Talent Pun

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

¶ Art Direction, Design & Animation
¶ October 2013

Loud Crow Interactive: Talent Pun (art direction, design, animaton, photography), Colin Cove (scripting) Mark Carter, Mars Dong (engineering), Tracy Tsui, Tiphanie Lau (design)

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is an adaptation of the original 1973 TV special into an interactive children’s book for iOS and Android. As the lead designer and art director I storyboarded the project, designed the look, feel and interactions for the book, and did a whack of the animation and production.

One of the goals of the project was to make each spread of the book feel like a living illustration. We wanted to appeal to early readers by creating a experience that was as tactile and toy-like as possible, and rewarded and responded to every touch, similar to a pop-up book.

The result was a warm, nostalgic, highly skeuomorphic design. The characters were redrawn and reconstructed as puppets with rag-doll physics, while the scenes themselves were layered to create elaborate tilting and parallax effects.

This app was featured as Editor’s Choice in the Apple iTunes store and won a Parent's Choice Recommendation. 

Learn more about the evolution of Loudcrow’s interactive books apps.

SKEUOMORPHIC DESIGN

We designed the look and feel of the UI to be as skeuomorphic as possible. We noticed young children were more inclined to touch and engage with objects on-screen when the product looked more book-like (Peter Rabbit), versus a still from an animated film.

TURNING PICTURES INTO PAPER DOLLS

All the characters and backgrounds from the special needed to be redrawn and rebuilt. I provided guide lines for how all the characters needed to be constructed.

By separating out the characters into limbs and large masses, we could rig them to behave like paper dolls, making them responsive when the device was tilted or touched. 

STORYBOARD EVERYTHING

I provided thumbnail storyboards for all pages, in order to identify all the assets, animation and scripting requirements. This helped define the scope of work up front, and allowed our designers, contractors and scripters to work simultaneously. An associate designer could composite and animate one spread, while a scripter could greybox another.