A slight new puppet deviation...

String, buttons and blue foam

For those of you who don't know, I'm a graphic designer in my everyday life - this puppet stuff is a hobby we try and fit in around working and gigging with the band. Currently I work as part of a marketing team for a mattress selling company based in Norwich. One morning we needed to come up with a simple Youtube video to be used as part of an internet campaign that could be done in-house and turned around fairly quickly.

How does he smell joke.. etc.

The company had an already existing mascot that I thought would be fairly easily made into a simple hand puppet. (Any excuse to try making up another puppet design). I suggested it, and in my lunch hour I made my way to a local furnishing shop and bought some blue foam, some buttons and a few sheets of felt. That evening I quickly made a character mascot puppet to use in a fairly simple commercial that we had sketched out, and were confident we could shoot it within the confines of the small back room space we had available.

Super cheesy!

The next morning I printed out some cartoon skyline buildings and a few of the key company messages to appear on screen. The idea was to have the puppet fly over the buildings, with key messages coming past like clouds as he races to deliver to the customers. This would be set over the already pre-existing, radio advert. It took three of us to shoot it in the end. One person to work the puppet, one to fly the clouds and a third to pull the skyline backwards to make it look like he was flying! Have a look at the finished video here.

Micheal Bay style budget filming... or maybe not!

It was a lot of fun for a morning, and it worked well enough for us to make the video and upload it to the business Youtube account. I took some photos of the puppet to keep on file, and then realised that I could use the puppet design some more for promotional point of sale posters. I posed the puppet in a few different angles and converted the images into cartoon outlines. These are now being used instore and on the side of one of the shops. What began as a throw away idea, bloomed into a popular key message campaign that decorated all the stores for a few months!

Getting a lot of use from our new puppet. Checkout in store now! haha

All good fun, and a lot less irritating without the music! 

Next week, we return to the Booze Boys... and some unsettling props for the new episodes.

See you then!