You are now tuning in to Discover Your Potential. So listen, participate, be inspired. Know that you can discover your potential. Today on Discover Your Potential, we welcome Cameron Garrity, a designer, illustrator, puppeteer, and award-winning filmmaker. Cameron is the co-host of the Puppeteers podcast, a show he created with longtime collaborator Adam Krudinger, where they spotlight the world's leading puppeteers and builders. He is also a standout filmmaker in the 48-hour film project competitions. His latest film, Something There, won Best Film in Buffalo's 2025 event and will compete at Filmapalooza in 2026. Cameron brings years of experience as an in-house designer for nonprofits, along with a passion for visual storytelling that fuels all his creative work. Please welcome Cameron Garrity. Welcome to Discover Your Potential. I'm your host, Dan Gilman, and I have an amazing guest today. Cameron, I'm so blessed that you're here today, and I wanted to chat with you about you do puppetry, illustration, filmmaking, design. My question from you is, across the puppetry, illustration, and filmmaking, and design, when did you first realize creativity was going to be a defining part of your life? Oh boy. First of all, Dan, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to finally get to meet you and to be talking with you and with your audience. I think creativity was bound to get in there some way or another. Most of my entryway into any kind of creative medium probably started by way of the Muppets. My mom is and was a huge Muppet fan herself. Was it nature? Was it nurture? I had all sorts of Muppet tapes and toys. And of course it was on television a lot in the nineties, not only Sesame Street, but Muppet show reruns, Muppet babies, and just other puppet shows as well. I loved Mr. Rogers. I loved Baron, the big blue house when that came into the fray, anything with the puppet. I just loved as you learn more about those worlds, you learn about the, the Michael Fritz and the Joe Matthews and the Jerry Jules and all these people who contributed to that world. It was just so inspiring. Then, of course, other artists that you meet along the way. One of my favorite illustrators still to this day is Eric Carle. I love Eric Carle. I absolutely love. He had this how-to book of how-to collage with examples of the tissue paper that he designed and created. And I use that for so many school projects. and dioramas. All of those things really played a role. And, you know, I haven't looked for it in a minute, but I probably, I would be surprised if it wasn't. And certainly I'm sure you could pick one up on eBay or something. It was a fantastic resource, how he took it from sketch to painting his own tissue papered material and then taking it into the collage state. All of these things contributed and as I grew up and learned more and more about these artists and these ways of doing things. Of course, art was my favorite subject in school, art and math, believe it or not. And then, you know, when I finally in high school and college, when I had more elective credits, I was able to take acting classes and other things and really meet some professors who knew what to do with me they were able to point me in the right directions and meet other people locally and it's kind of all snowballed and accumulated but for as long as I remember I've been drawing and creating and doing all these things living room shows all that that's great yeah and I would say like my other question because I'm actually if If you don't know, I'm also creative. I come from a design background and always loved puppetry and puppeteering. I was going to ask you what early influences shaped your passion for storytelling, whether it be visual or performance-based. I also wanted to get into another question, which is kind of our connection to your long standing creative partnership with Adam Krudinger, which is a unique collaboration and how the two of you first met and decide, you know, to create together. Absolutely. Well, two very different ends of my own personal timeline, because like I said, the creative stuff was so early. You asked about storytelling. I remember going back to my mom, when we would do story time before bed, my mom would get us started with a simple story like The Three Little Pigs, Beauty and the Beast, or all these things. And I would want to retell the story as I had read it in whatever picture book version we had or whatever version we had seen on a VHS tape. My mom was always encouraging us. And I'm sure in her mind, it was her way of getting us out of those creative boxes. She said, well, make up your own story. How would this end if X, Y, or Z did or didn't happen? We were playing with variables from a very early age. I think I just always had that performance bug. When I heard in some very early Sesame Street video, Big Bird say, you know, the whole world's a stage. I took that to heart and ran with it. And so I would take every opportunity to perform. I don't know if these exist everywhere, but certainly in Buffalo, we have these, you know, when you walk into a vestibule in a mall in the old days, there would be this clickety-clackety material that helps you wipe off your boots. made the best kind of clicking noise when you would walk on them with your sneakers. I would always do a tap dance routine because I was seeing people like Savion Glover on PBS and other great dancers. And so I was doing all that kind of stuff. I did figure skating as a kid. I wanted to emulate all of these different things. Fast forward to one before I met Adam, I was doing puppetry in college. I made a niche within our very small but mighty theater department at now Damon University. Then it was Damon College. I had a friend in the program who said, hey, I'm in this play right now. I'm an assistant stage manager for Evil Dead the Musical. Adam Cruttinger, Maria Cruttinger, and our friend Zach Halmiser were all in this show together. they were doing puppets and had their own characters already