Puppeteering with Adam Savage!

Recently, Adam spent a day at Rick Lyon’s shop working on a new puppet, Finn. We check in with Adam to chat about his puppeteering technique, the origin of Finn’s voice, and meet some new hand puppets made by Ron Binion!

Comments (36)

36 thoughts on “Puppeteering with Adam Savage!

  1. I find amazing that when the puppet Norm had went shy, it seemed like it just “clicked” and all of a sudden it had a character and personality. That’s pretty cool.

  2. I really like the characterization on Finn too, Would be interesting to see some more from him and maybe some Talking Room interviews with puppeteers about their memories and processes in bringing characters to life?

  3. More Finn!

    maybe try a ”Lego with Finn” ?

    That should be fun. Not sure how much help he would be but I bet he’d be fun. 🙂

    Or have Finn do a “ruining the movie” if he has something interesting to say about a particular movie. It is high time that there is another unauthorized commentary again anyway.

  4. Hi guys,

    it would be really nice if you could go into more analytical detail in future episodes, e.g., how do you reflect certain character traits with the puppet’s head movements, or how do you indicate emotional states. In humans, the latter are conveyed to a great extent by facial expressions, which are rather limited in the puppets. So I’m curious to know how you compensate for that.

    Cheers,

    Jochen

  5. More Finn!

    maybe try a ”Lego with Finn” ?

    That should be fun. Not sure how much help he would be but I bet he’d be fun. 🙂

    Or have Finn do a “ruining the movie” if he has something interesting to say about a particular movie. It is high time that there is another unauthorized commentary again anyway.

    Mystery science theater with Finn and friends

  6. Someone had mentioned mouth plate material that is durable in another puppet post. I find that large juice and liquid detergent containers make great mouth plates. Cardboard is ok, but will wear after many uses.

  7. , I’ve been using 1/16″ thick rubber sheets meant for cutting your own gaskets for my mouth plates. You can usually get 2 sets of mouth plates out of each square and they usually come in sets of 2 sheets for a couple of bucks at any hardware store. The rubber makes it easy to make different mouth shapes with your hand.

  8. What’s the status of getting an HTML5 player for premium content? The Ooyala flash player doesn’t work in Linux anymore and I’m unable to watch any of the premium videos now (including old content I was previously able to watch). Just get an error of “Invalid Content Specified Error #2048”.

    This is on both Firefox and Chrome.

  9. Hm, interesting. Which Linux are you running. I’m on a Debian 3.16.7-ckt20-1+deb8u1 (2015-12-14) x86_64 GNU/Linux and the videos play without problems.

  10. I’m running Ubuntu 15.10 with the latest 4.2.0-25 kernel. I’m able to watch flash-player content elsewhere, but it’d be nice to have one less reason to have flash installed at all.

  11. [..] but it’d be nice to have one less reason to have flash installed at all.

    In that regard you’re totally right. Flash should generally be outcast and has to die. 😉

  12. I love the recent puppetry videos! Puppetry is such a great maker medium that sometimes gets missed. Bring on more Finn, please.

    Adam, It seems that you need a carrying case for all these little guys now, maybe a one day build, wink wink.

    Thanks for another great video Tested.

  13. Excellent video guys, will be nice to see how Adam develops his skills over time.

    PS: Thank you for the update to a non-flash video player.

  14. I’ve now watched this four or five times and I’m always amused by Adam’s conversations with the puppets, basically conversations with himself.

  15. , you may want to get in contact with Jeff Dunham. He may be able to teach you some ventriloquism to make Finn come alive JUST a bit more.

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