Tapisodes Tells Their Story

Our feature this week is written by Christoper Lynd of Tapisodes. Earlier this year they came out with Charles Peattie’s Animal Alphabet which is a delightful illustrated, animated, and musical tale of animals from A to Z. Christopher shares the story of how they developed their app and what their goals are for future apps. Keep an eye on the blog as they will be on stage this week for App Friday!

Tapisodes’ journey to producing family-friendly apps is perhaps a little different to other brilliant app developers that are part of this group. Tapisodes was born out of BreakThru Films (A production company, best known for its film Peter and The Wolf) and my background is in television. What we have tried to do is let our film experience become a part of the apps we produce.

Over the last couple of years, the Tapisodes team and I became fascinated by the way young children are engaging and interacting with media in such a positive way. But we also saw a lot of content that really seemed to be churned out, presumably on the thinking that kids and families are less discerning. So we really wanted to change that, and make something that both kids and parents could enjoy together.

This inspiration behind Charles Peattie’s Animal Alphabet was to create something that parents and children could play with together. We didn’t want our app to be another piece of pass-back media. Most importantly, we wanted to make it look and feel as good as any app made for adults.

We spent a lot of time and effort making focusing on the quality of the graphics, sound, and user experience. Charles Peattie, the chap that did all of the drawing, also writes and illustrates the satirical cartoon strip Alex (published in the Telegraph) and a couple of other cartoons for publications like Private Eye – so his wit really comes across in the animation. We also included elements to engage the user in a creative way; such as a quiz, sound effects and music.  Here’s a link to our trailer if you’d like to see it: 

We’ve got many more kids apps and stories in the pipeline. ‘Grumpy Farm’ is our next one, and I think it’s something that young parents in particular are really going to enjoy. We’ve been experimenting with a style that involves live drawing under the camera and traditional animation, and we’re hoping to use young and up coming bands to sound track the app.

Thank you Christopher, can’t wait to hear the new tracks!