that they would bring to rehearsals with them. And she saw some of Adam's earliest puppets and said, oh my gosh, like Cam's got to know these people. He's so interested and passionate in this stuff. There's other people here in this zip code or area code who are doing this stuff too. We connected on Facebook and met at a coffee shop here and just talked for hours. At the end of that first meeting, I was working on a show about Jim Henson and it needed an evil Mickey Mouse puppet in it. I needed some help with that. I was a little out of my element in building something that complex at the time. We didn't have a budget. We didn't have anything to pay anyone. We barely had any material money left. And Adam said, oh, I'll just do it. He texted me two days later and he already had a Mickey head prototype. It was phenomenal. And we were off to the races from there. We were constantly hanging out. He was so hungry to learn and better his skills as a builder and a performer. I had spent so much time collecting reference photos of Muppet and Sesame Street characters for years that I would send him photos he had never seen. And then, and those first couple of years was really us kind of teaching each other and just playing. We had the benefit of both being in school. So we had summers off and we, you know, were able to just spend hour in, you know, his workshop just you know playing around and experimenting and getting to know each other That developed over the years into doing commercials short films and all the things people know us for now It was a very lucky thing. So often puppeteers are the only ones in their area. You have to go to a conference are one of the big city hubs where lots of puppeteers are living and gathering. Not only do we now live in a world that has the benefit of having a Puppet Nerd YouTube channel that Adam created, but even 15 years ago when he and I were first meeting, it was just such a gift for me. I feel like I was the first student of the Puppet Nerd Academy, so to speak, because we were doing it together. Now, do you also build? so I I can I'm not very good I'm very impatient because I just want to get the thing on and start performing with it so I get to the good enough point much quicker than anyone should dabble quite frankly I had the benefit of having an atom for so long that I would be able to focus on what I was really good at, which was the producing, the writing, and even some of the design work preferred more. The tediousness of the build, which he was able to lock in and do. So we kind of, he was. I am trying to get back into it a little more because every puppeteer should be able to build and know how to do that. And, you know, I want to, of course, keep working and continuing on his legacy and create my own stuff. So, yeah. That's great. It touches your heartstrings. It does. At the point that we're talking, you know, we were discussing off mic that it's about a year to when he passed. While that is certainly hard, it was also a very long goodbye. We had a number of years of him not being able to do everything he wanted to because of what the illness was taking away. It's a lot to process and it's still a grief that we're going through. But I'm happy and comfortable to talk about things with people. Discussing this kind of grief and this kind of loss is important for people to have discussions specific to Adam, but also in general. Well, there's one thing I wanted to touch upon, too, which I think was important. Like Adam's puppet building, you talked about in his work. But it was exhibited in a gallery, which unfortunately I wasn't able to attend just because of, you know, just getting out there. Geography. Yeah. geography but i know a lot of people that actually went and it was you know what has it meant for you to see a medium often viewed as like entertainment but taken so seriously it's an art form so it is and that's an important thing for people to recognize and realize it's not just when people think about you know the muppets and jim henson they think of it as entertainment i was like looking at the auction that was just recently published for jim henson a lot of their puppets i was like oh i wish i could have that or a lot of things that i i wish i could own like an artifact from the dark crystal yeah and that was something you know that adam was that's what got him into puppetry because a couple years before that evil dead show that i was talking about he met zach homacer backstage doing little shop of horrors zach had had this puppet that he had purchased it was an ebay auction item that he had won from if you're familiar with the puppet builder and performer terry angus he's a canadian puppeteer yeah sure and he worked on fraggle rock and all sorts of canadian puppet shows over the years and he was building and selling puppets on ebay Zach managed to win one of these puppets. And that was Adam's first time seeing this Henson quality puppet up close. He just looked at this thing and was staring at it for 10 minutes, taking in the beauty of the details and the fact you couldn't see the scenes. That was the aha moment for him of seeing like, oh, they're not just characters. These tools have a function and they have a real beauty to them. That was something that he and I really bonded over. Years ago, we had done an exhibit of his early work because we were doing a puppetry festival in Buffalo. At Damon, we wanted to fill the gallery space. They offered us this beautiful gallery to fill with Adam's puppets. We did that. And then early last year, when he was getting sick and we kind of knew it was coming, I said to him, I said, you know, would you be interested in doing and having us put up another show? And he said, absolutely. I would love that. By that point, we were able to, I don't think there were too many puppets that were on display at both shows. he had done so much work and had really exploded with all of the things that he had done with his own little shop of horrors puppets and snoofs and arlo's