If I were to trace my interest in puppetry to one single moment, it might be around the time that Elijah and I recorded a couple of video skits with his Among Us plushies. “Engineer News,” as we ultimately called it, was also inspired a lot by “Villager News,” a series of YouTube videos that Elijah actually introduced me to.
This video has a lot of elements which would eventually carry over into my puppet videos. We had the stuffed characters which I moved like puppets, a small desk served as the “set,” and I displayed an image on the TV which served as a background, much like with green screen. The structure of a news program made the whole premise a lot easier to pull off.
Of course, I couldn’t have accounted for Elijah’s own creativity and enthusiasm which tended to throw me off a bit. I think that these videos are actually the forgotten attempts. There is a video floating around which went a lot better.
The flubs and imperfections stood out to me while I was watching them, but then I realized that it doesn’t matter. We spent a few minutes working on something together, and that’s an opportunity that I’ll always cherish.
