Story and Character Workshop

Workshop hosts:  Isabella Jones and Bill Cantrell

This is an excellent workshop to combine with a puppet building workshop so you can develop your puppet’s character and storyline for the Workshop Showcase.

Story and Character Workshop with Bill and Isabella

About Instructors:

Bill Cantrell is a local playwright and lover of stories of all kinds.

Isabella Jones is a Brazilian transplant with background in acting, design and illustration.

About the Class:

The first part of the class will focus on story creation as it applies to the creation and development of puppetry characters.

We will look at historical and current approaches to storytelling and consider various options and elements for making good dramatic content for puppet performances. We will cover styles such as political satire, sketch comedy, drama, pageantry, spectacle, and improvisation as they apply to puppetry. Bill uses index cards and a storyboard to capture and organize inspirations in the process of creating puppet characters. We will also cover script writing if there is an interest.

In the character design portion of the workshop, you’ll learn how to use basic principles of design and illustration to create a character that better tells a story. Tools like color archetypes, dynamic spacing and shape language will be taught, and used to sketch the characters we started creating on the storytelling portion of the workshop.

Provided:

Course materials. Index cards.

To Bring:

Pencils, pens, and notepad.