Acting for Puppetry and Beyond: Leveling up your performance skills
Summary:
Come kick your puppet performance skills up to the next level! Join Kristin Charney on a deep dive into making acting choices for your characters so they are believable, unique, engaging & fun!
Description:
Kristin Charney (Team America, The Muppets, Fargo, Ratched, Sid the Science Kid, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Men In Black II, Kidding (and oh my gosh, so much more!) will use her 25+ years of experience in film, television & theatre to help you learn techniques to up your game! These techniques apply to puppets as well as other characters you may want to bring to life (oh hai, RPG friends!). All of the skills that actors use on stage or screen also apply to the puppeteer. Let's explore acting choices for our characters together & learn how to effectively communicate those choices through our puppets and beyond. We’ll also work through the physical expression of emotions that is essential for storytelling. We'll be working with multiple styles of puppets, as well as written text. Puppets & text will be provided but feel free to bring your own if you have something you want to work on!
Learn to build a moving mouth mech for a turning head rod puppet. It's similar to the type used on Rizzo the Rat, and is a simple, intuitive design that's easy to perform and fun to play around with.
Description:
Along with building this puppet “skeleton," we're going to be looking at how it works, why it works, and how you may need to change it if you come up with your own designs in the future! We'll spend some time looking at fun ways to add on to the basic mech to create your own character, then we will look at another rod design to get your ideas flowing. We will be assembling a kit, but this workshop is designed to show you the principals and be able to create your own designs from fairly easy to find materials. If you can bring needle nose pliers, a fine phillips-head screw driver, it would be great, but we will have extras to borrow if you don't routinely carry those around with you the way Greg does.
Building a Better Hand Puppet - Tips and Techniques
Summary:
The internet is filled with patterns & pictures of fleecy friends, but if you want to build your own characters, you need an approach that that gives you strong results & makes your puppet expressive.
Description:
Puppets are not sculptures, they need to move! Building a puppet that moves well, stays light, and won’t break is the real key. We will look at the function of each part of the puppet, and then explore some tried and true ways that I have been building puppets for decades. Greg Ballora will emphasize taking a drawing and creating an easy blueprint that leads to success! For more than 30 years, Greg has been a Los Angeles-based puppet builder & performer. He has puppeteered with the Muppets, Henson’s Puppet Up, & was the Puppet Captain on Disney’s Crash & Bernstein. Greg has also been a Puppet Master for the Disneyland Resort, building puppets, training puppeteers, teaching students & creating parade choreography for puppets & large floats. Greg has taught puppet construction & performance at UCLA, Pepperdine University, Penn State & Cal Arts.
Do you want to create production-quality videos and live streams for your puppet characters? We're here to help!
Description:
Have you ever wanted to stream puppetry content live, or build yourself a humble (or not-so-humble) home studio setup? The folks from the Gen Con Puppetry Program are here to help you figure out cameras, lighting, monitors, workflows, streaming software, you name it for your puppet productions! Bring questions, we've got answers!
Finding Your Character's Voice for Puppetry and Beyond
Summary:
Do you want to find unique voices for your characters? Let’s explore your sound and shape it into something new. We’ll have fun discovering sustainable voices that you can use in your work and play!
Description:
In the world of puppetry, voice work is critical to developing characters. Looks, movement and sound work hand-in-hand to create a fully formed persona. Kristin Charney brings over 25 years of professional puppeteering experience in film, television & theatre to this workshop and is excited to share her insights! Join Kristin Charney (Henson, for a fun and practical vocal workout! Are some of your characters starting to sound the same? Are some voices difficult to sustain? In this workshop we’ll discover some new character voices and strengthen some old ones. We’ll start from the visual and layer sounds to build a fun and believable character. You’ll gain a solid foundation and learn some handy tips so that you can expand your own personal character library. Come ready to learn and play!
Would you like to get a start making puppets or other crafty things, but don't quite have a grasp on sewing by hand? Good news! This sewing for beginners workshop is perfect for you!
Description:
You'll learn lots of different hand-stitches, & of course you'll get to practice them. You'll leave with a collection of labeled stitches in a book (that you make) & instructions on how to achieve them at home. We'll get through as many stitches as we can in our 2 hours. You'll even learn a couple of tricks for threading needles & tying knots. The instructor, Stacey Gordon, has been sewing by hand since she was much shorter than she currently stands, & she stopped growing a long, long, long time ago.
So you've been practicing and you've got your lip sync and eye focus down. But what happens when you add a prop? A second camera? How do you puppeteer in a group of people? And what about Naomi???
Description:
Whether you're filming on your phone, tablet, camcorder, or your Canon Mark II, you'll want the skills that will help up your game in puppetry. Learn how to play with space, work with two cameras, interact with another puppeteer or even assist. We'll cover as much info as we can in an hour to leave you feeling challenged all while having the best time playing around with puppets!
This hands-on puppeteering workshop is perfect for beginning & early-intermediate puppeteers, librarians, teachers, or anyone who just wants a refresher on their puppetry skills.
Description:
Learn what makes puppetry such a magical experience & why puppeteer Stacey Gordon is passionate about teaching others to be effective storytellers, communicators, counselors, & educators through puppetry. In this workshop you will be led through skills like focus, breathing, posture, movement, lip sync, listening, & emotion to help make your characters come alive & your audiences more receptive.
Hilarious & slightly naughty skits from some of the funniest puppets around. This is an adult puppet show, prepare accordingly.
Description:
Quirky edgy puppet shows from quirky, edgy puppeteers! Puppeteers from around the country are converging on Gen Con for the best 4 days in gaming--and puppetry! But here's the best part: they're saving up all of their adult material just for this puppet slam! All of those things that we can't do in front of kids? We're going to do in front of you. (Okay maybe not *all*--but a bit of it!) Be prepared to laugh, to cry, to think, to gasp, to laugh again, to weep, and then laugh some more. You'll see beauty, you'll see talent, you'll see silliness, and you'll see hilarity.
Dive deep into puppet-building and make your very own fancy fish hand puppet in this workshop led by professional puppeteer, Stacey Gordon.
Description:
You'll learn skills to help you build puppets beyond fish, and your puppet will last for years to come! Glue gun skills required, use at your own risk.