I had the pleasure of meeting Dean and Susan at last year’s iBooks Author conference. Dean’s a great storyteller and he’ll be speaking at the Hype Conference about his experience animating iBooks with Susan in their new animation endeavor:
Tell me a bit about yourself and what brought you to Tumult Hype:
Sue and I were impressed with the possibilities Hype offered a group with our skill sets, giving us the tools to create a series of animated kids books for iBooks. We met a dozen years ago, and decided it would be a fun match. We had no plans for doing anything along the lines of writing books.
As a young mom, Sue would tell her kids made-up stories, and created several characters and story lines which her kids, now grown, still remember. So we decided to join my publishing and computer graphics history and interests, with her story lines and illustrations, and began in 2012 to learn iBooks Author and iPad illustrating programs, and join it all together to publish kids books, giving birth to “How About…” Kids books. We recently published a new How about… An Undersea Adventure in addition to five new Pinky and Dirty stories animated with Hype this week.
The entire process is exciting. It has meant that being retired had nothing to do with having nothing to do; we are working daily as nearly a full time job, together, and keeping our brains bubbling with new ideas, new capabilities, and new challenges which make us remember how much fun life and being productive can be.
Hype is to me a bit like chess. You can get the idea of it, and have some fun results with it, pretty much from the beginning. And like chess, I suspect it would take a lifetime of experience making increasingly amazing results to begin to feel like a true master. Like life, the more I learn about Hype, the more I feel like I want to learn. It’s good for the brain, and for the imagination.
What’s most exciting about the books you’re working on?
As I embark on this entirely new pursuit as the actual builder of these books, including the content to be animated, I am yet again glad to have been born at such as exciting time in information creation and distribution. And it seems to continue to revolve around the process of publishing, now in a new and more efficient generation.
We are also re-releasing for Nashville, one of our early titles, “How About…” Music, since Nashville is after all, Music City. It too will be rich with animations. All together we have something like 100 animations across all the titles.
View Dean & Susan Hammond’s latest work on their iBooks page.
Meet more Hype Pros at the Hype Conference on October 8th!
