Picnic Books

One of the lovely aspects of children’s books for 3 to 5 years old is that they give an opportunity for a shared moment with a parent, elder or guardian. Often with close contact, there is a chance to interact, understand together, comment and exchange ideas, express surprise, laugh, remember etc . . .

In the 70’s I used to flick through books while listening to the recorded story playing on a vinyl.  I remember the exciting magic sound of the bell ringing each time a page had to be turned. This pleasant but somewhat lonesome experience was not dissimilar to today’s digital books or books with narrated stories on a cd-rom.

Despite loving doing traditional illustration on paper, I am not a stranger to multimedia work as I have designed several web and multimedia projects. One of them involved creating a website with a virtual house with various rooms with topical educational games and activities. The target audience is adults with learning disabilities, but the website is also widely used by children and schools. 

One of the favourite ‘rooms’ is the Sensory room, which can be fully customised to create a mood with a choice of settings, animations and music. Characters have been drawn digitally with a computer tablet and digital pen to create what we call ‘vector graphics’ using Flash software; the characters were then slightly animated.

The most animated characters are located in the music room. You can get musicians from a band to play their instruments or stay still while the rest of the band is playing. When animating the guitarist, I initially just animated the hands and arms playing the guitar.  Note that each animated element has to be drawn separately, on a separate level or layer and animated individually (for instance a hand or an eye would each be an element – think of Mr Potato Head if each plastic piece was animated and then assembled).  Coming back to the guitarist, I realised I needed to give a slight rhythmic movement to the guitar to make it look more natural. The body also had to move slightly or the character would look too stiff.  In the end, very few elements remained still – and this was nevertheless a very basic animation that had to remain minimal for quick web download!

You can have a play with the various music bands here:

http://www.sensoryworld.org/funk/music_band_funk.html

And the sensory room

http://www.sensoryworld.org/sensory_room.html

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 8:58 am and is filed under The Sleepy Ladybird illustrated by Caroline Bailey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.