A Puppet Maker Career: A Custom Puppet Maker Answers Your Questions

Have you ever wondered what a puppet maker career is really like? In this creative careers interview, Zack Buchman, founder of Furry Puppet Studio in New York, answers common questions about becoming a puppet maker, designing characters, and working in the entertainment industry.

My name is Zack Buchman, and I am the 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, music videos, advertising, live shows, and a steady stream of projects that are hard to put a name to.

Sarah (The Arty Teacher) asked me to answer the question her students ask most: how can I do what you do? So here is my honest attempt:

How did you end up doing this as a job?

I did not follow a tidy plan. As a kid, I was glued to anything puppets, starting from Sesame Street, and I stayed fascinated by the idea that a piece of fabric with ping pong balls could look back at you and make you feel something. I tried animation early on, but I was still drawn to puppets. I wanted to move the character with my hands.

I never went to college because the option did not exist for me. I moved to New York young and learned the work by doing it, and by working with people who were better than me at things I could not do yet. If I have any advice for a student, it is that you learn this work by making things, not by waiting until you feel ready. Build puppets, show them to people whose taste you trust, and notice which parts of the process you would happily do for free. That feeling is worth following. For me it has been a far better compass than any plan.

What does a normal day at work look like?

There really is not a normal one, which is part of why I love it. Some days are quiet and full of sketching, where the whole job is figuring out who a character is before we build anything. Other days are about meeting with clients and trying to shape the character together.

A surprising amount of the day is problem-solving. How will the mouth move? How will a puppeteer actually control the puppet? How will the expression read on camera? I would say a healthy part of the job is trying things that fail, then trying again.

What skills do you think are most important?

Persistence is probably my most useful skill, even though it is not specifically about puppets. This work is a lot of trying something, realising it does not work, and staying with it long enough to find a better answer.

Drawing, sewing, sculpting and painting all help. So does learning to really observe faces and movement. But you do not need to be great at everything at once. Start with the part that excites you, make a lot of work, take a break when it gets frustrating, but then always resume. It will eventually pay off. Hopefully.

Who do you make puppets for?

The range of our puppet design work is wide, and that is the fun of it. We have built puppets for tech companies, including two years working with Apple’s team in Japan, and for brands like Nike, Casper, and Nintendo. We have made characters for musicians, including marionettes of Missy Elliott and Pharrell Williams for a music video. We built a likeness of Andy Cohen for CNN. We made Frankie Focus, the mascot for New York State’s phone-free schools campaign, who then turned up on Jimmy Kimmel’s show being operated by Matt Damon (!)

So if you have watched television or a music video in the last few years, there is a decent chance you’ve seen our work.

What is the best part of the job, and what is the hardest?

The best part is seeing the finished puppet interact with people. In the studio, you are so close to every seam, every tiny decision. Then a performer picks it up, or it appears on set, and suddenly other people are responding to it in ways you could not fully predict. That never ceases to surprise me, no matter how many times I’ve been through it.

The hardest part is probably handing it over. You spend all that time with a character and then it belongs to someone else. I am still working on that.

If a student wanted to make their first puppet, where would you tell them to start?

Start cheap, and start now. You can make a real character out of almost nothing: an old sock, a paper bag, an actual banana, whatever is within reach. The one rule is to just play with it and see where it takes you. Like a child.

To learn more about Zack’s puppet maker career and see examples of his custom puppet work, visit: furrypuppet.com

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The Arty Teacher

Sarah Crowther is The Arty Teacher. She is a high school art teacher in the North West of England. She strives to share her enthusiasm for art by providing art teachers around the globe with high-quality resources and by sharing her expertise through this blog.

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