Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.
My hope still is to leave the world a bit better than when I got here.
The most sophisticated people I know - inside they are all children.
When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope is to leave the world a little better for having been there.
If you're doing a large, complicated character with radio controls, it might take a number of people several months to make it and if you're talking about a quick little hand puppet, it could be made in 2 days, so there's enormous range there, and no real easy generalities.
You're assisting the audience to understand; you're giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don't give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it's almost more pure. It's a cooler thing.
No, there's not much competition between puppeteers in general because everybody's working their own style.
I've never felt any sense of competition with anybody, and we're all friends; we're all good friends.
When I was a kid, I never saw a puppet show. I never played with puppets or had any interest in them.
At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.
I was very interested in theatre, mostly in stage design. I did a little bit of acting.
But with The Dark Crystal, instead of puppetry we're trying to go toward a sense of realism - toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive and we're mixing up puppetry and all kinds of other techniques.
NBC was trying to convert all of their local programming to color right away to encourage the sale of the sets, so I barely remember working in black and white, although I do know that I did do it, but there was not a major difference, though.
It has always been difficult to get Big Bird to be very pretty. Big Bird in England is much more gorgeous.
It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.
Actually the copies of characters is something I don't particularly like to talk about in articles but just for your information, most characters there's only one.
I think my own strengths are in television production.
We thought it would be fun to try to design a show that would work well internationally and so that' s what we're intending to do with Fraggle Rock, and we are indeed now selling it around the world.
Yeah, I did some small parts in high school and the first year of college and then fairly soon thereafter I settled into the backstage scenery, and then at the University of Maryland I was doing posters for their productions.
Yeah, we pretty much had a form and a shape by that time - a style - and I think one of the advantages of not having any relationship to any other puppeteer was that it gave me a reason to put those together myself for the needs of television.
