Curious Media Inc

Sick beats!

Sometimes we get to be a part of something much bigger than the animations, websites and games that we develop. While 📺 can rot your 🧠 (allegedly)– games and media can also be a pretty powerful educational tool. Don’t believe us? Well we can prove it! Over the years we’ve gotten a front row seat with various grant funded research projects that we’ve been a part of on the game/app development side. One really standout project from about 5 years ago was The Cat in the Hat Builds That!, an app that features 5 games focused on various engineering concepts including material science, measurements, physics, momentum and friction. The app was built in support of The Cat In The Hat Knows a Lot About That! series, funded by a Ready To Learn grant and made in partnership with Penguin Random House and Portfolio Entertainment. Ready to Learn is an amazing government program that has helped fund so many awesome series on PBS Kids. Usually we get some high level analytics back to know that kids are in fact playing our games and presumably, having fun, but it’s less common for us to get detailed data and studies to show the efficacy of the content we create. With The Cat In The Hat Builds That! we learned this program (including our app!) received very high efficacy ratings (much higher than they normally see with these types of research programs). A 🔥 quote from the research summary: "Previous research suggests that transferring knowledge from videos and digital games can be challenging, especially for young children. That children in this study were able to apply what they experienced virtually in the games and videos to the real world is meaningful and indicates that virtual screen experiences, when developmentally appropriate, aligned to national standards, and focused on active learning, can support real-world learning." Just a few of the amazing people that we worked closely with on this aspirational project: Lynn Kestin Sessler Traci Lawson Alison Folino, CFA, Ed.M. Shannon B. Take a look at the included gallery to see some screenshots from the game as well as some interesting slides from the research paper. #throwbackthursday #catinthehat #readytolearn

10 years ago (almost to the day) we kicked off a project that would ultimately be the most widely viewed content we’ve ever created… Earlier in the year we went to Burbank for a couple of brainstorming sessions with our old friends Gino Guzzardo and Robert May. Within a couple months we were able to get a modest budget to produce the first episode of a new series of animated shorts called Disney Retold. The concept was fairly simple… Retell classic Disney stories in a variety of modern/different/weird formats. The format that we landed on for this initial episode was an MMS texting thread and since we were hot on the tails of the global domination that was Frozen, we were tasked with retelling that story: Frozen As Told By Emoji. It turns out people liked it… a lot! We went on to create about 30 more episodes for the series and racked up hundreds of millions of views on Youtube and many more on Disney+. We don’t take all the credit for the views. The source material that we had to work with was pretty good after all. But we will take a little credit as it required a ton of passion, creativity and work to pull off. This series included more stakeholders than any project we’ve ever worked on, as each retold movie brought along a new set of producers involved with the original productions. Keeping production on schedule was a challenge at times, but we are super proud of the body of work that we ultimately produced with a lot of wonderful collaborators and partners at Disney. It continues to rack up views on Youtube and Disney+ to this day! A super special thanks to David Trexler, an amazing animation producer who we hired on to manage the production internally and the amazing duo Ryan Burns and Nicole Quadros who coordinated everything and kept things moving forward at Disney. For a full list of credits, go to the end of any episode! Watch one of our favorites here: https://lnkd.in/gJWdh_ky #throwbackthursday #astoldbyemoji #disney

From the founder... look what he found.

Last week our team visited Southern Nuclear's Plant Vogtle in Georgia, where we gained incredible insights into nuclear power generation. We toured all four reactors and explored the Nuclear Control Room simulator—an exact replica used to train future operators. It was a fantastic experience! We’re thrilled to keep collaborating with our friends at Georgia Power Company and Southern Nuclear on cutting edge educational experiences. A big thank you to Joel Leopard for the incredible tour!

BWAHAHAHA!!

Today marks Curious Media's 20th anniversary! I still feel likes it one big dream and I can't believe it's been 2 whole decades. We celebrated today with tacos, burritos, good friends, good music, a look back at our early days and some Curious Media themed mocktails. Yum! It wouldn't be complete without saying thank you to all of our lovely clients we've had the privilege of working with over the years. Thank you for letting us join you in making joy.