art show and hubble and all these different things so we had a real feast of things to put on display i think back to my own childhood i'm not sure if you're familiar with the strong museum play and that's just a you know stone's throw for me and we went oh i went for the first time as a kid when they debuted a sesame Street exhibit there, which is still there now. At the time, it was just going to be a year-long exhibit or so, but they have a recreation of the set, but they also have the puppets there on display, some poser puppets. And they are, they really, really are. And, you know, as a kid, you just go in and you see your favorite characters and you think, oh, that's great. Before the show last May, I actually went back to Rochester just to look and see, how do they do this? And what are these poses communicating? I've met and worked with Richard Termini and had Louis Henry Mitchell on our podcast. I've talked to all sorts of people about posing puppets and what makes a strong pose. It's a real labor of love for me and a true gift I was able to give to him and the family. But it was also, yeah, being able to show our community here in Buffalo, like this is a real thing. And it should be at the same level that we treat you know, Fando or Warhol or any of these other, you know, household names. Everyone should know who Don Saline is. Absolutely. Agreed. Just to switch gears, I'd love to have you on again. I know we're going to run out of time eventually. Stop me if I'm rambling at all. Oh, no, no, no. I love it. I could speak to you for hours. Yes. Speaking of the 48-hour film project, which is famously intense. What draws you to that challenge year after year? And your recent film Something, their one best film in Buffalo, is that correct? It is, yes. That's incredible. And it's headed to Filmpalooza in 26. What do you think made that project stand out? This holiday episode of Discover Your Potential is sponsored by Squarespace. The holidays are a season of reflection, gratitude and new beginnings it is a time when many of us feel inspired to create to share our gifts and to take the first step towards something meaningful if you have a dream you want to bring to life in the new year squarespace is the perfect place to begin squarespace gives you everything you need to build a beautiful website that showcases your work your voice, or your business idea. Their elegant templates, simple editing tools, and built-in marketing features make it easy to create a home for your holiday projects, from launching a new brand to sharing your story with the world. Whether you want to start a podcast, open an online shop, build a portfolio, or finally turn that idea in your heart into something real. Squarespace can help you move forward. This season is all about possibility and joy Let your creativity shine and set yourself up for an amazing year ahead Check out squarespace for a free trial And when you are ready to launch use offer code DYP to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain. Squarespace, where your potential becomes reality. You know, I think something you hear a lot of writers talk about, and some of them get it, some of them don't. I have definitely been in the past someone who didn't quite get it. But the idea that through telling a very specific story, something that is almost impossibly unique to just you, you end up telling something that is very universal and resonates with people. I don't think most people who do a 48 would necessarily think, let's do a story about a guy who has a crush on a girl, but he plays a mascot character at a theme park and he's got this unrequited love and throw it into a hospital setting. All of those things were so personal in different ways to me and the other members of our team and the people who helped write it. The story isn't, I mean, it is about a monster puppet, but it's really about the people behind all of it and those true emotions. Everyone's had a heartbreak. Everyone's had that feeling of, oh, I really like that person, but I don't think they feel the same way about me. I don't know if they feel the same way about me. Just that longing and wondering. Those were all themes we were able to play with. My character, Ben, is a puppeteer and a big bird-like monster character in a Sesame Place-like theme park. I have a huge crush on my handler who's keeping me safe throughout the day. Things go wrong at the park and we have this day where we're able to talk and converse for the first time. She maybe feels something towards the person inside, but she doesn't know what I look like because she's only ever seen the monster suit. It's kind of a send up to Beauty and the Beast. So I think just in telling a very honest human story, of course, we had a wonderful puppet filled by Richard Michael Gomez and our director of photography, Tyler Bostock was incredible. Everyone was firing on all cylinders. So it was a lot of the right place in the right time. But we also, you know, felt very passionately about what we were all doing. That sounds great. I've got so many other questions, but not enough time to ask them. What role do personal projects play in refining your voice and pushing your craft forward? That's a great question. I have the benefit and the curse of being a professional artist as my day job. I work here in the marketing department at Damon University, where I went to school, and I love this place, and I love graphic design. and all that said, it's a day job. There are things that frustrate me and there's things that I want to sometimes turn off the computer and not look at a screen for hours or days. But you got to suck it up and do it. And I'm very lucky to have this job. But there's something as an artist that is so comforting about being able to clock out at 4.30 and go home and say, okay, now I'm going to write this script that I am very passionate about. And I'm able to just give all my heart and soul to it because I have this day job that allows me to pay the bills and do the things. And