Puppeteer

The puppet is often shaped like a human, animal, or legendary creature.

However, there is much puppetry which does not use the moving mouth (which is a lip-sync innovation created originally for television where close-ups are popular).

Very often, though, the puppeteer assumes the joint roles of puppet-maker, director, designer, writer and performer.

In this case a puppeteer is a more complete theatre practitioner than is the case with other theatre forms, in which one person writes a play, another person directs it, and then actors perform the lines and gestures.

Puppetry is a complex medium sometimes consisting of live performance, sometimes contributing to stop frame puppet animation, and film where performances might be technically processed as motion capture, CGI or as virtual puppetry.