Puppet Port

This summer while colleges are shut, mercury is breaking records, your brother is sweating at the nearby club, and you’ve shot down several often-tried suggestions and looking for a bright one, MoneyQuin forks out some puppet stuff.

An idea, which will not just make your vacation joyful, but will give you skills that can fetch you good money for long after the holidays are over. A well-known ventriloquist and puppeteer Satyajit Padhye tells MoneyQuin a step-by-step formula of making and operating puppets.

MoneyQuin followers can master this art and take up shows at birthday parties, school camps or TV channels and get paid handsomely. A small show at a birthday party can fetch you at least Rs 5000.

How to make a Puppet:

Puppets are broadly of two types – String Puppets, and Glove /Hand Puppets. We’ve seen string puppets at fairs in Rajasthan. The puppets are controlled and operated with strings tied to various parts of their bodies.

In case of glove/hand puppets, as the name suggests, the puppet structure is worn over the hand and is operated with the movement of hands. The Sesame Street puppets are the best example of hand puppets.

Well, can you make a puppet at home without professional training? Yes! So Satyajit has us believe. All you need is a good hand. If you have a show in mind the first step will be to write the script and characterisation and then work accordingly on making puppets. Here we learn to make a puppet.

Let’s try and make a string puppet of a girl.

Material required:

• Wood (Ply wood): You need to buy an 8x10 feet sheet of a ply wood though you may need only a bit for one puppet.
• Cloth: To dress the puppet. The material preferred is cotton. The clothes should be light so to keep the puppets light. If a puppet is heavy, it hinders free movement with strings.
• Buttons and beads for eyes and nose.
• Accessories: Wig, Bangles, earings, necklace etc
• Thread strings to operate the puppets. Black, nylon strings are preferred.
• For hand/glove puppets, you need cloth, foam and fur.

Simply follow these steps:

1. Take a sheet of paper and make a silhouette of a girl.
2. Cut face, hands, and legs separately. You need to be good at sketching to some extent.
3. Put these cut outs on ply wood and carve accordingly.
4. Now join these wooden body parts with the help of screws. This builds a Marionette or t-square structure.
5. Dress this structure with clothes. Put the wig on.
6. Put accessories.
7. Attach strings to hands, back and front.

The whole process takes 8-10 days.

Opertaing:

1. String Puppets: You need to learn how to move the puppets with strings. But you can learn this on your own also. All you need is a few hours of practice every day for 3-4 days. You have to perfect your finger movements.
2. Hand/Glove Puppets: When you wearing the cloth puppet on your hand, you should be able to move your hand such that it brings out the right emotion on the body of the puppet. This too can come with practice.

Hand/glove puppets are generally preferred for TV shows while for theatres string puppets are the buzz word. For birthday and other parties, hand/glove puppets should be good. It doesn’t need setting up the stage and other infrastructure.

THE ECONOMICS:

Making a string puppet can cost about Rs 8,500.

A hand/glove puppet costs Rs 10,000 upwards.

(ENDS)