What's with the puppets?

I have made mention of building puppets in several posts across the web and the common question from friends now is "what's with the puppets?"
 
My theatre company (JaCKPie.com) is working on adding a puppet improv program.  At its inception I had zero puppeteering experience and relied on a good friend of mine Raymond Carr to do all the puppet work while I played a human character. We did this in a show called Ninja and Jack and it ran for about a year before Raymond got the opportunity to tour with Walking With Dinosaurs. Now I am training as a puppeteer and building puppets as well as teaching puppeteer Amy Strickland how to do Long-form Improv. Soon we will co-teach a class on puppet improv and build a team of Improv Puppeteers and begin production on some shows.
 
I will be posting some pics of some new designs I am trying out as well as video of Amy and Myself workshopping the new stuff. 
 
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