Thank God Christmas is over! Our annual show at Victory went well, and many people enjoyed it. I'd post video but we apparently haven't put any together yet. At any rate, I'm posting because I'm toying with the idea of using shadow puppetry as a medium to teach the kids in our Sunday classes. I've never done shadow puppets before, aside from hand shadows on the wall as a kid. My thinking is that we'll use shadow puppets for teaching Bible stories as a separate section of our weekly children's program in order to add more variety to our services. The Bible stories would be told via shadow in order to free up the teacher from having to cover the story, thus being able to concentrate on simply teaching the truths that relate to the story of the week and cutting down on long teaching scenarios where kids minds tend to wander.... What I'm needing to know is whether or not there are any books, videos, etc. that are recommend to cover the various aspects, set up, and construction of said show. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! 

Hi - I specialise in shadow puppetry! Welcome to P&S!

I recommend David Currell's book "Shadow puppets & shadow play". It's an excellent resource and covers everything from creating the designs and building the puppet (rods, materials, etc), to lighting, screens, scripts, etc.

Also, I have a few free tutorials here:
http://www.puppetsinmelbourne.com.au/blog.php/2010/11/13/learn-more-about-shadow-puppetry
and more patterns are listed here:
http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/tutorials.php/free-shadow-puppet-patterns-a-list

I highly recommend going to that second link and scrolling down to the Hobey Ford tutorial. Hobey is the American Richard Bradshaw I think (if you don't know who RB is, then there's also info about him at the second site linked above)

If you have more specific questions, I'd be happy to help

Thanks for the info Na! It's greatly appreciated. I did order that book on Amazon, and that's the kind of info I was looking for. You can always find a book on a subject, but finding the best book can be a bit of a challenge!

I'll definitely have to check out the links you've posted as well. I think the  main thing we'd have difficulty with is setting up the stage itself. It would have to be portable or otherwise easily taken down during the course of the production as it would be a 5 min piece in a 45min. weekly production. We're redesigning our stage soon, so we should be able to figure out something in the meantime.

It's great to be back on P&S. I tend to visit here in bursts of puppetry goodness whenever we undertake projects like this. I'm sure I'll be around for a while! I'll let you know if I have any specific questions.  God bless!

You know that shadow puppets can be done on an overhead projector and you could simply project the show from the front on to a wall. That would take hardly any time to set up.   I realize it is not quite the traditional style of shadow puppetry but might be an option.  Even if you do go with traditional shadow puppets you can still use the overhead as the light source from the back and thus create scenery for each story very easily on a computer and then print it on clear sheets. We have used this technique even for regular rod or hand in mouth puppet shows. We have a couple stage set ups that had the shadow screen built into the back of them so we could do this. Often we would then use the screen also for transitions between scenes.

That sounds interesting, but I'm not sure an overhead would have the necessary lumens to project in our sanctuary. It may work for our kid's stage, but I'm pretty sure that the throw would be too far in our main sanctuary. We occasionally have a "take over" Sunday in which our staff takes over the morning service and gives the congregation a taste of what happens next door every Sunday. I think I really started thinking about shadow puppets during the Christmas production while sitting in the "box" (the puppet stage) and listening to the narrative styled song, and how that would be a great time for some interesting visuals (i.e.: shadow puppets) that most of us haven't been exposed to. One of the most creative things I saw at a church was at a conference at Church on the Move when they had a sand artist do a Creation sequence on some sort of overhead. I'm not sure what the overhead was... It looked like an overhead projector on steroids! At any rate, I do have a few overheads lying in a closet somewhere. I kept them for projecting templates onto foam for sculpting.

Play around with it... you might be surprised.   It can be a bit touchy when you use it as background. We always did this in a theater so we had control of light placement. even then we had to make sure and not throw light on the screen from the front. You would have that issue though even with "regular" shadow puppetry.

I've used the overhead projector for shadow puppets several times.  I don't know how big your sanctuary is (megachurch?) but ours seats 400-500 and it was plenty big enough for everyone to see.  We used it this way for VBS and everyone was enthralled.

All I did was cut the figures out of cardstock copied from coloring books and taped to a popsicle stick!  We all thought, oh this may be lame but the audience was fascinated. It really held their attention.  Maybe just because it was different.  Anyway, it's a quick option, but I'd love to have real shadowpuppets and a stage.  If you build one, please share here how it worked out. I'd love to know what you did.
 

Thanks for the info Na! It's greatly appreciated. I did order that book on Amazon, and that's the kind of info I was looking for. You can always find a book on a subject, but finding the best book can be a bit of a challenge!

I'll definitely have to check out the links you've posted as well. I think the  main thing we'd have difficulty with is setting up the stage itself. It would have to be portable or otherwise easily taken down during the course of the production as it would be a 5 min piece in a 45min. weekly production. We're redesigning our stage soon, so we should be able to figure out something in the meantime.

It's great to be back on P&S. I tend to visit here in bursts of puppetry goodness whenever we undertake projects like this. I'm sure I'll be around for a while! I'll let you know if I have any specific questions.  God bless!

I was going to post a link to a tutorial for a screen, but I haven't finished it yet. I do have something already, but it's for table-top/display use.

In the meantime, I think you might like this:
http://www.jnpconsulting.com.au/gallery/To%20make%20a%20shadow%20puppet%20screen.pdf
It's a tutorial on how to make a screen using PVC piping.  It looks fairly easy to use/take apart/put together. The screen looks quite small, but I'm sure you could resize the instructions accordingly to fit your needs.

Hope you enjoy the book - I know it's been very useful for me. I really actually don't know much about shadow puppetry, most of it I've just worked out as I went along. The book's been really handy when I haven't been sure of a concept and needed good information.