One of the biggest problems I see for beginning ventriloquists, and that I used to suffer through myself, is unbelievable dialogs. The entire idea of ventriloquism is creating the illusion of life. People need to suspend their belief and accept the puppet as a separate entity. That is hard to do when the dialog sounds rehearsed and memorized.
Does that mean you don’t have to rehearse? Just the opposite. You need to know your puppet and material so well, it becomes second nature. Only then can you put the effort into your presentation.
Part of creating a believable conversation is a quality script. To help students of the Learn-Ventriloquism course, I created the Ventriloquist Script Writing course. When I joined Maher Studios, I talked with Mark and Ken about the old dialog books. Maher was famous for publishing them, and unfortunately, most were dated and sad. I heard from a bunch of vents that if they only got one line out of the book, it was worth the expense. I wanted to create something unique.
The result was Dialogs Plus – a series of pdf script books. The books are themed and each contain three short scripts. We also included a video of us developing a script from each book. In this way you get to see the creative process, learn a thing or two about script writing, get great starter scripts and can hear dramatic readings of each script to give you presentation ideas.
It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out, or an established ventriloquist. Dialogs Plus will inspire and teach you something with each script series. You can find them over at Maher Studios!