One Puppeteer's Journey From Puppets to Pixels

The fence that divides puppetry and animation is a pretty low one and lots of artists like Phil Vischer, Karen Prell, Mike Quinn, and Nate Pacheco (to name just a few) find themselves jumping from one side to the other mid-career and Craig Crane is another of those puppeteer/animator hybrids.

Craig started his career in the 1990s doing a lot of ground-breaking work in real-time animation and performance capture as well as conventional puppeteering on various projects in England, France and Isreal, but these days he's an animator for Double Negative, a British effects shop. Craig discussed his transition from puppetry to animation in a two part interview with 3D World Magazine last fall (click to read part one and part two).

Craig seems to be pretty happy in the animation world these days, but I really hope he keeps a hand (no pun intended) in the puppetry world. He really is a brilliant puppeteer; you can check out is Real-Time animation demo reel above and his preschool puppet reel is a lot of fun too.

Cross-posted from The PuppetVision Blog.