Hi Everyone,
I quite often get contacted by young aspiring puppeteers, filmmakers and entertainers. Who have these great plans and ideas and who want to have me build them puppets for virtually free and exchange for things like rights to all different parts of their production/s and or being their producer or Director 
Every time I have been approached I have tried to help them as best as I can. But I am wondering if there is anywhere out there that I can refer them to to help them on their way. I would like to do more than give them some very generic advise and wishing them luck.
I know there is kick-starter and programs like this for crowd funding. But I doubt they even have the capital to support their incentives.
If anyone has any thoughts I would appreciate it, I would really like to encourage the young creative minds to dream BIG.
Thanks in advance
Shannon

You know, I will give you 10% of my company if you only...... :p

That is where I am, and those are the people I hope to reach.  But like them, it is just a big dream right now.  I wouldn't recommend crowd funding at the start, as it can be more discouraging when it fails (I haven't learned that lesson yet :p).    I will be interested in seeing other people's responses on this.

I think the best thing is to point them to basic resources about what puppetry is and how it works. I have had a lot of similar enquiries over the years and the biggest problem for me has always been that they have no clue as to how much work goes into designing puppets. If they understood the basics better they would have a far greater appreciation of the costs involved and why its not feasible to do it for cheap. More importantly, their ideas are usually totally not thought through, so getting them to learn about puppetry means less work for the builder in trying to parse their ideas. Often i have had the response of "i havent thought this through enough and now realise i need to either rethink or not do puppets at all".

The second thing i do from there is say "look, i cant do it, but heres a pattern or book or website. Make it yourself - its not as hard as it looks and it will save you heaps of money". Generally i point out that a little enthusiasm and willingness to learn is all you need, even if it wont have that 'professional' look.

If you want, when i am back at home next week -on hols right now- i can dig up some emails and draft up a template response based on my most common replies.

Oh - third thing... Point them to forums. We always help and quite often just having some free feedback is useful.


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