Have you ever had a company that you wanted to work with but it just never seems to happen? We’ve had a few over the years and we are here to tell you– keep after it, eventually the stars might align! The history with this particular client sort of goes back to the very early days of Curious Media. Our founder Randy was trying to break into the children’s media industry but had no clue how to, so he just made a list of targets and started searching the internet for phone numbers and then picked up the phone. After a long day of wrong numbers and no answers he dialed the number he found for Sesame Workshop… Much to his dismay, someone at the company actually answered! What now?! After a brief moment he was able to remember who he was and asked if they needed any multimedia to which they responded “No thanks!”. “Okay thanks!” Randy ended the call. 😅 There was no further contact with Sesame Workshop for approximately 7 years when they reached out to us! By this time we had done a few projects with PBS Kids and word must have gotten around to them. Before long, we had a project lined up: Oscars Rotten Ride! What a great way to start our relationship with Sesame. The game is still live on their site and a blast to play, despite all the grouchiness! Since then we’ve collaborated on a plethora of games including: Letter Dance Party Abby & Rosita’s Wand Chase Monster at the end of this Game and a bunch more!     Thanks to all the wonderful people at Sesame especially Todd Slepian, Geri Cole, Kristin Cook, Michelle Kaplan for all of the super fun collaborations over the years!

Shortly after development wrapped on the My Little Pony Friendship Celebration app, Hasbro approached us with a totally new product in the Furreal Pets toy line. When we started it was a robot dog with a connected app or something like that… When we finished it was Furreal Makers: Proto Max! Before this point we had done extensive internal R&D on Bluetooth LE connected toys and even built a handful of prototypes… but building prototypes and building something for manufacturing and release are two entirely different beasts. Fortunately, we had some of the most talented engineers in the toy industry spearheading the physical product while we focused on the connected mobile app. It was one of the coolest projects that we’ve gotten to be involved with because we got to collaborate with these crazy guys that have to worry about things like hair entanglement, choking hazards, abrasions, pinching, electrocution etc. all while maintaining a product that kids actually want to play with. Talk about a tall order! One of the most memorable meetings we’ve had to date was at Hasbro HQ in conjoined cubicles that are surrounded by toys in various states of completion and mutilation. It brought back memories of the creepy mutant toys from Toy Story… if you don’t remember, just Google Babyface! Toy mutilation aside, we had some really awesome meetings in Pawtucket and learned a ton about the toy engineering and manufacturing process. Ultimately we collaborated on two connected toys– Furreal Makers: Proto Max and Dance Code with Princess Belle. Furreal Makers launched and enabled kids to build a robo pet and then program its personality and play games and nurture it through the app. Dance Code with Princess Belle was an amazing dancing doll that taught kids how to dance as well as basic programming! We were very fortunate to get to collaborate with Don Cameron, Ricky Katowicz, Aaron Arvia, Joshua Garrett and many more on these products. Check out the montage below that shows each of the experiences that we developed. #throwbackthursday #connectedtoys #hasbro  

Short form animation? Yeah, we do that… sometimes! Working on a variety of websites and games for Phineas and Ferb for a couple years during the show's heyday, we did a fair amount of animation. It was always very short bursts and loops, but the show creators and producers at Disney were always very happy with it. So happy that they approached us to animate a spinoff short form Youtube series called Doofenshmirtz Daily Dirt. A hyper topical series where Heinz Doofenshmirtz (the show's ridiculously lovable villain) sounded off on a VLOG about various controversies of the day. Due to the timely nature of these episodes, we had to turn episodes around in 2 weeks from the day that we received the script and voiceover track (provided by none other than Dan Povenmire– show creator and the voice of Doofenshmirtz). This required an extremely efficient pipeline and I can only speculate kept Disney S&P on their toes! Huge shoutout to Alan Gorringe for busting out all the animation on time!  We produced about 40 episodes in total and they covered important topics like goats screaming like humans, Justin Bieber, cronuts and Gangnam Style! The series even made an appearance on broadcast TV during the airing of Phineas and Ferb: Mission Marvel, a Marvel/Phineas crossover episode. It was a blast getting to sit at a table with all the legends behind Phineas and Ferb like Dan Povenmire, Swampy Marsh and Martin Olson. Thanks Julius Harper for figuring out how to make this project happen and for picking us! #throwbackthursday #phineasandferb #goatsyellinglikehumans