering up my
Puppet Commission Checklist as an Excel file or PDF
for free and under the same creative commons licence (attribution only). If there’s anything there that you think should be added, please let me know and I’ll update the file.
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Is it hard to make a puppet?
As with most topics on puppetry, the short answer is ‘it depends’. That’s not really all that helpful for a beginner though, so I’ll elaborate: certain puppet types are easier to make than others. But it’s still not as easy to describe as that…
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Making 'professional' puppets as a beginner
You could just start with the Beginners’ Guide to Puppetry. This really is more about professionalism than about giving you a "here’s how you build a puppet from A to Z" type article. For that, well, as I say, head here.
This is one of those topics that irks me, because it’s a lot of myth and a lot of misunderstandings amongst the general public about how to go about making ‘professional puppets’. In this article I hope to both shed some light on those myths, and show you how you can go about doing it yourself at the same time. So let’s start with the basics: what do we mean by ‘professional’?
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How to commission a puppet maker
This is sort of a beginners’ guide to knowing the right things to ask in order to commission a puppet maker. For the sake of us puppeteers, learn about how the commission process should work: read before you do anything; finding the right person for the job; quotes and prices; timelines; policies and payments; replicas; giving specifics; galleries and showcases; following up; and WHERE TO FIND PUPPET MAKERS.
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What is the best type of puppetry?
Yet another question pulled right from the Google searches. I find it quite odd that somebody might have typed this into a text box, given that the answer should be rather obvious.
There’s no such thing as "best" type of puppetry. Like all art, puppetry is appreciated based on personal taste. Many people I know don’t even like puppets, and some don’t consider it a true art form at all; especially when considering it for adults.
Excellent web site .
... Ross Browning on Where to find puppet shows in Australia?Very interested to hear how you did it in RSS.
Maybe as fellow puppeteers we could make a hyper link to each others web site?
Also love the ' spam test'...great idea...I get so much spam
Cheers
Ross