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Posts from the ‘Producing’ Category

iBooks

Project

As part of an ongoing collaboration with my children’s author parents, Jacqui & Colin Hawkins, I have been producing the Rhyme & Read series as iBooks titles.

This work has involved firstly getting to grips with the iBooks Author software and then a lot of trial-and-error on image and audio manipulation.

Pat the Cat iBook

That said, iBooks Author is a wonderfully rich application, which, while I’m only just scratching the surface on, essentially gives the Hawkins Books team a powerful self-publishing mechanism.

iBook - Pat the Cat

The first book of the five Phonics titles is almost ready to go, with a view to shipping to iTunes this May. I’ll update this post once we’re through submission and I can move onto the other titles.

Room on the Broom

Project
Room on the Broom

This was a project I took creative director and producer role for Macmillan Childrens books, who approached Pat & Pals – the children’s publishing company I had helped found with Ross Sleight and Jacqui & Colin Hawkins.

Macmillan were keen to explore a multimedia version of the original best-selling title written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler.

This was pre-iOS and Mac Appstore days, so the idea was to create a desktop download, which would be available for purchase via Patandpals.com – which in turn was powered by Macrovision’s DRM system (now part of Rovi group I believe.)

Armed only with the original source material, an audio recording voiced by the comedienne, Josie Lawrence and some of Julia’s own musical compositions, we set to work.

Room on the Broom

Creatively I wanted to make sure we didn’t mess with the book too much. It was important that we struck a balance between the multimedia ‘effects’ and the simple purity of the illustration.

In addition, due to the gentle lilt of the storytelling, it was important to reflect this rhythm in any animations we created.

The delightful animation and clever flash programming was created by the team at TWP – who I would heartily recommend on any childrens-related interactive work.

Will Richards, now founder of Moon, was Art Director. Tobias Sturt, now Design Manager at the Guardian’s Digital Agency, was also on board for thinking and writing help.

I’m very proud of the finished work – which is sadly no longer available for purchase and download. Largely due, I suspect, to the appearance of the TV version over Xmas 2012*.

The final product featured all sorts of lovely things – the animated storybook, some fun flash-based games – ‘Broomstick Dash’ and ‘Dodge the Dragon’ (thanks to Atari’s ‘Defender’ and ‘Pac Man’ respectively), a drag-and-drop ‘Story Maker’ for kids to create their own Room on the Broom adventures; and some thoughtful printouts – a theatre, a board and card games. Thanks to Tobias for working hard on those!

I’m not able to put up the application it self – but I’ve included some relevant grabs in this post, which you can view larger like if you click the thumbnails.

Macmillan also featured the final product as a CD-ROM on a reprint of the title.

*An odd bit of family serendipity. My sister, Sally, voiced the green bird in the TV version!

‘…the witch tapped her broomstick, and WHOOSH! They were gone.’

Room on the Broom

Room on the Broom