The history of creating an interactive book for iPad
Greetings to all!
I want to tell you how we created our first interactive book for the iPad - Puss in Boots. Speaking we, I mean an excellent team of not indifferent professionals, who with soul were given to the project.
It all started with the fact that my friend and I decided to try myself in the creation of interactive books. I like interactive books because of my four-year-old daughter, who simply adores them. A friend (his name is Denis Gribkov) is interesting from a professional point of view - he has long been engaged in computer graphics and animation.
To begin, we decided to decide on a fairy tale. We immediately decided that we would distribute our book in several languages. Therefore, it was decided to choose a fairy tale known throughout the world. Making a list of several options, we stopped at “Puss in Boots”. It seemed to us optimal in terms of volume, with interesting characters and bright locations.
Having divided the text into pages, we began the search for an artist-illustrator. At first we tried to look for sites with freelancers. But candidates either requested a lot of money, or did not suit us in terms of the level of work. Searches among freelancers lasted about two weeks. After an unsuccessful “casting” among freelancers, we decided to search for our artist on thematic sites. We began to look for artists on our favorite site. Having found several artists whose works we liked, we wrote letters to them. Only one responded =). It was a wonderful artist from Ukraine - Sergey Loginov. Having agreed that our budget is extremely small, but the project is very interesting, we began work.
')
A couple of days later Sergey sent us a sketch of the first page.
Sketch we liked immediately. Our only comment was that the younger son looks oldish =). Otherwise, everything was fine and we waited for the finished colored page. Sergey did not take long to wait:
We were delighted with the colorful and “cartoonish” pictures!
Sergey began to draw the following pages, and we turned to our good familiar iOS developer (also Sergey). With Sergey, we started to think how to animate characters. We decided to try to make a beautiful on-frame animation. We started the animation itself using Adobe After Effects. The characters were very lively.
The animation of each character we reduced to a separate file. Here's a sigh animation and head scratching (48 frames).
Having made the first page completely, we are faced with the fact that all this volume of png frames is eating an indecently large amount of memory in a device.
After rewriting several “solutions” to the problem during the week, we came to the conclusion that we would not be able to do animation in personnel.
We decided to do a “hinge” animation. Those. cut the layer with the character into several composite pieces and set the character's movements already programmatically. But here we are faced with the fact that Sergey (the developer) is not able to achieve the naturalness of the movements.
We completely hung our heads from the current situation. I decided to seek help from the “competitors” and sought out the contacts of one of the creators of the interactive books about Repku and the Golden Cockerel. I described our problems and asked him for help. I needed only a vector in which we had to move. And he helped me!
He shared the principle on which they themselves made the books. For me it seemed like an excellent solution. Their technology was that all animations were done in Adobe Flash. Those. the pieces of the characters were imported into the Flash and there the flash animator asked for the necessary movements. Then these animations were exported to XML instructions that were understood in the application itself, and with their help the animations were repeated in the application. Those. Flash gave a description of the movements, vectors, coordinates, dimensions, etc.
We decided to do the same. I started searching for a flasher that can do “hinge” animations, then export all of this to be fed to our application.
The first day of the search brought me to an interesting person, Anton Azarov. He asked me for an interesting thing - “Why do you need to export to get a native application, if you can make the whole application right on Flash. After all, Apple has long missed such applications. ” I did not find that he would argue =) I liked the idea. After all, the truth - Flash is ideal for creating interactive books. There is a rich environment for visual work with graphics and animation. And the presence of a “packer” in the application was very helpful. Moreover, the flash has an excellent API for communicating with the device. You can use anything: an accelerometer with a gyroscope, a microphone, a multitouch, etc.
So the work began.
Sergey drew, and Anton did the animation.
We immediately decided that each page should be with illustrations. And on every page you can click on something and interact with something. In some interactive books we did not like that the creators left pages with bare text or without interactive. We wanted each page to bring joy to the child and he was looking forward to the next page.
In the course of work we decided to publish a book in 7 languages: Russian, English, German, Spanish, Italian, French and Chinese. For translation, we turned to a translation agency and ordered translations by native speakers. We didn’t want the text to seem alien to readers, so native speakers were very important to us.
After 2 months of dense work, all pages were ready. It remained to complete the overall design of the book, the design of dialogues and voice acting.
With the design and design we did it ourselves. And the sounds had to collect on different resources. Something found on freesound.org free, and something bought on paid sources.
Finally, the book was ready to be sent to the censors in the AppStore.
After two weeks of waiting, our book went on sale. We deliberately did not “wring” the price because we wanted the book to see the maximum number of children.
About investments. In total, we invested a little more than one hundred thousand rubles in the project.
We enjoyed working on this project so much that we have already started work on the next book =)
AppStore Link - itunes.apple.com/ru/app/kot-v-sapogah-interaktivnaa/id497335117?mt=8
And finally - a small bonus =) Promotional codes for free download! All those who downloaded the promo code, we ask you to write a review in AppStore. Thank.
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I want to tell you how we created our first interactive book for the iPad - Puss in Boots. Speaking we, I mean an excellent team of not indifferent professionals, who with soul were given to the project.
It all started with the fact that my friend and I decided to try myself in the creation of interactive books. I like interactive books because of my four-year-old daughter, who simply adores them. A friend (his name is Denis Gribkov) is interesting from a professional point of view - he has long been engaged in computer graphics and animation.
