Final Project: Children's Storybook (Design Process)

Task: Create ONE children story e-book with food as the theme.

This project is done as a group work. My team mates are Victor Chua Fu Kuan and Nicholas Yau Lih Kang.

Since the theme is on food, we were thinking along the line of a balanced diet. We had referred to several materials, and this includes the food pyramid. We came out with several ideas such as the fight between the items in the food pyramid, and the battle of the food pyramid against bacteria. We decided to go for the approach of having the vegetables as the key protagonist of the story, along with the human children. The antagonist would be the bad bacteria. We wanted to come out with a story to educate the children about the importance of eating sweets sparingly and to maintain a balanced diet.

Since it is a group work, we had split up the task among ourselves. The works that needs to be done include storyboarding, character sketches, background scene, layering, animations, scripting, and not forgetting the design document.

Below is the storyboard sketches done by my group.

Having done that, we came out with the characters for our story. I have to say that the characters are cute in their own way.

Sketches

Tommy

Lisa

Vegetable Friends

Bacti

Vario

At the same time, we came out with sample background scenes. These were done in Adobe Illustrator, before it was sent to Adobe Photoshop for layering.

Layering and further enhancements were being done with Adobe Photoshop. The results can be seen at the upcoming post!

Our script were catered to the target audience that is of age 7-9 years old. After doing several readings of real children storybook, we have decided to use short sentences that consist not more than 10 words per sentence.

The interactivity component of our project is to animate some of the pages using Adobe Flash. Apart from animations, another aspect of interactivity lies with the script whereby the main character, Tommy, asked question to himself. These monologues encourage readers to give answer as they read the story. Due to time constraint some of our interactive components were not being included in the final prototype, such as the activity page at the end of the storybook.

Overall, we were satisfied with the progress of our storybook. The comments we received from the class is to give the option to the reader to either pick Tommy or Lisa as the main character. Do look at the next post for our final prototype!