Portal Storytime

📚🦙 Interactive storytelling experience for Facebook Portal featuring animated characters and immersive visual effects.

Portal Storytime was the project that first brought me to Buck. 📚 As part of the Creative Technology team, I helped bring Anna Dewdney’s Llama Llama 🦙 and Todd Parr’s Otto children’s book series to life on the Facebook Portal.

Each book was comprised of a series of Spark AR projects stitched together into a full interactive experience—an inventive way to use Meta’s AR tech typically used in Instagram Filters. (RIP Spark AR, RIP filters. 🪦🙏)

Technical Challenges ⚡

The project presented massive challenges. Everything from ironing out animation pipelines at a company primarily doing rendered animation, to developing on the Spark AR platform, during a time when it was going through intense development itself. We had to create workflows specific to the needs of this animation pipeline as requirements evolved.

All while keeping each project under Spark’s 4MB file limit. No sweat, right? 😅

These were extremely collaborative projects—everyone doing everything, helping one another as we went along. While challenging, I was also aware that I was working atop the hard work of Kirin Robinson, Moses Journey, and others who made this project possible. 🙏

Each book and chapter had its own little challenges. A good blend of baked animation and custom animations, all pixel-perfect to match the styleframes. We also built up a decent library of Spark Patches, though, at the rate of platform development, maintaining them was tricky.

And on this one, I created a workable (if janky) artist-friendly solution for Spark projects to share JavaScript libraries.

Team & Credits

Big thanks to everyone in Creative Tech for making this project such a memorable experience—it was the start of many adventures ahead.

Storytime Creative Technology Team:

Special thanks to Kirin and Journey for maintaining a calm, steady forward momentum while fighting those little battles that happen while delivering dozens of bite-sized real-time networked AR projects stitched together on a platform still under development.

Oh and shout-out to my Storytime developer alumni around the world. You know what you were up against.