that's something that Adam and I would always talk about. He was a teacher, as his day job, never did puppetry professionally in the sense of having it fully pay the bills. He said, I don't want to rely on it as my, as my sole income. He said, because there are times where I want to just put the puppet aside and go play with my kids or work on schoolwork or do these other things. And I think I have the great benefit of being able to let this be kind of just a hobby side hustle weekend warrior type thing for now. That being said, if anyone wants to hire me to do this stuff full time, I'd spend my own right. But for right now, I think it kind of keeps the wind in the sails on a more regular basis to be able to just say, yep, from five o'clock until 930 at night, I'm able to dedicate my time to this other thing and work with friends and my chosen family and get people together in a room and see what we can create. and and all those things back to your question about like why I do the 48s it's to work with those people first and foremost and to see what we're able to create and how we top ourselves from the year previous if you watch our movies in order you can really see oh they're getting so much better at storytelling and performing exactly speaking of visual storytelling and creative problem solving you said the key is exciting people with your problems explain what that means for creatives? Yeah, I think the best way to build a coalition is to meet with people and say, man, I've got this really great idea. It's got these characters and these people working on it, but we need a musician. You say that to someone and they happen to know, oh my gosh, my brother-in-law plays the piano and works with X, Y, and Z people, all of a sudden you're building these connections. I think by being able to get people, you almost tease them with part of the story, right? You get two pigs through the three little pigs story. And then you say, but I can't tell you what happens to the third pig until you do X, until you find us a musician or get us some funding for this thing in being able to work with other people and asking, especially when in my case, I'm asking most of the folks who work with us to do things for free, which is a very difficult thing to do. And I'd love to be able to pay people more and to get them back. I'll feed them. I'll make sure they get IMDB credit and, you know, I do my best. But, you know, when you're at this stage And so I think the more you can make people feel like they're investing in you and they're helping to, you know, we're all raising each other up is a great way to build that found family. That's what Adam and I did with each other when we were just getting started out. He was excited by the idea of, oh, my gosh, this play that Cam's doing sounds really cool. I would love for one of my puppets to be in it. At the same time that I'm thinking like, man, I really need a puppet for the shore. It's not going to go very well. And then you start, you know, you make friends with people and they ask you to do their stuff. Goodness knows I did loads of graphic design for pretty much any logo that Adam's done or any of the books. I helped him as a designer. Yeah, I have that book. It's incredible. He works so hard on that. It's so good. I was actually thinking about teaching a puppeteering class here in Boston. And that was my prerequisite. Yes. I would have loved that book as a kid, you know, and I think that's another important piece of the puzzle that I'm trying to build. How much can I be an adult to the kid that I needed when I was growing up? How many stories can I put on a shelf that my younger self would have loved to pull out and read or watch or any of those things? The more I could do that, the happier I am personally. I'm doing it for other people, but I'm saving myself in the process. We have a lot of people that listen to the show from various cultures and diverse, even, you know, a lot of artists actually now. My mother started this show 30 plus years ago, which I inherited after she passed away. It was one of her legacies. What advice would you give to artists like who feel stuck? You know, because there's a lot of creatives of artists that don't have work or jobs right now. And they're unsure about their own unique creative path. So they feel stuck. They're not doing what they want to do in their life. And they not as fortunate as we are to be in a creative field where we can play or do things that are fun and interactive Well I think there lots of different ways that you can find creativity in even some of the most bleak places. Everyone's situation is different, but another element of the 48 that I love, and I promise this will answer your initial question, but when people do that, every, you know, Cities compete one city at a time. And so when everyone in Buffalo is doing it, everyone in Buffalo is given the same three elements that we all have to incorporate. We're all given the same prop, line of dialogue, and character that we need to somehow put into our story. It's actually an icebreaker that I use now when I do professional development and things like that. I have cups of popsicle sticks with a short line, a character, and a prop. and I ask people to pull three and then just fill in the blanks of the story. Once upon a time, there was a dinosaur who lived in a wherever. And just being able to distract yourself with another kind of creative thing. I have one friend who's an English teacher who loves to look at license plates. In New York State, the first three characters on a license plate are letters. She'll look at that and say, give me a word that has those three letters in order somehow. It kind of breaks your brain a little bit, but finding short, easy experiments like that and using your brain to work in a different way than it normally would than if you were chopping wood or working in Excel or any of these things that we might call boring, you know, that you're going to find little sparks of inspiration that