Puppet Experiment Evaluation

Audience Interaction/Movement

Audience interaction is at a maximum when using finger or hand puppets as movement is created directly through the gestures of the audience's hands. This amount of interaction gets the audience fully involved with the telling of the story as they are bringing the characters to life, as well as carrying the story through their movements. However, the puppets that were incorporated into the actual pages felt awkward to use because of their set poses and positions. I think the enjoyment factor of this particular method would wear thin (especially for a young child) because of the limitation and awkwardness when handling the pages.

Material

Using a soft material like felt is appealing to both children and adults. The soft, touchable quality felt has, provides extra interaction with young children as they might like the feel of it - like they are petting a real animal.


Composition/Viewpoint

The stand alone finger puppets can be viewed from every angle as they have no limitations, and can be easily slotted into any composition - like being used alongside a book or in a puppet theatre.
On the other hand, the puppets that were incorporated into the pages had a limited viewpoint because of being stuck to the page.


Conclusion

In my opinion, by creating puppet characters for my book, I have been able to answer the questions posed in my proposal in both a positive and a negative way - I have created a better understanding of how a more tactile approach to storytelling (through the use of puppets) can aid the interest and entertainment value for its audience, as well as weighing out the pros and cons to working in this particular medium to see how it functions when considering the objective of interaction.