Sesame Street’s best-selling book of all time,“The Monster at the End of This Book,” went digital as an app on iPad in December 2010. Who was behind the scenes taking this childhood favorite to the hands of iPad users? Chaotic Moon Studios. Callaway Digital Arts sought out the Chaotic team for support after being entrusted with recreating this crown jewel of the Sesame backlist, which was originally published in 1971.

The Chaotic team felt a huge responsibility in this collaboration to preserve the delight of the original storybook while reinventing it for a new generation of Sesame Street fans across the world. While Callaway illustrators were working diligently to capture the style of the original artwork for animation, our team was tasked with developing an aggressive strategy that, in fewer than eight weeks, would bring the app from inception to launch. To achieve this monstrous result, we chose to develop a custom framework allowing illustrators to directly import animations into the code.

In working on this project, it was crucial for our team to quickly and effectively respond to the evolving needs of the client, as well as seamlessly integrate with their in-house programming, animation, sound design and creative resources.

In October, the project was introduced to us in mere sketches. By the holiday season, Sesame Street and Grover lovers were able to re- experience this classic childhood story in a magical way with their children on the iPad.

Post launch, the Chaotic team was instrumental in formulating an update and optimization strategy that added additional value to the users. “The Monster at the End of this Book for iPad” has ranked fifth overall, has been listed as the number one app for Books in the App Store, and been featured numerous times by Apple. More importantly, nothing quite like it exists in iTunes. We are proud to say customer response has been tremendous, as demonstrated by the app's five-star review in iTunes.