Twin Cities Puppeteers Guild interview with Max Humphries, Puppet Designer for Dinosaur World Live

Are there mentors or experiences that have helped shape your journey as a puppeteer?

My schooling at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama under Chris Marfleet and Sean Crowley taught me the hard graft it takes to bring a creative project to the finish line. after that, Chris Piree, Dik Downey and Peter O'Rourke were some of the first puppet makers I worked with and I learnt a lot from them, but the biggest influence on my work is certainly Cheryl "Chuck" Brown, as we've been working together making puppets as a team for over fifteen years, our work is built on each other's strength.

Many puppeteers gravitate towards a particular style or form in their work, is there one that you've particularly resonated with?

My heart is always inside the puppets, the gears and springs, the bones of the thing. The style of our puppets though, comes from the collaborations within our team and everyone bringing their particular skills. Beyond that, what you see onstage is a joint effort of everyone, it's a conversation between us as the makers, the puppet director and the puppeteers.


Part of what makes paleoart so dynamic is the way it balances scientific discovery with the artist’s imagination. How did you balance these with your dinosaurs (in terms of decisions around colouring/feathering/movements)?

My original pitch for the show's design was very much a push back against the drudgy brown and grey look that's a hangover from the victorians. 

We've looked to nature to inspire us and keep everything very bright, so you'll see elements of blue jays, red pandas, alligators, ornate mastigures, elephants, whales, among others, all mixed in to make a very colourful menagerie on stage.

When you begin the process of making a puppet of a creature, where do you start?

My design philosophy has always been to work from the inside out. Gracefulness is something I'm always striving for in my designs. That doesn't always mean they all move like ballerinas, it just means that even if the puppets nature is to be large and plodding or skittery and shy, each style of movement has been considered into the design from the start.

Once the bones are in place, then we move onto finalising what the final look will be.


Were there any particular design challenges you faced with what you wanted the puppets in this show to do?

A number, all very practical. We really wanted this show to be accessible to everyone and the way to do that is to keep the ticket prices low, so I knew from the start we were going to keep everything very practical, no electronics or hydraulics. That means the puppets have to be as light as possible to allow us to fit a lot of mechanisms in and everything has to be maintainable on tour. We have an amazing team of puppeteers on tour and they're working incredibly hard as every dinosaur is full size, operated by nothing more than their strength and skill.


When seeing a puppet show, some puppeteers very carefully study how the performers are embodying the characters, others study the mechanisms, or how the puppets interact with their world. When you’re seeing a puppet show, what do you keep an eye out for?

To be honest, I try very hard to not dissect a show whilst i'm watching it, it's a very easy habit for theatre makers to get into and one I've definitely been guilty of in the past. There's plenty of time for evaluation after so I try to leave my profession at the door and enjoy the show along with everyone else.

Read our past interviews below:

Interview with Toby Olié, co-director and puppetry designer for Roald Dahl's The Enormous Crocodile the Musical