I am Zack Buchman, founder and Creative Director of Furry Puppet Studio, a custom puppet design studio in SoHo, New York. We design and build custom puppets for television, advertising, and music video, and most days I am somewhere between a workbench and a monitor, worrying about eyeballs.
Why we still build it by hand
A physical puppet and a CGI character are usually chasing the same thing: something on screen that an audience believes is alive. They just get there in completely different ways. A physical puppet has weight, warmth, and a presence that a rendered one does not, and on camera you can tell the difference even if you cannot say why. Once the suspense of disbelief clicks, the brain stops looking for the rods and just accepts that the thing in front of it is alive. It’s simple and pretty magical.
The part that can’t be faked
Every puppet at the studio starts the same way: a block of foam, carved by hand. Nothing about that step is digital, and nothing about it can be undone once you commit to a cut. The mechanisms that let it move get engineered in house, and the eyes usually go in last. The shape has to read correctly from every angle a camera might find, and the mouth has to actually work when the moment calls for it. There is no fixing that later in post.
No retakes, no safety net
A good example of that is a 2015 music video we made for Missy Elliott and Pharrell Williams, “WTF.” We built likeness marionettes and costumes that were performed by street performers in real locations. We studied the way the performers moved and reverse engineered that into the rigging, so the puppets carried the same distinct movement. Rolling Stone named it the best music video of that year. What sticks with me is not the likeness, it is that the puppets had to hold their own next to real people in a real location, while dancing.
What I want more of
We have done a wide range of work over the years, from television and advertising to characters that end up on the news for reasons nobody planned. But music video is the corner of it I would love to spend more time in. It is one of the few formats left where someone can hand you a strange idea and just let you build it. It’s really fun.
