Nickelodeon’s TMNT Sewer Studio Tour

Create and Share Your Own Adventure

Nickelodeon gave kids and families the ultimate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle experience with it’s ‘Sewer Studio Tour.’ The tour visited 10 cities nationwide, and fans were able to meet their favorite Turtles from Rise of the Teenage Mutant Turtles. 

The ‘Sewer Studio Tour’ allowed kids to create their own dynamic stop-motion videos with Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures. The best videos had the opportunity to be featured on other Nickelodeon platforms.

Outcome

A fun, interactive experience that quickly generated an easily shareable video that features the new toy line.

Competitive Research

For this project, I researched other motion animation products or products with similar functionality. My primary focus was to see how competitors were onboarding new users to the experience. I did a quick study of stop animation to help me inform what important concepts needed to be communicated to our users.

User Research

We reached out to parents who allowed us to observe their children using tablets and other devices to study their behaviors.

Constraints we were certain about:

• Both children and parents would be involved in the experience, but both are not necessary to succeed in the process.
• Time is restricted to only 7 minutes per visitor to maximize foot traffic.
• The experience will be mobile, needed to travel across the country to 10 different locations.
• Will be amongst several other installations.

What we didn’t know:

• Will children understand this information?
• How much will the parents interact?
• Is 7 minutes enough time to go through a memorable experience?

Prototyping

Once we had a good idea of what our clients needs were, we sketched up some wireframes to test our user flow and got some initial feedback.

Here’s one of the initial wireframes we mocked up for our client to walk them through the experience.

Testing

After we created our initial prototype, we wanted to test it in it’s intended space to make sure all tolerances were taken into account. We were looking at things such as height, camera angle, and maneuverability – basically checking to see if we were offering the appropriate affordances a child and parent would need to go through this experience the way it was intended.

And here is another wireframe using assets we got from our clients. We also used this to conduct.

We asked some friends and their children to try out our first few iterations and give us input on how we could improve it. Feedback included:

• Cognitive Load – The instructions were too much to read or unclear.
• Constraints – There isn’t enough time to complete the tasks, or took longer than they’d like.
• Desirability – They wanted to see more options for intros and endings.

We built the stage of our experience low enough for children to interact with but also at a height appropriate for the ideal outcome of the footage that the user will be creating. We had to make some compromises to make this happen.

We used toys that were readily available in-store as a backdrop for the video content that would the children were going to make. The children were able to set up their own scenes and play out their own stories.

Design

Here are a few samples of the screens we designed. Most of the design elements were provided in a design system that was already created. But I took some liberties of creating my own by repurposing some existing elements.