This week two things are happening, we have spent the first part of the week finishing our prototype focusing on Knuffle Bunny as a test case. With this prototype we are exploring the pipeline and frameworks necessary to allow us to create experiences from books faster. We are also exploring basic ways to transition between pages and bring them to life. We finished the prototype late Wednesday evening.
We chose Knuffle Bunny as a test case mostly because it was already in our room, we were able to borrow it from our neighbors and it happened to be easy to photoshop images out of the pages to animate. It was a book of convenience more than anything. However, it taught us more than most other books would have.
Going in we understood the first rule of choosing a book for art:
- It must be easy to separate the components from the page.
We learned a few things along the way. Knuffle Bunny, while easy to separate art from the page, is not the easiest thing to animate or add movement too. Our efforts to bring it to life mostly involved fading the characters across the screen in a way that would mimic the passage of time as one walks. This was reasonably successful. We also attempted a zoom and some more fade action, this time of different parts of the body. The fade of the body parts, in this case the mouth, was wonderful. This experimentation gave rise to a second rule:
2. The book must have some inherent motion to its pages.
It is hard to describe, but we found ourselves getting much better at looking at a book and knowing how we could bring it to life. We have also begun to compile a list of good ways to transition between pages and animate once static images.
Apart from page transitions and larger animations we also needed a way to keep the page alive and responding to the child when they are trying to read. To this end we thought parts of the page should move in response to the child. This gave us our first chance to test this. It worked, but needed some work. We had the eyes, mouth and nose move based on reader feedback, but it all felt rather tacked on. Most of the animations didn’t make sense with the words they responded to. Which leads to our next rule:
3. Animations in response to words need to make sense to the word they are associated with.
I am undoubtedly forgetting some things, but suffice to say we learned a lot. Come Friday we went to the library to choose more books. Our client was very interested in more words per page so we moved from picture books to readers. Along the way picking up a good standard for rating the difficulty of books. We brought back 11 books. When choosing them we were focusing on several things.
- More words per page.
- A variety of styles of writing, such as different levels of rhyming.
- Better movement per page
- Fun stories
Out of the 11 books we chose one to make a fast prototype over the weekend to test our pipeline and framework. We chose Guji- Guji, a delightful book about about a duck which raises a crocodile. Over the course of two days we were able to create a great prototype.
Moving forward we are focusing on some small polish efforts on this prototype, fixing problems we saw with the prototype while we work on a few new designs for the next prototype. With the next prototype we will be focusing on ways to get the player to know when to read and what to read with as little prompting from the bear character. We are also looking at moving the character (the bear) away from the role of guide/helper and into the role of friend/listener.