But wait... was it Beck?

I spent the evening trying to reconcile the optical illusion, but it turned out that the person on the big screen was Beck's puppet double. For his tour for The Information, Beck enlisted a team of four Los Angeles based puppeteers - BJ Guyer, Frank Langley IV, Carla Rudy, and Rob Saunders - to tour with him. Their job was to make a puppet show in tandem with Beck's 80 minute live show, using 6 puppets that were perfect facsimiles of Beck and his band. If Beck was dancing, so was his puppet. If Justin Meldal Johnsen, Beck's bassist, jumped with a mid-air splits, so did the puppet. If another band member was playing the xylophone, you could damn well be sure that his puppet was too. It was mesmerizing.

Before getting in touch with Rob Saunders, the man behind the Beck puppet, I wondered what he would be like. Would someone behind something so whimsical be repressed, moody, dramatic, consumed by his confession? I kept John Cusack's puppeteer character in Being John Malkovich in mind.

I was surprised to hear a friendly voice on the other end, so I told him I was expecting someone a bit more unstable sounding.

"You're thinking of the guy in Being John Malkovich, right?" he asked me.

Guilty as charged.

"There are a few difficult personalities, but for the most part everyone in the puppeteering community is pretty easygoing. I consider myself a working class puppeteer. What I mean by that is I treat puppeteering as my job. For example, one time when I went on vacation, there was a puppet festival going on, and one of my buddies asked me, "Hey, aren't you going to go to the puppet festival?" I told him 'NO! I need to escape my job!' I can think of many puppeteers that would have gone to the puppet festival, but for myself I think it would be the equivalent of say, an accountant going to the Bahamas on vacation and then doing accounting there," Saunders explains.

"I think acting and puppeteering are different. There's a kind of purity that goes with puppets. In their simplest form, puppets are the characters.....it's not like Tom Cruise, who can be a father one moment, a secret agent another moment, then a guy jumping on couches professing his love for Katie Holmes for another."

It is refreshing to see Saunders maintaining such a layman's view of his work, seeing that people in the arts industries can become easily consumed by their craft. In a sense, puppetry is a unique application of acting - instead of projecting a character through yourself, you are projecting a character through an inanimate object.

"I think acting and puppeteering are different. There's a kind of purity that goes with puppets. In their simplest form, puppets are the characters. You build a puppet for a specific purpose, a specific character. There's no baggage for the character, it is just what it's made for. It's not like Tom Cruise, who can be a father one moment, a secret agent another moment, then a guy jumping on couches professing his love for Katie Holmes for another."

Saunders' pauses to think.

"Wow, that was a bit of an artsy puppeteer moment, wasn't it? Sorry."

I tell him he has no need to apologize. Saunders seems careful to maintain this level of normalcy in his life, and taking a look at how he was initially interested in puppeteering, it is refreshing to see that it was somewhere that many of us are familiar with: Sesame Street .

"[Sesame Street] is something that pretty much anyone born after 1965 can relate to. However, the pivotal moment when I knew that I wanted to work with puppets was the year Jim Henson died, I believe it was 1990. That was when I said to myself, 'This is what I need to do.'"

FACTOID: Before new technologies emerged, the style of puppet that the puppeteers used (Sicilian Marionette) for the Beck show were made of oak and steel and would've weighed 80 pounds each. However, the puppets on the Beck tour were made from lightweight plywoods, plastic, and foam and weighed under 3 pounds. Thank goodness for technology.

What followed was years of college study in puppetry, and work on a bunch of movies such as Team America and Spiderman 2. Then, this year, the opportunity to tour with Beck came up. Beck contacted BJ Guyer of Puppettown Productions, Saunders' boss, and told him the concept for his tour. He needed some puppeteers that could perform on the fly, construct and fix puppets, and finish everything in twelve days. They took it.

"During those twelve days, we worked around the clock to build six puppets and all their outfits and accessories. As you can imagine, we didn't get much sleep during that time," explains Rob.

Everything seemed to work out, however. As luck would have it, a random Google search yielded a man specializing in constructing miniature instruments that happened to be the exact scale of the Beck puppets. Perfectly sized cutlery was found at American Girl, a national chain of doll stores.

"We hadn't rehearsed at all for the show - actually, the first night that we played with Beck was our rehearsal. We developed the show as we went on."

Each evening before some of the shows, the team created short film segments with the puppets. Voiceovers for each puppet were added from their respective band members. The puppeteers and their puppets ran amok in a number of cities, trashed Radiohead's dressing room, dressed up in silly costumes, took part in Yahoo Hack day, played hockey, and channeled Rocky in Philadelphia. The audience ate it up with a spoon. Unfortunately, as things go with having fun, it all had to come to an end, and it did - on Saturday Night Live.

"Being on Saturday Night Live was mind boggling. What made me really proud was the fact that we were only a handful of puppeteers to ever be on SNL, including Jim Henson - it was just such an honour to stand on the same stage as he had. And a great way to end the tour," says Saunders.

"I never thought in a million years that I'd be touring with Beck. He's one of those types of people that inspire interest in people to do new things, and he's captured the imagination of people who didn't realize that puppets could be used in this way," Saunders reflects.

For now, Saunders is recovering from the hectic touring schedule before getting back to his everyday life.

Saunders laughs. "The funniest thing about all of this is - who ever thought that I'd get to where I am now, just by playing with dolls?"