Develop a Friend Puppet – Part 3
The last two posts have dealt with friend puppets. Once you’ve decided on the puppet and the personality, it’s time to begin developing that personality. The way we did it was to practice routines together with the emcee and the person doing the puppet. We’d practice them in front of the rest of the team to get their input and suggestions. How did we get the routines?
We started off with a brainstorming session to get as many ideas for routines as we could. Then we narrowed it down to the one or two we liked most. I suggest that you do the same and get your whole team involved. Once you’ve gotten some good ideas choose one you’d like to develop into a routine.
Take that idea and outline a routine you’d like to develop. Don’t actually write it out as a play, keep it as an outline with basic points and sub points. You might want to include some jokes, statements you want the puppet to make, specific things to talk about, or points you want to make.
Once your outline is ready, practice it. Get the puppet in the stage and the emcee out front and go through the outline. By using an outline, you have to think about what you will say rather than just read a line. It comes out as more real and less “canned.” Have the rest of the team watch and offer suggestions and helps. The key is to practice, practice, practice.
The nice thing about doing adlibs is that no two ever turn out the same and you can tailor them to your audience. One word of caution though. If the audience really warms up to the friend puppet, your five minute adlib can easily become ten or fifteen and might cut into the rest of the program.
If you haven’t tried using a friend puppet yet, give it a try and see what happens.
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