Now that you’ve built your puppet, it’s time to bring it to life. In the video below, Maia will explain how to use breath and focus to animate your puppet. Once you’ve watched the video, have a go at the exercises below to test your puppetry skills.

Breathing

• Start by choosing an emotion that you would like to give to your puppet such as happy, sad, or angry.
• How would that emotion change the way you breathe? Experiment on yourself first and observe how your breath changes in different emotional states.
• Now try to replicate that breath with your puppet, trying a few different emotions. Does your puppet’s physique change when its breath changes? How does emotion manifest itself in our bodies?

Focus

• Find somebody to work with and label yourselves A and B.
• A will move their finger left to right, up and down and around the space.
• B must manipulate their puppet so that it follows the finger around the room with their puppet’s eye-line.
• Once B has got the hang of it, swap over to let A have a go.
• Make sure to look at your puppet and give it your entire focus as you operate it.