Puppets

In the remote play shown earlier, 'Welcome to Earth', the spacecraft featured at the beginning is essentially a puppet. It was made by drawing a simple picture of a spacecraft and then sticking it to a small piece of wood. This technique of hiding the puppet master works very well in remote theatre since the edge of the field of view of the webcam provides a natural frame to the puppets' world. This of course is similar to traditional puppetry styles like Punch and Judy where the puppets act inside a wooden frame.

Keeping in mind the importance of facial acting in remote theatre, it's also powerful, and potentially more moving however, to see the puppet master's face sometimes as it may be highly engaging for the audience to see emotions and expressions which can't be portrayed in the puppet's face in the face of the puppet master.

Another alternative way of ensuring real faces are seen is to have the puppet telling the story whilst actors perform it (as in the image below)

An interesting variation on remote puppetry is to use hands coming from above to manipulate the puppets as in the screenshot below, using, for example, characters from a nativity scene.