Making Story Apps - The Art of Little Red Riding Hood

My name is Ed.
I* make apps at …

* Of course I don't do it all on my own! There are 2 other full time developers called
Will and AJ.

Over the last couple of years
we've made 9 apps.

Go on, take a look ...

I even got to illustrate a
couple of them!*

* Three Little Pigs and Cinderella

Before making story apps, I
made videogames. Some of
which you might have
played ...

Well, what I do is roughly
split into 4 areas ...

Life of Ed Pie
Illustrator

Technical Artist Fixer

Animator

Illustrator Ed designs people and
places, doodles and draws and
does colouring on them ...

With my animation hat on I make
things run, jump, walk, dance and
jiggle ...

Technical art is really the bit that
involves taking the original art
and preparing it for animation and
making it work in the app.*

* In fact it's even more technical than that. Sometimes.

I spend a lot of time fxing things
too. Especially at the end of the
project.

Let me show you what that all
looks like in practice ...

In our new story, you don't just
meet the Big Bad Wolf as you
wander through the woods.

Oh, no ...

You meet 3 other characters too!
Help them and they'll help you
defeat the wolf when you reach
Grandma's house.

To make this app we frst needed a
plan. Like this one ...

With a plan in my hand I could
start drawing ideas for the
characters you'd meet and the
places you'd go.

All the time trying to balance the
artistic side of things with the
functionality of each scene.

Lots of sketches of lots of things.
Trying to get what was in my head
out onto the paper.

I'm not fussy. I'll happily take the
head off one Grandma and stick it
on the body of another ...

… and I'll keep sketching and
chopping up and trying different
ideas until it all has that thing*
that I'm looking for.

* You know, the thing. When what you've drawn kind of matches what's in your
head.

And here's our hero and villain,
together in sketch form ...

I colour everything in on the
computer. This is the bit I fnd
most like hard work.

I try really, really hard not to
overwork things. I want to keep
what made my scrappy sketches
nice.

The characters end up in that T
pose so animating them later is
much easier.*

* Looking at the mandrill, you can see this is a lesson I have yet to learn. I was silly
enough to want to keep his nice pose, then struggled with his animation. Next time
I must follow my own rules.

And everything is layered in
Photoshop. You'll see why in
a minute or two.

These are built from shared parts
so the app doesn't run out of
memory and I don't run out of
time.

This library of artwork can be
used to construct lots of different
places in the forest.

And I can fne tune the colours
used in each scene too.

Because we move the camera
around in many scenes, I have to
provide lots and lots of extra
background art ...

… for example, in Grandma's
house you only see this little bit at
a time ...

With all that fat artwork ready, it's
time to rebuild it all in 3D and get
it in the app.

First, all those layers in photoshop
have to be laid out like this. This is
how the artwork ends up in the app.

Our hero, Little Red Riding Hood
doesn't escape ...

Now it time to put all that fat art
back together, but this time with
added 3D-ness.

I use Autodesk Maya for this.*

* Other 3D modelling and animation software is available.

It's a bit like paper engineering I
guess. You cut everything out and
then shape it to give it depth. On
the computer.

Then you put the bits back together
to make the fnished scene. They
look like digital theatre sets.*

* Sort of.

Making the characters is a similar
process, except there is a skeleton
added to the model so you can
move it all about.

Anything on the character that I
think I'll want to animate has a
joint added. Eyebrows, fngers,
skirt bottom and pig tails.

Then it's time to make it move.

Some characters have lots of
animation like LRRH and the wolf.
Some little characters like the owl
only have a couple.

Then we place our characters in
their scenes and with some clever
coding from Will, we end up with a
fnished story.

Making Story Apps - The Art of Little Red Riding Hood

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