🧵 Origins in String and Paper Mâché

I discovered puppetry when I was four, after successfully convincing my parents to buy me a puppet at a swap meet. From that moment on, it was all I wanted to play with. My parents (bless them) quickly adapted, taking me to see puppet shows anywhere they could find them — often at the mall, where a large marionette theater regularly drew a crowd.

I was more interested in what wasn’t onstage. I’d sneak around the back and sides of the theater, trying to catch glimpses of the mechanisms, cables, rods, and puppeteers behind the curtain. Even as a kid, I knew what was going on behind the scenes was often more interesting than what the audience was seeing up front.

In those early years, I built a lot of marionettes, then slowly began exploring other forms. When my parents got their first video camera, I started incorporating it into my shows — experimenting with live and pre-recorded footage that would interact with my onstage puppets. I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but I was already trying to figure out how analog and digital could collide in a way that made storytelling more magical.

Here’s a photo of me as a kid in the puppet theater my parents built for me — Sean’s Puppet Time Theatre. The plaque from that little booth still hangs in my office today.

There’s another photo of me in third grade, performing a mime and puppet piece in my school’s talent show. I have no idea what the audience thought of it… but I was all in. (Still am.)

By high school, things had evolved. I started making masks — first out of paper mâché — and eventually wrote, directed, and designed a new adaptation of Animal Farm for my senior project. It featured full-face masks and puppetry and was, somehow, both sold out and wildly controversial. I still have the newspaper clipping.

I also still remember the early feelings I had of putting something strange and personal and visual in front of people — and watching it land.

That hasn’t changed.

More dispatches soon.