On behalf of tvlesson.com, my name is Paul Louis. I’m a professional puppeteer and puppet
builder. Let’s talk a little bit about what goes in a video reel for puppetry. Okay, let’s say you
want to audition for the Muppets, what type of reel should you send them? First of all, it
shouldn’t be very, very long, because nobody wants to sit to a demo reel that’s going to take 10
minutes, they don’t like it, they’re going to shut it off after 5 seconds, unless, your puppetry is
really engaging from the start. They may stay with it for a couple of minutes. So make it about 2
minutes, 3 minutes.
Use a wide variety of characters that really show off your range, your performance range, in
terms of your voices, your mannerisms, your manipulations. So lets say you, you have one
character that’s speaking like this, follow it up with maybe a character that’s speaking like that,
followed by, another character who’s speaking like this. So in other words, don’t have a high
peach character, follow another high pitch character. This way the viewers are going to see some
variety to your performance right from the start. Make sure the puppet looks good on camera,
don’t audition with the sack, don’t audition with a rag doll, audition with the nice professional
looking puppet. If you have to invest, go on eBay and find a nice professional puppet. There are
also puppet videos out there, you know, in educational sites, they’re free, and you can learn how
to build puppets. I even have a few of those videos out there. If you want to check them out just
Google my name, Paul Louis, you’ll find them. But you know, a video for an audition is
something that’s going to be etched in stone. So you want to make it perfect, you want to be
engaging, you want to be funny, you don’t want to be too long as I mentioned. So again, make
sure it also goes to the right source. You don’t want to address it to, To Whom It May Concern,
call up the company that you’re auditioning for and find out who the person is there who does
the actual casting for puppeteers, okay. That can change all the time but make sure you got a
name and address it to that particular person. You can put it on DVD. In all likelihood they’re
going to have DVD nowadays, so make sure that the DVD is a good quality. Make sure that you
are not seen at the shot at all. So make sure that your head is not showing on the shot, a piece of
your arm, make sure that the only thing that is showing in the video is the puppet itself, okay. So
good luck with your video reel. On behalf of tvlesson.com, this has been Paul Louis. Thank you
for watching.