Our InnovateUK Takeaways and What It Has Meant For Us and The Future of Our Business

We’ve done it, and we’re out the other side!

Now, a few weeks on, we’ve had a chance to look back to review the main takeaways, evaluate our innovations, and consider the next moves.

Main Takeaways

The nature of working on an innovation project, at least for us, is to imagine a great position to be in (in relation to the work at hand), and then pose a series of ‘what if’ questions to try to find a way towards that dream outcome being accomplished.

This consists of working through a succession of feedback loops that build on the last and inform the next; be that to continue along the same route or to change tack altogether. It’s not for the faint-hearted! After all, enjoying the quest of the unknown and squarely facing the possibility of failure is a central theme.

This approach is a great example of using inventive thinking to navigate a way forward. Keeping a creative mind when up against restrictions and recognising the opportunities that they could present is a valuable trait to cultivate.

Innovations

We had several wish list items to tackle at the beginning of the project, and most, if not all, have been accomplished one way or the other. We have certain details we wish to keep under wraps, of course, but here are a couple of major advances for us:

In the pursuit of creating a magical experience, we have found a way to achieve automatic and recurring personalisation in the web-book without collecting or storing personal information. This was a high priority for us considering our target users are children. We wanted to both engage and involve the reader, and encourage people to share the experience as a personalised gift for others to enjoy.

We have also found a way for the experience to change over time (in recognised time periods). This presents us with exciting possibilities that impact much of our in-house project work, as the core of what we do is to bring the printed page alive!

Next Moves

Through completing this innovation work, we have realised that what we are creating is actually very innovative. This is a good thing, of course; we are at the forefront of using the web storybook format to create enchanting and in-depth experiences in an increasingly quick and cursory online world. But with innovation, there is also risk, and understanding how we present and communicate our product and message will be crucial in how it’s received.

The world of tech and media is moving at an incredible pace, with AI capabilities (and the access to this) fast changing the face of production in screen-based creative products. In our view, AI should only ever be used as a powerful data tool, not as a creativity replacement. We are dedicated to human-made endeavours, with human creativity and human interaction at the core. This is where the real stories are; in the making behind the work, as well as in the product or experience itself.

This innovative work has led us to realise the huge potential and value of what our proposition can bring to both makers and recipients. And we have exciting plans that tackle both of these aspects head on. We certainly have our work cut out. But never shy of a challenge, our plans and company aims have become more ambitious as a result of our findings.

We’ll keep you posted…

Thank you for reading!

Eleanor :-)

You can keep up to date with our progress on Galdo’s Gift, and our motion storybooks by adding yourself to our mailing list.

Admin hoops and hurdles, and how valuable it is to hone those writing skills

Galdo’s Gift awarded Innovation Funding

As many of you already know, back in November we won an Innovate UK grant for innovation with our Galdo’s Gift: The Boovie® project. Which was fantastic news, of course!

We’ll update you on what we’ve been doing within this another time - but I want to talk to you now about the admin… I know; it’s the least sexiest part of it, and yet… almost the most important in terms of receiving the actual money. It’s crazy.

Learning Curves

These past few months have been a really steep learning curve for me. I have been in deep; deciphering the government forms and formats, timings and charts required. Not least, was understanding the array of acronyms used, to work what was being asked of me. Luckily as PM (project manager) I have been allocated a very helpful MO (monitoring officer) for my QRM (project quarterly meetings), and that’s just the start of it!

Having written the application forms over last summer (and yes I did make sure that I wrote 300 words for every category, well, 298 for most) the real difficulty then was, relaying all of the information requested, in the correct place, in a succinct manner. The difficulty now is trying to make sure I don’t labour over the costings and profiles, tables and registers to the detriment of the project itself. It’s a hard, but, valuable experience. By the end of the project I will have ‘Project Management’ under my belt for sure; in an intricate and precise government kind of a way, and that is actually a fantastic take-away, as well as the money, the opportunity and the kudos!

