“I see faces everywhere!”: Zack Buchman – Creative Director at Furry Puppet Studio – on creating characters

Zack, it’s great to connect. To kick us off, how would you pitch what Furry Puppet Studio does?
We are Furry Puppet Studio, a custom-puppet design studio based in SoHo, New York. We design and build characters for television, advertising, music videos and live shows. The focus is on creating custom puppets that feel like real, living beings before they even start moving. We try to bring a modern sensibility to a very traditional craft.

How does one get into puppet design? Is there a typical route in!?
I am not sure there is a typical route. I tried animation early on, but I really craved the physical side of creating characters. I wanted to touch them and see them react in real time. I never went to college, so my path was mostly just making things and collaborating with people who knew how to do the things I did not know how to do. You just have to start cutting foam and let the process teach you.

Can you talk me through the early stages of the design process here? What helps you find the character?
It almost always begins with a lot of sketching. I find that when a few of us are drawing freely without overthinking it, we make very clever choices intuitively. Often the throwaway scribbles are the ones we end up returning to.

We also look at materials very early. Sometimes an unusual synthetic fur or a piece of fabric sitting on the bench will suggest an entire personality, and we let that guide the shape of the character. The goal is to find the essence with as few details as possible.

What makes for a good brief for you guys?
A good brief tells us how the character needs to feel, rather than giving us a rigid blueprint of every detail. It leaves room for the process. When you carve a shape in three dimensions, the material sometimes pushes back and suggests a different direction. The best projects happen when the client is open to those discoveries and trusts us to find the right expression together.

Can you talk us through some recent creations?
We recently built Frankie Focus, the mascot for New York State’s phone-free schools initiative. The brief was a very practical assignment: they needed a mascot with a specific communication goal, something that would help introduce this new policy alongside Governor Hochul. We patterned him in upholstery foam and synthetic fur to make him bright and approachable.

What made it interesting was everything that happened after the build. The character took on a life of its own and ended up appearing everywhere, from the news to a spot on Jimmy Kimmel Live – where he was actually played by Matt Damon. It is always surreal when a puppet leaves the studio and becomes part of a larger cultural conversation.

Brilliant. And in a world where AI is on the up, are you seeing more love than ever before for these tactile creations?
I think so, yes. A physical puppet does something that digital or AI generation simply cannot replicate. It exists in the room. It has actual weight, and the interaction carries much more emotion in it. Because there is a human performer driving it in real time, the performance has a spontaneity that you can feel. People seem to be craving that tangible reality right now.

Absolutely. And what is the studio like? I imagine it’s a pretty special place to work?
It is much calmer than people usually picture. It is a quiet working space in SoHo with shelves of books and puppets sitting around looking at us. The making is very slow and deliberate. You will see someone carving a foam head by hand, an engineer working out a mechanism for eyelids. It is very collaborative.

Lovely! Last question – what fuels your creativity? What helps you have ideas when it comes to these creations?
I just see faces everywhere. I look at a plug socket or a weird stain on the sidewalk and my brain immediately turns it into a character. I still get a lot of joy from daydreaming and seeing how much life you can get out of a few simple materials.

Zack, this has been fun! A huge thanks again!