“The Chet Show” is a student short film series created by Michael Losquadro and Candice Leach. The series follows Chet, a living puppet college student living in a college dorm with his roommate and best friend Todd. The series was produced over the course of two years with a team almost entirely consisting of students from SUNY New Paltz. Three episodes have been completed and released to date: “Chet Goes to the Doctor”, “Chet Goes to a Party” and “Chet Falls in Love”.

However, this raunchy, 20-something-coming-of-age sitcom isn’t what it appears to be on the surface. Underneath, there’s something very, very wrong with our titular Chet. Puppets aren’t supposed to come to life. Being trapped as a puppet, an image, a character in a show, is it a life worth living at all? This ongoing identity crisis is the core of “The Chet Show,” and Chet escapes to his idyllic as-seen-on-TV life, where he always gets to play his role perfectly and make everyone laugh. Cracks begin to form, and Chet is violently, horrifyingly, torn back to reality, only to end up back in the show. “The Chet Show” reveals itself finally to be a horror-comedy series about self-actualization.

A large amount of the work required to make “The Chet Show” possible on a small scale and smaller budget demanded the mindset of a designer. How problems with the puppet as a character were handled, how time was managed on and off set, and a lot of specific, visual design work. Prop production, storyboarding, character design and color theory, editing, marketing, all of these were improved by approaching them from a designer’s perspective. This project provides documentation on the pre-production, production and post production of “The Chet Show.” The “ChetSite” is not only built to share the perspective of the people involved and the experience that working on the project provided, but to share everything that made it such an important memory for those people as well. This site’s primary purpose is documentation and appreciation for the project and all of those involved.