Writing A Future

Having been in the creative visual industry for my whole career, it is striking how hugely important writing skills are, in being able to persuade others to jump on board with a project or, to allocate money to develop it further.

Right now, we are half way through the Innovate UK grant period and I’m feeling pretty pleased (hopefully I won’t regret saying that!). I have completed a successful PCR (project change request), and the first QRM is done. Let’s see what happens over the next few months and we’re out the other side with our innovations ready to be shared…

The Next Step

Ultimately, we want to do our best work that inspires others to do theirs, and this grant is a great step towards doing that.

P.S. I also have my eye on another fund to apply for, which would be great for Galdo’s Gift and those who will benefit from that, and also hopefully not as arduous a journey for me. Fingers crossed.

You can keep up to date with our progress on Galdo’s Gift: The Boovie® by adding yourself to our mailing list.

And please do add comments below if you have any questions or experiences regarding funding and grants that you would like to share.

We're in the March issue of Computer Arts!

We are really pleased to be featured in the latest March issue of Computer Arts detailing the work that went into creating the children’s interactive storybook, Galdo’s Gift.

Here’s a snippet of the content with a link at the end to where the complete article and magazine can be found. As well as a fantastic five page article on us :-) and the latest on the world of digital creators, there is invaluable information for anyone considering starting their own creative business.

From Computer Arts (March Issue 2019):

Genesis of Galdo

Eleanor Long and Trevor Young

Galdo’s Gift: The Boovie was the culmination of a style of illustration and animation we had been developing for a while. We had a story that originated from a short poem and it seemed the perfect vehicle to demonstrate and consolidate the skill sets of our new studio. As the story evolved we tested it with children aged five through to 11. This gave us invaluable feedback on the age of our readers, how they understood the story, what they found funny, their favourite bits and so on.

With regards to the story, it’s the tale of a frog, King Galdo, who sends four robust little heroes out to the far corners of Galdovia to bring back a very special gift for the reader. Only, he’s not quite ready for what they return with.

We were intrigued by the idea of a book that comes alive and talks directly to the reader, and keen to play with the possibilities of the digital storybook format. We knew it would work well with our playful style of animation.

Creating the characters and sets

Eleanor Long

Our personal interests and strengths often form the basis of what each of us does. Trevor has drawn figures throughout his life, so he drew and developed the characters, monsters and creatures. My interest has always been in landscapes and the environment, so I worked on the landscapes, seascapes and interior shots…

The cover image below takes you to a site where you can purchase your own copy of Computer Arts in either digital or print form…

Tapocketa's 'Galdo's Gift' Wins Best Book at The Digital Book World Awards

Of course we haven’t let it go to our heads.

We are proud to announce that Tapocketa scooped four big awards at this year’s Digital Book World Awards. These awards recognise the ‘best of the best from across the wide world of publishing’ and Galdo’s Gift won Best Book (Overall), Best Book (Fiction), Best Book (Children’s) and Best Book (Interactive Fiction).

It matters greatly that indie publishers, such as ourselves are recognised alongside those who are more established in the industry.

As well as our first digital publication winning four awards, Tapocketa itself was a finalist, nominated for Publisher of the Year and Children’s Publisher of the Year on a list that included Disney, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House.

Because of our haul, Tapocketa and Galdo’s Gift gets special mention in the press release. We look forward to attending this prestigious event next year.

Digital Book World Press Release

School Results

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Eleanor and Trevor losing whatever remaining dignity they ever had

There is no hiding anymore, time to step into the spotlight and sink or swim.

A collection of harsh little critics file into the school hall and sit down and deliver their finest harsh critic gazes towards us. This is just the first of seven sessions presenting our book to the children of Commonswood Primary School.

Now, something we had created from scratch, will be laid out for children to see, and critique.  We came armed with big colourful images and big colourful masks. I would narrate and Eleanor was to act out all the characters.

