Stephen Adetumbi’s Blog

Its been almost a year and a half now since the launch of the biggest web project that I’ve ever worked on in my infant career of digital design. In 2007 It Is Written (IIW - the Bible teaching, philanthropic, television ministry that employs me full time) set out to create an interactive website intended to teach children (ages 5-12) the basic tenets of Christian faith from the Bible in a few lessons — like a year of virtual Sunday school condensed into a few hours. I was fortunate to be given the task of designing and providing the creative direction for the project. Almost a year and a half later we’ve been fairly happy with the results. My Place With Jesus has accrued nearly 166,500 visits from 77,600 unique visitors in 187 countries/territories who spent an average of 19 and a half minutes on the site. We’ve also acquired a not so shabby bounce rate of 24.17%.

Upon first visiting MyPlaceWithJesus.com kids are taken through an account creation process which allows them to later login and continue from the last lesson they completed during their previous visit. After creating an account they are welcomed and given an introduction to the website by the My Place With Jesus host / instructor Jean Boonstra, the Children’s Ministry Coordinator for It Is Written. You can watch that introduction here -

The vision we casted for this project required me to employ a large deal of my arsenal of technical know-how. Notwithstanding I had a lot of help from our web developers who customized the open-source CMS Drupal to handle all backend management of My Place With Jesus and from our graphic artist who modeled the 3D objects in the project in Alias Maya. We also had huge contributions from the folks at Curious Media who spearheaded the bulk of Flash development, and my buddy at Hood Production who handled much of the video editing.

All of Jean's footage was shot on a green background

We removed the green in post production and placed her into the illustrated world of Paradise Valley using After Effects and Flash

Perhaps some of the most interesting help I got was from my younger brother, Philip, who illustrated all of the animated characters and coloring pages for the lessons. One of the highlights from my collaboration with my brother was the making of “Dexter” the stray dog who makes an appearance in Lesson 3. Philip drew all the primary key frames of Dexter where perspective changes, we scanned them in and digitized them using the worthy industry standards Photoshop and Illustrator, and I organized the digitized illustrations and animated Dexter throughout the lesson with the help of 3 different animations softwares, Adobe Flash, Anime Studio Pro, and After Effects. When it was all said and done we like Dexter so much at IIW that we brought him into reality by making him a stuffed animal.

Philip Illustrated My Place With Jesus's animated characters. Here he's fooling around in the office where we did most of our work together.

Click to enlarge - Philip's drawing's that we scanned in.

Click to enlarge - Digitized and colored versions of the illustrations.

A screen shot of Anime Studio pro where some of Dexter's movements were created

Me with Dexter the stuffed dog

Making My Place With Jesus was a fun and challenging task that was quite educational, and if I’m fortunate enough I’ll have other opportunities to help bring to life more large scale interactive dreams.