will butt up with each other. And then I know this sounds simple, but I think also just keeping a notebook on you. Because I used to think that was the corniest thing for the longest time. I'd have high school professors and college professors tell me like, you got to keep a notebook, keep it on your person at all times so that if something comes up, you can write it down. And I actually have started carrying a notebook with me. I started back in April this year. It snowballs because you all of a sudden are putting your brain in that process of thinking about like, oh, I could write this down. I could write that down. You start observing things and seeing the world in a different way than you normally would have. Sort of the primary elements of creativity and making and play. I think the more people can do that, the more they'll get themselves out of a creative rep. Everyone hates a blank page, I think. But the quicker you could say, okay, I'm going to give you a mostly blank page, but it has two or three things on it and you need to connect the dots. That's going to get your engine go a little quicker. And then And even if it's crap, then at least you could say, well, now I have a first draft and now I'm going to fix it. And you erase things or you redraw it or you do whatever it is you want to do to elevate it. But I think in any case, with anything, the quicker you could get your first version just out and make it a reality in the world so it's no longer just in your head, the quicker you can be making stuff that is more reflective and more true to your own, your true voice. That's great. I know we only have like four or five minutes left and I'm looking forward to our next session. What's next for you creatively? Are there new disciplines or collaborations or what are you excited to explore? What's next? And also just one last question. Sure. Just to kind of pull it all together. When you think about your potential and your impact, what do you hope people feel or understand after experiencing your work? Two very good questions. I think for me, in any work that I am looking to do, I am just hoping that people are able to start seeing the world in a different way with a little more empathy. Another kind of person. In puppetry, we work a lot with inanimate objects and imbuing those objects with some kind of character. A good friend of mine who does a lot of photography for us just wrote me today and said, hey, Cam, which office supply, if it was a character, do you think would be the nicest and most understanding if someone made a mistake? And I kind of had to think about it for a second because it's a weird question, right? But you come up with an answer and you start thinking about, well, okay, if these things on my desk could talk, what would they say or what would their personalities be? So I like being able to get people thinking about the rotary phones that are sitting in their grandparents' basement collecting dust and what they're feeling. I hope to give people that. The next two big projects that I'm going to be working on in the new year are a feature film that I'm developing the script on right now that is actually based on one of the last 48s that Adam and I worked on together called The Handoff, which is about a children's television program a la Sesame Street who loses their Jim Henson, Frank Oz type leader. And the puppeteers working on this legacy program, trying to figure out who will take on his signature Miss Piggy kind of character. And it's creating the story that is having us watch this new generation of performers try to rise to the ranks and telling a very specific story about this very niche world that few people know about. you start to see, oh my gosh, I went through this at my day job when someone retires or passes away. So that's one big thing. Also, I'm affiliated with Buffalo Comedy Collective, which is a comedy theater here in Buffalo, New York. I'm a member of their comedy sports team, which is like competitive improv in the vein of whose line is it anyways, but we're also putting together. Now we did one late night puppetry show back in October, and we're looking to continue doing those kinds of cabaret type slams in the new year. Building this group of puppeteers and artists in Buffalo in Adam's honor, but also trying to excite people. Hey, we don't have as many puppeteers as we had previously. Let's work on this together because people love this stuff. The more they know about it, the more they want to contribute to the art form. And I think that's something both of those projects are doing and positioning us for. That's great. That's something AI can't take away from many of us. Try as it might. But is there any kind of last words that you'd like to say? And also, how can people find you? How can people find your work? How can people connect with you? Sure. Well, I am pretty accessible online. And I'm at Cam Garrity at just about any of the main social media sites. And I'm also, I have a website, camgarrity.com. so people are more than welcome to you know find me at those places check out the work follow along and I thank you for having conversations like this because I think it's so important artists to connect and ask each other questions and the more we're able to share this oral history I believe it is stimulating and it creates new connections that other people can be inspired by and grow from and so appreciative of opportunities like this. So thank you. I hope everyone who's listening can maybe ask someone they love some of the questions you asked me today. It's a lot better than asking your partner, your kid, how was your day today? We all hear that at a certain point. So ask someone about, you know, why they do what they do. We're looking forward to having you on again too. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you very much for being here. this is Cindy Gilman and you're listening to Discover Your Potential so until next time do something nice for yourself but do something nice for someone else
