Melt Awardees

Kathy Loizou (Showcomotion Children's Media Conference) & Matt Gould (Soda)

Animoodle is a new concept that allows children's drawings to come alive using a mixture of simple animation and simulated physics that combine to create a fantastically entertaining hybrid between drawings, puppets and toys. In Animoodle children create characters and objects using an online interface based on Soda's Moovl software, which imbues freehand drawings with simulated physics. The best creations rising from this ecology of user-generated-content are used to populate a live television format.

The project was devised after a conversation in a bar between Matt Gould, the Learning Director at Soda, a software development company in London, and Kathy Loizou the Director of Showcomotion, the International Children's Media Conference held annually in Sheffield. Soda had already developed Moovl, software which imbues freehand drawings with simulated physics. 'Put more simply, if you draw a cute dog on the Moovl website it will turn into a cute 'hand-drawn-style' animation in front of your eyes'. Matt and Kathy felt that if Moovl could be furthered developed with tools that really young children (under the age of 10) could use, children's media companies would be interested in the product mainly because it's a great way of making websites sticky. They are also interested in the children's TV market opportunities of incorporating the Animoodle, user-generated animations into a television format.

The prototype will be demonstrated at Showcomotion, which takes place in Sheffield from the 4th to the 6th of July 2007

www.showcomotionconference.com
http://soda.co.uk/

Photograph by Shaun Bloodworth