August 7, 2024 | Social Media Puppetry Workshop | Grant Baciocco | San Francisco, CA
By the time I attended Grant Baciocco’s social media puppetry workshop I had already been running Puppet Show at the End of Time on Instagram for nearly two years. I thought I had a reasonable handle on what I was doing. Grant very quickly and very cheerfully showed me how much more there was to know.
Grant Baciocco is one of the most experienced and knowledgeable people working at the intersection of puppetry and digital media and spending a day learning from him was an absolute privilege.
The workshop covered the full picture of what it means to create and perform puppetry content for social media platforms from the practicalities of filming and lighting a puppet for a phone screen, to understanding how social media audiences engage with puppetry content differently to live or television audiences, to the strategic side of building a following and developing a consistent creative identity online.
What I found most valuable was the conversation around the specific performance adjustments that social media demands. Performing for a camera on a phone in a public space is genuinely different to performing on a stage or even in a professional studio. The scale is different, the frame is different, the audience relationship is different. Grant had thought deeply about all of it and shared that thinking generously.
I came away with a much clearer sense of direction for Puppet Show at the End of Time and what I was doing well, what I could sharpen, and where the real opportunities were for growing the series and its audience.
If you are a puppeteer thinking about building a presence on social media, find a way to learn from Grant Baciocco. It is time very well spent.
