Making children's programming that respects children

There is a particular tone that creeps into children's religious media — bright, loud, slightly panicked, as though the maker is afraid that a child will leave the moment the music stops. Children can hear that fear. It reads as a lack of confidence in the material.

Four rules we hold to

Do not explain the joke. If a scene is funny, let it be funny. Children are more comfortable with ambiguity than adults give them credit for.

Give the story somewhere to go. A lesson delivered in the first thirty seconds and then repeated for six minutes is not a story, it is a slogan with animation attached.

Let characters be wrong. A character who never errs teaches nothing about how to recover from error, which is most of what a child actually needs.

Keep the songs short and genuinely good. Parents hear them four hundred times. That is a real design constraint, and we treat it as one.

On accuracy

Everything in our children's work goes through a subject-matter review before it is animated, not after. Fixing a theological problem in a storyboard costs an hour. Fixing it in a finished 3D sequence costs a week, and by then somebody has usually fallen in love with the shot.

The children watching are not a captive audience — they have every other thing on the internet a tap away. Earning their attention is the whole job.