Off the wall creativity at Furry Puppet Studio « Brand Identity Designer Mark McCorkell

04 Jul

Off the wall creativity at Furry Puppet Studio

Furry Puppet Studio

If you have been following my blog for some time, you may remember my previous article about Furry Puppet Studio. I stumbled upon their website and was amazed by what these guys were creating. Recently, I had an email conversation with Zack Buchman, the Creative Director of Furry Puppet Studio (New York) and he showed me some of their recent work and I was blown away by what these guys were doing, and this all happened inside the time frame of 3 weeks!

The Brooklyn based Furry Puppet Studio has recently been working on a slightly unusual project. Their spunky design team has collaborated with Peco electric company to create a series of electricity eating monsters, helping convince people to rid themselves of their energy guzzlers and trade in for some more efficient wares.

Furry Puppet Studio, headed by Creative Director Zack Buchman and known for their original approach to traditional puppetry, has taken lifeless appliances like a dishwasher, refrigerator and a boring glass window and actually found a way to bring them to life. The end result is a superb combination of creative design and well-executed craftsmanship.

I love this stuff! There are always things you can learn from other creative arts and crafts. So, out of sheer curiosity and intrigue I asked Zack a few questions that I could post here – have a read below at what he said.

Q: How do you find inspiration and develop your ideas for the puppets and everything you guys create?

Answer: “I think I find a lot of my inspiration from the view of a window overlooking the street, or even just a seat in a subway car – New York is brimming with beautiful, memorable characters, and in all manners of shapes, sizes, and colors imaginable. You could probably fill a sketchbook just riding the subway in the morning – and maybe even two sketchbooks if it’s on the weekend when it makes local stops. There definitely isn’t a shortage of source material here.

But as far as style goes, I’ve always been inspired by the pixelated adventure games of the nineties, and, in particular, the brilliant work of artists such as Steve Purcell and Pierre Gilhodes. The designs and characters they have created for those games are just brilliant, full of imagination, innocence and magic – and that is despite the fact that the medium was very primitive and limited in those days.”

Zack Buchman photos

Q: What is the creative design process for creating your puppets? Does it start out with sketches and develop on from there?

Answer: “I prefer to use actual, physical materials whenever possible, so yes, most of our characters are born as pencil-drawn, marker-colored sketches. It’s only later on during the creative process that I scan them and finalize the colors and finish on Photoshop.

When I first start on a new character, I’ll do a sort of “free-write” and sketch out any neat ideas that pop into my head. It isn’t until I have a variety of sketches to choose from that I finally distance myself and ask: “What most captures what we are looking for?”
at this stage, I am trying, together with the rest of the creative team, to identify the essence of the character, that core quality we want to preserve as we develop the character further.

It’s this essence that we’ll turn to time and again as we start to construct the physical puppet, which is crucial as there are a number of other considerations to keep in mind at this point as well. For one, the 2-D sketch is now becoming a 3-D foam sculpture, so we have to make sure it makes sense in real space and looks appealing from every angle. We also have to make sure the puppet works practically, and that it allows the puppeteer to show a wide variety of emotions while also maintaining a strong, defined expression.

Another consideration is that we want to make sure the new character fits in with the rest of the cast – the ensemble is really a singular artistic vision, and our new character has to fit in with this vision while still maintaining its own unique dynamic. That’s why it’s so important to understand the essence of the character early on in the development.”

I think all good designers should absorb inspiration from everywhere, and by looking over the fence every once in a while at your neighbours in another side of the creative industry you might just learn something, and find new inspiration that you can translate into your own work.