Puppets Magic Studio
Puppets Magic Studio is a puppet-making company specialising in custom-built characters for television, film and theatre. Founded by Daniel Byrne, the studio was shaped by his background in Fine Art, having studied at Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths, University of London. Alongside his formal training, Daniel has had a lifelong passion for puppetry, making puppets from a young age. With a strong foundation in sculpture and character design, he combined his technical training with this long-standing interest in puppetry to form Puppets Magic Studio
The studio’s main focus is hand-and-rod puppetry, a flexible and expressive style that works particularly well in television work. Puppets like these often start life as a sculpted block of foam before being fabricated in a mixture of textiles – often fleece or synthetic furs. Alongside this, Puppets Magic also creates a wide variety of other puppet forms, including traditionally carved wooden marionettes, walk-around costumes, and creature suits. Working across such a broad range of formats allows the studio to adapt to different creative briefs and storytelling requirements, as each type of puppet demands a different approach to design, construction, and movement.
A typical project at Puppets Magic Studio involves a combination of traditional craft skills and modern fabrication techniques. Classical methods such as sculpting, pattern cutting, sewing, painting, and woodwork remain central to the studio’s process, ensuring that each puppet retains a handcrafted quality. These are increasingly supported by digital technologies, including 3D modelling and 3D printing, which allow for greater precision and efficiency in the development of mechanical parts. By integrating these approaches, the studio is able to produce characters that are both visually distinctive and highly functional in performance settings, ensuring durability as well as expressive capability.
Over the years, the studio has produced work spanning broadcasters, production houses, and global brands such as ITV Studios, Apple and Unilever, helping bring character ideas to life for a variety of projects. One of its notable commissions was for Apple’s holiday commercial ‘A Critter Carol’, which was recognised at the British Arrows advertising awards, winning in the craft category. Internationally, Puppets Magic Studio has also developed characters for Aldi Spain and Portugal, creating the duo AL and DI for a series of ongoing TV adverts. These characters became familiar faces in the campaigns over the years and were later turned into plush toys sold in Aldi stores, extending their life beyond the screen in a playful way.
