People call Furry Puppet Studio for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they need a custom puppet. Sometimes they need a mascot. And sometimes they call and say: I need a monster.

I’m Zack Buchman, founder and Creative Director of Furry Puppet Studio, a custom-puppet design studio in SoHo, New York. We design and build custom puppets for television, advertising, and music. A real portion of that work sits in the dark, weird end of the spectrum, and I want to talk about why custom puppets are uniquely suited for exactly that kind of work.

A physical creature does something digital cannot. It is in the room. It has weight and texture and a presence that the camera picks up differently from a rendered image. The performer’s hands are inside it, and that connection, the fact that a living person is channeling something through the object, shows up on screen in a way that is hard to quantify but easy to feel. Some directors have understood this for a long time. The creatures that have stayed with people, the ones from the productions people still talk about, were built by hand.

Our creature and monster custom puppets have appeared in television productions, music videos, and advertising campaigns. We have built large-scale mechanized monsters that require a crew to operate. We have made custom creature puppets whose proportions are subtly, deliberately off. We have made things that clients could not stop staring at when they first arrived on set. I find that reaction… rewarding.

The custom puppet design process for a creature commission starts the same way any character does: sketches, materials research, and a lot of questions about what the character is supposed to feel like, not just look like. The feeling is what you are really building.

The studio’s work, including the creatures, is at furrypuppet.com and on Instagram at @furrypuppet.