App, app and away!

II am going to make this short and sweet today since I have been up since 3am but I wanted to introduce my app to you right away. My first contract, my illustrations and story put together with a really cool app interface is more than my brain can handle and still rest properly. At some point this week I will crash and probably pretty hard but for now I am riding the high as long as I can.


Synopsis: Pet My Dragon? is a story about a preschool aged girl who takes her dragon for a walk in the park. She cheerfully asks the other children she meets if they would like to pet her dragon. The sharp teeth, fiery breath and the long spiky tale are just a few of the reasons they all decline the girl’s invitation. One child looks past all the “dangers” and notices the dragon’s soft belly. All of a sudden the dragon doesn’t seem so dangerous.

The app will be available in the iTunes app store around February and will cost $1.99.

My iPad/Phone project

When I started this project (turning one of my stories into an iPhone app book) there were only 19 illustrations including the front and back covers. When I finished up yesterday that number had grown to 79! How did that happen? Originally “Pet My Dragon?” was intended as a picture book with the 19 illustrations spread out over 32 pages so without any additional illustrations it would have been presented like a slideshow. I didn’t think that original format would have been all that entertaining on an iPad. Besides, I wanted to take advantage of as many iPad features as I could so this book didn’t become just another “slideshow” but a true multimedia experience. Really, what is the point in turning it into an app anyway if you don’t take advantage of those features?

So I got to work reformatting the illustrations for “Pet My Dragon”. The display dimensions for the iPad are 1024x768 pixels. The original illustrations were nearly twice that length so each spread had to be clipped considerably. Sometimes the spread just needed to be split into two different pages. This wasn’t too difficult since all my illustrations are done in Adobe Illustrator but it was time consuming. The next step was planning the animation for each page. I was able to do a lot of cutting and pasting here so I didn’t have to totally redraw every new illustration. I used a stop animation style of animation to embrace the simplicity of the illustrations and enhance the inner child of the story. So each page turned into 3 or 4 pages with small variations on each page to show motion as if it were in a flipbook.

The whole process took about a week to finish. I know that isn’t necessarily a long time and I know that it could have been a lot worse. Anyway, I am glad that the major reformatting is done. I am sure that there will be little things here and there that will need my attention but I am looking forward to working on other projects that are begging for attention.

When I wasn’t reformatting Pet My Dragon? I was reading a lot of iPad books/graphic novels. When you get a chance you should check out these titles: Ghost Boy, Twisted 1, Robot 13, AR01, CrappyCat and Jellaby. You can find all of them except Jellaby in the app store and most of them are free.

Stats

Miscellaneous


My hit counter just went over 1000 today. A big little milestone to be sure especially when you look at the hundreds of thousands of hits some blogs get. But ya gotta start somewhere. I have a lot of fun checking the stats for this page from time to time. You can find out what platforms are being used to view your blog. You can see what country the hits come from. Or if I really want to put myself to sleep I'll watch the "right now" hit counter, well, not move.



However, I wanna know more about the people from China and Russia who are visiting my blog. I'm not getting enough hits from them to make me think they are trying to steal any of my secrets. Heck, I don't have any secrets here anyway but it is interesting that there are enough hits there to qualify them as "following" or maybe better yet "stalking".



Anyway if you haven't viewed your stats (found in your dashboard) you should go and take a look. It really does make the world seem a lot smaller.