Eleanor slapped a cardboard crown on the front of my Velcro'd head and we were away.  There followed a slightly awkward, ad-hoc rendition of the book., with the children helping us by providing the sound effects such as fanfares, sword-swishing and booing (now, hold on there -we had asked them to boo, it was part of the story, honest!).  We'd given ourselves a lot of mask-swapping and prop manipulation and it was quite a challenge.

Making it in the world of kid's lit takes nerves of steel

I can't claim that our first performance was a finely polished masterpiece, but we had given it our best shot.  This was our first time after all.  I was happy we had made it through.

Then we showed them the trailer and explained how we created some of the characters from bits of card and showed them some of our models.  Then we answered some of their questions (thankfully no 'why are you here?'), handed out activity sheets/feedback sheets (more about those in future blogs) and they filed out to make way for the next class.  This was exhausting and we had only done one.  Six more to go.

However, as we went from performance to performance throughout the day, we got better and started to realise where to put our focus, involving the children more and spending more time showing them the models and the process.

A few of the children had their photo taken wearing the masks and holding the props and they loved it.

A couple of masked heroes

In a future blog I will detail more of what we learnt and the feedback we got.  Safe to say it was a very valuable experience and I'm glad we stepped out of our comfort zone to do it.

Character Building

Here you can see the various elements that go towards making up a complete character for Galdo's Gift.

Below is a snapshot image of all the body parts we have created to allow us a huge array of options when creating a character.  In fact, these body parts are just for the King's many subjects within the book.  We have more parts for the heroes, Galdo himself and others.

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t gives us a huge amount of flexibility when creating the characters and, because they are made up of different parts, we can animate them as well.

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Pick your nose, ...or mouth

Inspirations

The more senior among us will remember Ivor the Engine and Captain Pugwash, UK children's TV programmes broadcast in the 70s which used a similar technique albeit never digitised.  More recently South Park use paper cutouts and stop motion to create it's manic characters.  Our methods are very similar, although we scan all our drawings into the computer and colour, light and animate them digitally.

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An example of Victorian paper theatre image courtesy of ©Kotomi on Flickr

Our original inspiration were things such as the miniature paper theatres of the Victorian era which recreated scenes from the stage.  We had moved on from this influence but with recent developments in Galdo's Gift, it's working it's way back into the story again.

How to get a head of the crowd

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If you print this, you will have headed paper -(sorry)

So the heroes of our story need a host of adoring fans and, despite what they say, three is not nearly enough for a crowd.

No, it's going to take more than that; a hero is just not a hero if there are just three lowly admirers raising a barely audible cheer on our protagonist's triumphant return.  Perhaps we could make one admirer and copy and paste times twenty, would that do?  No?  Ah, ok.

Colourful Characters

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one of our King's subjects, ready for colour

We've made up a collection of characters to inhabit Galdo's kingdom from the numerous body parts we have created.  Once we have decided on a few of our favourites, the process begins of colouring the various body parts based on our selected palette.

The multi-coloured heads you see in the image above is the first stage of this colouring process.  The colours you see here are far from the final colours (we will adjust those later).  For now, we are just colouring in.

In the next post (on Friday) I will show the process of picking the body parts (all sounds a bit Frankenstein, I know) and how we turn them into fully fledged characters.

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hand picked: a selection of some of the hands we have at our disposal

Gilty Pleasures

pure gold... work in progress lettering for Galdo's Gift inside cover

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One of the books we are using as reference: Nature Walks and Talks, available at all secret old bookshops.

When working on the inside cover of Galdo's Gift we are taking inspiration from a number of very old books we have gathering dust on our shelves (ok, we don't dust our books).

One technique that was used on many old books and that fits very well with our story is gilding (applying layers of gold leaf), in this case gold lettering, motifs and decoration.  The more modern method (used on the books we have access to) is hot foil stamping (pressing a gold leaf substitute onto the surface with metal type).  This has it's own unique charm, especially when printed onto a textural material and given the passage of time.

