Scholastic: Educational videos

Published by Big Creature Media on

CLIENT: Scholastic Storyworks; Scholastic SCOPE
YEAR: 2011 – 2013

Kids are the original party people, as an old friend of mine liked to say, and making videos geared toward them is especially fun. Crows bursting out of Edgar Allen Poe’s head? A bloody gorgon neck? Animals on skateboards? The kids, they’re all in, and, frankly, so am I.

(Sorry for the low-res 4:3 ratio, here, folks — a symptom of the times.)

THE ELECTRIFYING AGE OF FRANKENSTEIN

We really needed to up the creep factor without taking it too far, in order to give middle schoolers a sense of what was going on in the world at the time when “Frankenstein” was published — especially with regard to medical quackery. What a time to be alive… or something.

HAMLET THE HAMSTER (SERIES)

Meet Hamlet, an enterprising young hamster on the go. Not only is he always up for adventure, but he makes for a great test case for explaining literary concepts to 4th graders.

To help figure out how best to make Hamlet move, I found my way to an (aggressively; charmingly) web 1.0 site called The Agile Rat, a company that makes obstacle course equipment — to scale — for a variety of rodents. Both The Agile Rat and its sister site, Bible Donkeys, remain one of my favorite pieces of 2010s web lore.

This series is also the reason I know about Pua, the most stylish tamandua I’ve ever seen.