Steven Elford
Steven Elford is a puppeteer, puppet builder, and performer based in Vancouver, Canada. His work spans stop-motion animation, digital animation, hand puppetry, and hybrid digital performance, combining traditional craft with modern production techniques. Trained as a traditional artist, he began his career building things with his hands, models, props, and eventually puppets, before moving into performance and animation. Alongside his day job in animation, he creates original puppet content for his YouTube channel Monsters Play Puppets, where a cast of strange, monsters and creatures are brought to life in their graveyard through live puppetry and a homebuilt virtual production setup.
Steven entered the film and television industry through model making, prop building, and stop-motion puppetry, learning the craft from the inside out. He worked at studios including Aardman Animations, MacKinnon & Saunders, and Bumper Films, contributing to projects such as Mars Attacks! and Chicken Run, along with a steady stream of commercials. His early work focused on building and supporting stop-motion and live puppets, it was here he learned that even the simplest materials can carry a surprising amount of personality if you build them right. His puppets today are built with a combination of traditional techniques and modern materials,
CNC machines and 3D printers sit on his desk alongside foam, fabric, needles and thread. Many of his puppets are modular, featuring swappable brows, eyelids, and other features that allow for quick shifts in expression during performance. While happily covered in glue and clay at Aardman Animations, Steven was exposed to the early days of computer animation and, somewhat unexpectedly, found himself pulled to the digital side. What started as curiosity turned into a long stretch working in animation, learning an entirely different set of tools while still thinking like a puppet builder. Although much of his career has since involved digital production, he’s never quite shaken the need to make things physically.
That push and pull between pixels and materials continues to shape his work, with each side quietly influencing the other. More recently, he has been exploring hybrid puppetry, combining live hand puppet performance with digital environments. Using a small virtual production setup, he performs puppets live against a green screen, dropping them into computer-generated worlds in real time. It’s a slightly scrappy setup, built at home in his basement, but one that allows for spontaneity, improvisation, and the occasional happy accident. The goal is to keep the immediacy of traditional puppetry while expanding what’s visually possible, letting handmade characters exist in places they probably shouldn’t.
Through Monsters Play Puppets, Elford writes, builds, and performs short-form pieces featuring a growing cast of oddball monster characters—grumpy, confused, overconfident, and occasionally motivational. The channel acts as both a creative outlet and a testing ground for new builds and performance ideas. Alongside this, he currently works in animation at Mainframe Studios in Vancouver. His ongoing focus is exploring how stop-motion, hand puppetry, and digital tools can overlap, with the aim of making work that feels immediate, playful, and just a little bit alive.
You can follow Steven on Facebook. Instagram.
He also has puppets for sale on Etsy.
Steven also has a YouTube channel here