Even though our book is in digital land, we want to harness some of the charm and character of old books; including the knocks and scrapes they have gathered as they are passed on from one semi-careful owner to the next.

acorn motif in Galdo's Gift

We want our book to feel like it has been passed on down the generations and ended up in your hands.

lettering on our flyers

Monster Mash Ups

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creature chaos: some of the many drawings that have been created for Galdo's Gift

The stuff of our nightmares are rarely under the bed or in the wardrobe (unless you are a fashion stylist perusing inside my wardrobe), they are out there in our everyday world.  As a child these demons surfaced in the form of the school bully, a vindictive teacher or the embodiment of all evil, Brussels sprouts.  Sorry Brussels sprout lovers.

It's something to bear in mind when breathing life into monsters for children's books.  Do you want them to represent these fears?  Oftentimes humans can quite happily fulfill this role anyway.  Additionally, fear of creatures other than ourselves isn't really the noblest of objectives when comes to wonderful world of children's literature.

We also need to avoid creating actual nightmares for our more sensitive readership.  A bad actor in an laughably unconvincing rubber creature costume on Doctor Who could scare the proverbials out of me when I was five years old.  We certainly don't want to cause sleepless nights.

Thankfully, our technique of constructing our creatures out of constituent parts has allowed us to mix and match to find the perfect look for everything from enormous rabid blood-sucking bats to giant screaming snakes. 

Sweet dreams, everyone.

Defining Moment

So, how to make reading and understanding fun for children...

Everybody likes print books.  If you don't, I don't want to be your friend; there I said it.

So we are creating a digital book.

'Whaaa?  I thought you just said...', yes I know, it seems a little back-to-front and we will bring out a print book version in good time, but hear me out.  There is a reason why digital books should have their place among the stories that children enjoy. 

We know what digital books don't offer; their tactile nature, the intimacy of the page to reader experience, the ability to have varying formats; big, small, pop up, cutouts etc.  But they do have the ability to enhance the reading experience in their own way.  We've been speaking to parents and teachers about our ideas for Galdo's Gift and they are very excited by the possibilities it presents.

One of those is the ability to click on any word and find out what it means.  This, to us, seemed like a small thing to begin with.  Hardly setting the world alight, right?  Well, to a child that is reluctant to read because a book has many words that they simply don't understand, it's a game changer.

And the advantages don't stop there, but that's for another day.

The Changing Landscape

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a newhorizon... Eleanor's latest paper model of Galdovia

Galdovia is always somewhere we wanted to revisit and truly explore what it has to offer.

Previous visits had always been fleeting.  There was never time to take in it's full potential, we had to push on, quicken the pace, 'no time to linger' barked the uncompromising, yet dashing, Trevor.

Well sometimes it's good to pause, contemplate and revisit; you begin to see what you truly missed the first time around.

Eleanor revisited Galdovia; sighed it's cool fresh air, strolled its winding hill paths and misty valleys and brought the landscape into crystal sharp focus before our eyes...

...and next time, we go together.

The Book Look

A section from our latest Galdo's Gift page backdrop

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Looking worse for wear...much like the martyrs in the book

One thing that is important to Eleanor and I when making Galdo's Gift is to stay true to, and celebrate, the beauty of books.  This may sound contradictory when you learn that Galdo's Gift will firstly be a digital book;  we don't see it that way.  We want to encapsulate all that we love about print books alongside what a digital book can offer.

The image here is the front cover from a very old book I have inherited from my parents, The Foxes Book of Martyrs (a church copy, listing the stories of many Christian martyrs through history).  It has many of the qualities that have consciously fed into the design of our book.

Obviously a digital book can't be as wonderfully tactile as a print book, but we can draw a lot from it's visual texture, patterns and surface qualities and add all that is good about digital books; animation, sound, informative visual overlays, increased engagement of reluctant readers; the list goes on.

