FILMMAKER MAGAZINE (FALL 2012)                                                                                                                                       

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore 

Apps — for Apple, Android, Kindle Fire, or other devices — are simply one specific way in which interactive material can be distributed. Though still the newest medium examined in this article, apps are already ubiquitous in the cultural landscape. Video-based apps abound, and inasmuch as they present linear videos, the editor’s role adheres to traditional practice. It’s where video interacts with games or other elements that the editing process becomes more interesting and indicates the way handheld devices may most strongly shape filmmaking in the years to come. 

One of the most innovative companies producing narrative apps today is Moonbot Studios in Shreveport, LA. Like many current small production companies, Moonbot, which was founded in 2009 and now has more than 40 employees, works in multiple disciplines, as exemplified by their best-known property, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.Conceived by Moonbot co-founder William Joyce, who has a long credit list in feature and television animation, it began as a short, animated film about a bibliophile and the sentient books he loves. While it was in development, the iPad was announced and, as Moonbot’s in-house editor Calvin O’Neal says, “everyone on the team got excited about the storytelling possibilities. It made us think of all the wild things we could do to tell the story in different ways.” The traditional film went forward, however, and was released in 2011 to great success, winning the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. The team turned immediately to an ebook app released this year exclusively for iPad (topping the iPad sales chart in July), followed by a print children’s book and another app, the IMAG-N-O-TRON, that allows users to point an iPhone or iPad camera at the book and hear narration and see additional animation. 

Moonbot’s other apps — an interactive music video for the song “Bullseye” by Polyphonic Spree, and the educational narrative app The Numberlys — evince the same attention to quality narrative and visual detail; stylistic influences include Buster Keaton, Metropolis and The Wizard of Oz, for starters. So how do they conceive their projects and how does O’Neal, as the staff’s resident editor, fit into the process? “The workflow is pretty similar to making a film for us,” he says, “perhaps because many of us at Moonbot come from a filmmaking background. When we make apps, we approach it the same way as if we want to make a book or a movie.” The Numberlys features a narrative about five friends who reticently build the first letters in an industrialized world full only of numbers. The app feels like a narrative film that just happens to contain small games, where users create each letter through different tasks, rather than as a game with animated cut-scenes or interstitials. In this case, because the film portions and the games are distinct, O’Neal’s job was to work on the videos, storyboarding and developing “characters and the narrative as much as we did with Morris Lessmore.”