OgoSport: Navy Yard toy firm to release stop-motion animation kit

What’s more magical than movies? A lot of kids probably think that making an actual story that can be shown in motion on a screen is out of their reach, but a Navy Yard company is about to release a project that will enable them to not only make their own stories, but their own animated stories.

OgoSport is known for products that encourage open ended play. Their most famous product is the OgoDisk, which can both be used like a frisbee and like a sort of tennis racket.

OgoBild is a set of toys that fit together to make all kinds of interesting, abstract shapes. With wheels and legs as options, makers can definitely create things that look like animals or vehicles, but there is no prescribed structure. It’s all about kids finding their own way.

OgoBild AnimateIt! is their new stop motion platform. It comes with lots more parts to give young makers a wider range of creations, but it also comes with a license that allows them to use Aardman Animations software to turn sequences of photos of their creations into great looking cartoons. The software is widely used in schools across the UK, according to OgoSport staff.

The set also comes with a workbook to give young makers some initial projects to try to begin learning what’s possible. The goal is to get them to make their own creations as quickly as possible, and the team is working to build a site where users can share OgoBild animations.

“We want to incorporate technology in a meaningful way,” Jenie Fu, an OgoSport cofounder told Technically Brooklyn, meaning that a digital component only made sense if it deepened and expanded play and the creativity children put into it.

3D printing has become increasingly important to the company’s design staff, as it prototypes products. So much so, that it has begun releasing early designs on Thing-I-Verse to see what kind of reaction they get from the OgoBild community. Makers in that community can also add their own designs or modify OgoSport’s.

OgoSport was founded in Red Hook in 2006, but the team has worked from the Navy Yard for the last two years. We first encountered them at the Bldg92 “Making it in NYC” show, where we showed photos of Aero Zipp prototypes (a new device that makes it easy to throw a ball really far). The company has roughly 30 products available now, in 43 countries. They take an iterative, failure ready approach to releases. “We’ll launch products that another company would never do. We learn from a failure for the next product.”

The team tries to release a few new products each year. Its founders all went to Pratt, so they like prototyping in house. “We were trained in making it in the shop, by hand,” Kevin Williams, another cofounder, told us. If a prototype is beyond the scope of their in-house equipment, they have an informal relationship with Pensa and an ongoing partnership with Shapeways. OgoSport is a team of seven, plus various occassional consultants.

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