Backstage Pass to North Dakota History

This blog takes you behind the scenes of the State Historical Society of North Dakota. Get a glimpse at a day-in-the-life of the staff, volunteers, and partners who make it all possible. Discover what it takes to preserve North Dakota's natural and cultural history.

Creating an Animated Archives Team for Kids

In early 2025, the State Archives staff had an idea to create a kids kiosk for the upcoming ND250 Road Trip: Our American Story exhibit. A collaborative meeting was held with the State Archives and Audience Engagement & Museum teams to hash out the details for the project. Archives had a lot of fun ideas, and as I love fun, I was very excited to get involved.

Sarah Walker and Lindsay Meidinger from the Archives team arrived very prepared. Their main idea was to create three characters to help introduce children to the topic of preserving family history, using animation and simple games. They came up with names and occupations for the characters. This is when I first met Opal the Oral Historian, Archie the Archivist, and Jennie the Genealogist.

Let the fun begin! (For me anyways.)

After this meeting I began developing the characters. Who are these characters? What do they look like? What do they sound like? Are they kids? Robots? Animals? Emojis? While I worked on the visuals, Lindsay began writing scripts for me. In the meetings that followed, we decided the characters would be talking animals native to North Dakota. And of course, we would have them use North Dakota expressions like “you betcha!” and “ope!”

Multiple views of a deer wearing a teal dress and teal glasses with many different mouth gestures at the bottom.

This 360 character turnaround sheet shows all sides of Opal the Oral Historian.

Once all three characters were developed and worked up on character sheets, I moved on to storyboarding, a kind of visual road map for animation and gameplay. After the storyboards were approved, I started creating all the necessary design graphics. This took some time as all three animated characters have their own unique environments. An animatic or moving storyboard was created to help me with pacing and timing the script with the different scenes in the animation.

Eight frames of a storyboard for Opal the Oral Historian's animation A screen from the Opal the Oral Historian animation storyboard in video editing software.

At top, a page from the storyboard. At bottom, the animatic or moving storyboard.

I began animating Opal first, since she was the character we had most fleshed out. The toughest part for me was the lip syncing of Opal. I needed to brush up on some software changes to make this happen. And, yes, Opal does talk.

About Opal

Opal the Oral Historian is a white-tailed deer who is enthusiastic about oral history. Opal will help teach young people how to preserve family stories. She is voiced by Education Outreach Supervisor Madison Milbrath. Madison researched voice acting and came in to record with such confidence. She did an amazing job giving Opal her voice.

The left side shows a vector deer with a teal dress and teal graphic. The right side shows a woman with long, dark hair and a green t-shirt holding an audio record with headphones on who is looking at a wall with many pages of text on it.

At left, the opening scene of the Opal animation. At right, Education Outreach Supervisor Madison Milbrath records the voice-over for Opal.

I can’t wait for you to meet the rest of the characters. Archie the Archivist is a bison who loves organizing. He is voiced by Adam Pfeifer, a fellow new media specialist. Jennie the Genealogist is a prairie dog who loves her large family, past and present! She is voiced by Sarah, head of reference services. Sarah gave Jennie the cutest, most ecstatic voice!

At left, a young man with swoopy blonde hair, mustache, and beard holds a sheet of paper in front of him while he records into an audio recorder while wearing headphones. At right, a young woman with shoulder length dark hair who is wearing a green dress with yellow flowers and a white or cream sweater over it holds a mic while wearing headphones to record audio.

New Media Specialist Adam Pfeifer and Head of Reference Services Sarah Walker record voice-overs for Archie and Jennie in the studio.

We look forward to introducing you to our 2D archives staff at the kids kiosk in the ND250 exhibit opening at the North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum in late June. See you there! 

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