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Teaching artist Sam Jay Gold demonstrates how to craft a shadow puppet using a few simple materials, and explains how to use scale, movement, and perspective to create an amazing puppet show.

Vocabulary You Will Learn:

• Shadow puppetry—A kind of puppetry that uses light, shadow, and creativity to create a live performance.
• Scale—When you make an object in your puppet show larger or smaller by moving it closer to or further from the light source, you are impacting its scale.
• Movement—Puppeteers use movement to indicate how the character or object is moving in the story. They do this by moving their object around in front of their surface.
• Perspective—When you shift the light source around in the puppet show to focus the audience’s attention on different components of your object, you are changing their perspective.

Materials You Will Need:

• A writing utensil
• A light source, such as a flashlight or lamp
• Scissors
• A thin piece of cardboard, such as a cereal box
• A surface, such as a wall, sheet, or large piece of paper

How to Create Your Own Shadow Puppet Show

1. Gather your materials: your scissors, your writing utensil, and your cardboard.
2. Decide what kind of creature you want your shadow puppet to be.
3. Draw the outline of your creature on your cardboard, beginning with one element of the creature (such as teeth, fin, or tail) that will be very important. 
4. After drawing the outline, you can add more features and details to your creature. As Sam did with his serpent’s spikes, you may want part of your creature to double as the setting where the creature lives by drawing mountains, houses, waves, trees, etc.
5. Cut out your shadow puppet, beginning with the main outline and then cutting the smaller details. 
6. Now it’s time to experiment with using your puppet to create shadows! Go to the surface you’ll be using for your puppet show. Turn out all the lights except for the flashlight or whatever light source you will be using. 
7. You can begin by experimenting with scale. How does it look when you hold your puppet very close to the light source? What happens when you move it very far away?

8. Next, think about your creature’s movement. Do they run across your surface, or slowly stomp around? Do they swim, or maybe fly? Try out different ways your puppet can move around and observe what that shows about the character.
9. Let’s try experimenting with perspective next. What happens if you focus the light only on one small component on your creature—for instance, its teeth, tail, or a fin? What about if you focus on the part of the creature that doubles for a setting, like mountains or trees? Try focusing on that part, and then zooming out so we see the whole creature. How does this change in perspective help you start to create a story?
10. Now, you can begin crafting the story for your puppet show! Using scale, movement, and perspective, show the audience who your creature is and what they are doing as your puppet show begins. You can do your own voiceover for your story, just as Sam did.

In this video, Sam taught us how to use a few simple materials to create a shadow puppet, and he also taught us how we can use scale, shadow, and perspective to tell a story with our puppet. At the end, Sam showed us the beginning of his serpent’s story and prompted us to create the beginning of our own original puppet show. If you want to go even further, think about these questions: 

• How can you use different perspectives of your puppet to show different parts of the story’s setting? Can its tail represent the ocean, while its mouth signifies a cave? Or maybe zooming in on its ears shows that we are in the mountains, while focusing on its eye shows that we are near a hole? 
• Can you use movement to show who your creature is and how they are feeling at different points in the show? Maybe your creature scampers and jumps when they are excited, but tiptoes very slowly when they are afraid.
• What happens when you introduce another character into your story? Can you create another creature to interact with your first? How does that make the story different?
• How can you use scale to emphasize different important moments in the story? Maybe your creature grows really tall when they are feeling brave, but shrinks down when they are embarrassed or sad. If you’re working with two puppets, you can experiment with making them different sizes in relation to each other.

Accessibility

Don’t forget that you can turn on “Closed Captioning” to view the YouTube video with English captions.

More about the Teaching Artist

Sam Jay Gold (he/him) is a puppeteer and theater artist based in Los Angeles, California. His work has been supported by the Jim Henson Foundation and featured in venues ranging from the Lincoln Center to neighborhood stages in Indonesia. Sam believes that arts education is life preparation. He teaches throughout New York City and Los Angeles with an emphasis on neuro-diverse spaces, aiming to offer students a creative outlet to rediscover what’s possible in the world, in their communities, and within their own lives.

Kennedy Center Education Digital Learning

Eric Friedman 
Director, Digital Learning

Kenny Neal 
Manager, Digital Education Resources

Tiffany A. Bryant 
Manager, Operations and Audience Engagement

JoDee Scissors 
Content Specialist, Digital Learning

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Generous support for educational programs at the Kennedy Center is provided by the U.S. Department of Education.

Gifts and grants to educational programs at the Kennedy Center are provided by The Paul M. Angell Family Foundation; Bank of America; Capital One; The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; Carnegie Corporation of New York; The Ednah Root Foundation; Harman Family Foundation; William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust; the Kimsey Endowment; The Kiplinger Foundation; Laird Norton Family Foundation; Lois and Richard England Family Foundation; Dr. Gary Mather and Ms. Christina Co Mather; The Markow Totevy Foundation; Dr. Gerald and Paula McNichols Foundation; The Morningstar Foundation; Myra and Leura Younker Endowment Fund; The Irene Pollin Audience Development and Community Engagement Initiatives;

Prince Charitable Trusts; Dr. Deborah Rose and Dr. Jan A. J. Stolwijk; Rosemary Kennedy Education Fund; The Embassy of the United Arab Emirates; The Victory Foundation; The Volgenau Foundation; Volkswagen Group of America; Jackie Washington; GRoW @ Annenberg and Gregory Annenberg Weingarten and Family; Wells Fargo; and generous contributors to the Abe Fortas Memorial Fund and by a major gift to the fund from the late Carolyn E. Agger, widow of Abe Fortas. Additional support is provided by the National Committee for the Performing Arts..

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