We look forward to sharing that experience with all of you.

Discerning Palettes

Our initial palette choice

When we started Galdo's Gift we knew that we had to be strict over the colour choices we made.

All to often, if the decision over what colour palette to use is ignored, the resulting imagery can lack coherence.  We decided early on that we would choose a few images (in our case illustrations) which contained colour combinations we liked and thought would compliment our style. 

That is what you see in the photo above; the three images we picked.  They had some beautiful muted tones and fitted with the colour palettes we had noticed in folk art and the Victorian paper theatres that also inform our work.

Scanning these images into the computer and constructing a project palette within all our graphic software meant we could remain consistent across all the imagery we produced.

Of course rules are there to be broken, so yes, we have strayed in our colour choices from time to time, but we always have the original palette choice to bring us back in line.

Getting the Message

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monster message

For a while now we here a Tapocketa have been wondering what we can offer to our subscribers whilst we are still busy building and promoting Galdo's Gift.  The book is going to take a while before it is finished and we are grateful for the following that we are accruing, we want to give something back in the meantime.

We've been looking at putting messages into our scenes, something that people would love to share with friends on social media.  So we are building a selection of great quotes that not only have strong associations with our scenes but that would work well when placed out of context on a timeline on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc.

We will soon put out a link to a page of these messages that can be shared for free.  We have also been thinking about putting out personalised versions on request if there is interest in doing so.

For now here is one of the first (share by clicking on the paper plane symbol that appears in the top right corner (desktop/laptop: it sometimes only appears when you hover the pointer over the video, mobile: try rotating your phone, as it only seems to appear if the video is of a larger scale on your device)...

Enjoy...

An unexpected quote from a scientist, perhaps, but Einstein relied on the power of his imagination (alongside logic, of course) to expand his theories.

I Need a Hero!

Wait...did he just? Nah, can't be.

What a noble specimen of heroics. What a dashing, noble knight.  No wonder they have chosen to immortalise him with such dynamic realism.  Wait a minute, did he just move?  No...maybe not.

As I was saying, he seems just the sort of unflinching, bold hero we need for our tale.  What a fitting tribute to him this very realistic painting is...  no wait, he moved again.  Did nobody see it this time?  I'm not sure whether my mind is playing tricks on me.

Anyway, to get back to what I was saying... no there it is again.  Hang on, this is no painting.  No wonder it is so lifelike; Sir Strompliff is that you?  I'm not sure the hero we need is the sort that has to be his own portrait in his spare time.

Although heroes are pretty rare these days, so you might just have to do.

Animated, Like Clockwork

Do the squirrel rock

Mesmerising isn't it?  There's something so relaxing about watching a squirrel chomping away over and over again, forever.  

This is just one of the many critters that inhabits Galdovia and many of them lead very repetitive lives, but they don't mind.  They find something comforting in the familiar, even if it is familiar frequently as in the case of old 'scoff chops' here.

If he reminds you of an old Christmas nutcracker toy soldier, then top marks to you.  For those of you dribbling and scratching your head in bemusement, a diagram is in order....

Essentially a wooden toy for cracking walnuts shells and releasing the tasteless walnutty goodness within.

As good a starting inspiration as any, no?

Turning the Tide

Spin cycle

Well, now I'm all at sea.  Things are not all they seem when you look at them from a different angle.  What was once so substantial now seems wafer-thin.

But that works both ways; small and thin, inconsequential elements can be put together to build something quite substantial.  Unremarkable individual pieces can be constructed to create something to capture the imagination.

Now something that once seemed an unremarkable collection of parts can become a wonderful window into a weird world...

A scene from the up and coming digital book, Galdo's Gift: Now meet Master Mustafo and his mariner mates, Manoeuvring their Man O’ War through the Marlin Straits. Mercilessly mashing monsters from the murk. “Muster up a memento, or you’ll drive me berserk!”