To begin, we decided to decide on a fairy tale. We immediately decided that we would distribute our book in several languages. Therefore, it was decided to choose a fairy tale known throughout the world. Making a list of several options, we stopped at “Puss in Boots”. It seemed to us optimal in terms of volume, with interesting characters and bright locations.
Having divided the text into pages, we began the search for an artist-illustrator. At first we tried to look for sites with freelancers. But candidates either requested a lot of money, or did not suit us in terms of the level of work. Searches among freelancers lasted about two weeks. After an unsuccessful “casting” among freelancers, we decided to search for our artist on thematic sites. We began to look for artists on our favorite site. Having found several artists whose works we liked, we wrote letters to them. Only one responded =). It was a wonderful artist from Ukraine - Sergey Loginov. Having agreed that our budget is extremely small, but the project is very interesting, we began work.
')
A couple of days later Sergey sent us a sketch of the first page.
Sketch we liked immediately. Our only comment was that the younger son looks oldish =). Otherwise, everything was fine and we waited for the finished colored page. Sergey did not take long to wait:
We were delighted with the colorful and “cartoonish” pictures!
Sergey began to draw the following pages, and we turned to our good familiar iOS developer (also Sergey). With Sergey, we started to think how to animate characters. We decided to try to make a beautiful on-frame animation. We started the animation itself using Adobe After Effects. The characters were very lively.
The animation of each character we reduced to a separate file. Here's a sigh animation and head scratching (48 frames).
Having made the first page completely, we are faced with the fact that all this volume of png frames is eating an indecently large amount of memory in a device.
After rewriting several “solutions” to the problem during the week, we came to the conclusion that we would not be able to do animation in personnel.
We decided to do a “hinge” animation. Those. cut the layer with the character into several composite pieces and set the character's movements already programmatically. But here we are faced with the fact that Sergey (the developer) is not able to achieve the naturalness of the movements.
We completely hung our heads from the current situation. I decided to seek help from the “competitors” and sought out the contacts of one of the creators of the interactive books about Repku and the Golden Cockerel. I described our problems and asked him for help. I needed only a vector in which we had to move. And he helped me!
He shared the principle on which they themselves made the books. For me it seemed like an excellent solution. Their technology was that all animations were done in Adobe Flash. Those. the pieces of the characters were imported into the Flash and there the flash animator asked for the necessary movements. Then these animations were exported to XML instructions that were understood in the application itself, and with their help the animations were repeated in the application. Those. Flash gave a description of the movements, vectors, coordinates, dimensions, etc.
We decided to do the same. I started searching for a flasher that can do “hinge” animations, then export all of this to be fed to our application.
The first day of the search brought me to an interesting person, Anton Azarov. He asked me for an interesting thing - “Why do you need to export to get a native application, if you can make the whole application right on Flash. After all, Apple has long missed such applications. ” I did not find that he would argue =) I liked the idea. After all, the truth - Flash is ideal for creating interactive books. There is a rich environment for visual work with graphics and animation. And the presence of a “packer” in the application was very helpful. Moreover, the flash has an excellent API for communicating with the device. You can use anything: an accelerometer with a gyroscope, a microphone, a multitouch, etc.
So the work began.
Sergey drew, and Anton did the animation.
We immediately decided that each page should be with illustrations. And on every page you can click on something and interact with something. In some interactive books we did not like that the creators left pages with bare text or without interactive. We wanted each page to bring joy to the child and he was looking forward to the next page.
In the course of work we decided to publish a book in 7 languages: Russian, English, German, Spanish, Italian, French and Chinese. For translation, we turned to a translation agency and ordered translations by native speakers. We didn’t want the text to seem alien to readers, so native speakers were very important to us.
After 2 months of dense work, all pages were ready. It remained to complete the overall design of the book, the design of dialogues and voice acting.
With the design and design we did it ourselves. And the sounds had to collect on different resources. Something found on freesound.org free, and something bought on paid sources.
Finally, the book was ready to be sent to the censors in the AppStore.
After two weeks of waiting, our book went on sale. We deliberately did not “wring” the price because we wanted the book to see the maximum number of children.
About investments. In total, we invested a little more than one hundred thousand rubles in the project.
We enjoyed working on this project so much that we have already started work on the next book =)
AppStore Link - itunes.apple.com/ru/app/kot-v-sapogah-interaktivnaa/id497335117?mt=8
And finally - a small bonus =) Promotional codes for free download! All those who downloaded the promo code, we ask you to write a review in AppStore. Thank.
FMMA79WPYHTM
6TTK3NTH3FL9
XRP7YJTWALKX
HLJEL9JFAWPE
3EP3YFJHMR9L
NXA99RWKFXHR
PENE9LXNMEFP
7EH9HLKLJKK3
XANKWAMLFXRL
PP4HMP74MXYN
H3NN6W96WHXX
49W49NMF7ERN
TK7K44JNEEHN
WRR9RAJWHRJ4
3EKJ973KM4AA
7WYX4TY3AM7H
67J3WWERKX7F
NJLNH7MNNYWK
T6Y6L9LJT7EY
4HKRHYP4AYKM
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/138312/
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