We were lucky to catch up with Frank Cesario recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Frank thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I was in 7th grade, and needed an outlet. I was always fascinated with music, liked theater/voice acting and wanted to perform. When I stumbled upon Sesame Street’s 1985 film, “Follow That Bird” I instantly fell back in love with that Muppet charm much like I did as a child. From here, I purchased my own puppet online, and soon found out thereafter it was not the most durable. So because of this inevitable degradation, I took it upon myself to learn how to sew and search the internet high and low for any kind of puppet building knowledge I could. The rest is history!

Frank, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Through years of staying in touch with other puppeteers online who were around my age (some older), slowly posting my content on youtube and refining my skills, as well as staying informed about any new techniques and creative methods is what really got my foot in the industry.

What I mainly do for a living, is puppeteer, puppet build, puppet wrangle and build costumes for puppets on PBS kid Donkey Hodie, but my skills are not limited to just puppets. For those who are unfamiliar with puppet wranglers, they are the the people on a puppet tv set who have to rig props to puppets, dress them, style them, and make sure that all puppet needs are met. Unlike a human being acting, being able to pick up objects, etc… a puppet cannot. Therefore, we are the people to make all that magic happen! It can get crazy, but the end reward is always so worth it. I also act, am musically inclined, and have a passion for cosplay.

In regards to my own works, I build puppets for people and also puppeteer as needed, bringing characters to life both physically with a puppet and a correlating voice, as well as voicing animated characters. You can find my instagram @fantoccesario

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I dont have any particular mission per say, but I certainly am a puppeteer and builder because the craft itself is a transportation to another world momentarily. The idea of bridging the gap between our world and the ones we love that live in fantasy, is possible with the help of puppetry. Being a huge nerd and person who grew up playing Nintendo, Playstation and a slew of other games, those have greatly influenced my art. An example of this for me, is I built a Pikachu puppet that sat on my arm, while I wore my Pokemon trainer cosplay. This illusion caught a ton of people’s attention at a local anime convention. It i appearances like this that are some of the most fun, because you never know who you will inspire to pursue puppetry next. It is a bug!

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Some of the most basic puppet patterns belong to projectpuppet.com and they helped me understand the fundamentals of hand puppets for television. Using this website and its patterns for the first several years of puppet building was a huge step ahead in the building game, as a huge early step is the patterning process alone.

I also suggest searching for TV puppet shows behind the scenes to not only see how some puppets are made, what materials they are made out of, etc, but to see how they are performed. If you are trying to enter the television puppetry industry, this is key.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Fantoccesario

Image Credits
Photo by Taylor Glascock Courtesy of Fred Rogers Productions Photo Courtesy of The Children and Family Emmy’s