Work / Archive
Weirdwood Manor: layout and compositing at series pace
Context
Relish brought me in through Wasabi to join their creative production team on Weirdwood Manor, an interactive children's app that takes kids through an enchanted world of hidden rooms, puzzles and secrets. The goal was a visually stunning experience that would hold a child's imagination for hours.
The problem
- 01Top-quality interactive stories on a short schedule, across a whole series of books.
- 02Covering several roles at once: 3D layout artist staging characters and virtual cameras, and compositor animating 2.5D cameras and adding effects.
- 03Learning cinematography properly while shipping to a weekly quota.
What I did
01
Treat layout as cinematography
As a layout designer, I posed characters and set cameras following real cinematography rules rather than framing by eye. On a children's app that is what separates a scene that reads instantly from one a child has to decode.
02
Split the week by cognitive load
Roughly five to seven scenes composited per week alongside one or two laid out. Compositing is repeatable and layout is not, so they got different shares of attention rather than being averaged together.
03
Work close to the other teams
Layout and compositing both sit between creative and development, so the work happened alongside both rather than in a handoff chain.
Result
- 01A series that landed with both children and parents, praised for its storyline, gameplay and graphics.
- 02Six industry awards across production, interactive content and mobile entertainment.
- 03A sustained weekly output that held quality across an entire series rather than one showcase scene.
Awards
- Youth Media Alliance Grand Prize Winner, Best Production, All Categories, 2017
- Youth Media Alliance Winner, Best Original Interactive Content, 2017
- Banff Rockie Awards Winner, Interactive Content for Kids & Youth, 2016
- Kidscreen Awards Winner, Best Kids Game App, Tablet, 2016
- App Store App of the Year Runner-Up, Canada, Editors' Choice, 2015
- Digi Award Winner, Best in Mobile Entertainment, 2015
