“It was very fun but also very challenging,” Oldenburg says. “It really helps make it look grand and tall. “It’s a fun aspect ratio to work in,” says Oldenburg. Oldenburg and Joyce also decided to frame the story in the iPad’s vertical orientation, a more book-shaped than screen-shaped window into the world. The iPad’s approachable nature adds the potential of interactivity, allowing The Numberlys to draw in its users with 18 little games interspersed within the story. The Moonbot team draws on a mixture of experience from computer-generated animation, television and film. Oldenburg says the iPad was an ideal place to start with this story. Roger’s Neighborhood, and that’s The Numberlys’ gritty, charming universe. Throw in some Marx Brothers and sprinkle some Mr. The look and scope of the film became the inspiration for the soaring, black-and-white urban dystopia in which The Numberlys is set. With the Numberlys idea already cooking, there was a screening of Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 sci-fi film Metropolis in Moonbot’s home town of Shreveport, Louisiana. The opening sequences of The Numberlys, with its strange automatons marching in lockstep, evoke scenes from the 1982 film based on the album, The Wall. “The teachers we got along with were the art teachers.” As Oldenburg spoke, the lyrics of part 2 of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” jumped to my mind. “We didn’t really jive well with school,” Oldenburg says. “One of the things on our checklist is always to do an alphabet book.” For Moonbot, entertaining, engaging stories are the priority, but educational themes manage to sneak into them.
“Alphabet books are a right of passage for a lot of children’s book illustrators,” Oldenburg says. As a side effect, Moonbot would get the chance to make an alphabet book. The creators asked themselves whimsical questions like, “Who came up with the letter G?” The story would invent answers to such questions. The follow-up project began with the concept for an alphabet book staring these five characters, the Numberlys. “For a younger user, it’s just pointing them towards this wonderful reference and inspiration that they might not experience nowadays.” “For an older user, there’s a nostalgic quality,” Oldenburg says. “With Morris Lessmore, it was Singing In the Rain meets Buster Keaton with a little bit of The Wizard of Oz.” This formula helps Moonbot’s stories appeal to all ages. “We take all the things we love, stir it up into a pot, and hopefully it takes,” Oldenburg says. “ The Numberlys will also be a book at some point.” Moonbot’s process revolves around the stories themselves, bringing them to the media that make the most sense for the audience and the particular story. “We approach all of these stories this way,” Enochs says.
For The Numberlys, the iPad version came first, and the film version is now in production. The first story app, The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore, was a short film first, which Moonbot then extended to be an iPad app, and a printed book is coming this fall. Moonbot works off a slate of stories, choosing a medium to start with and then expanding the story to different platforms. Moonbot co-founders Brandon Oldenburg and Lampton Enoch described the process by which they, along with co-founder William Joyce, create their stories, and its as charming a story as The Numberlys itself. Kids can just watch it unfold the first time, skip around with the page arrows, or crank a mighty gear to jump to their favorite parts. The story plays out as a hybrid of a film, a book and an interactive game. Its stark, soaring black-and-white aesthetic draws on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to tell the story of five characters’ quest to create the alphabet in a world run by numbers. It’s an interactive tale with a massive visual scope appropriate for people of all sizes. Moonbot Studios has released The Numberlys, its second story app for iOS.
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