Final Project: Storybook on Kungfu-rella

For my final group project, I am required to create a storybook for children aged 6 to 9 years old with a maximum of 20 pages or 900 words.

Main Factors to consider:

My group wants a storybook that is colourful and enjoyable so as to cultivate the interest in reading for children. Besides this, the storyline must be kept short and simple to facilitate easy understanding. In addition, we want characters that children will like and are familiar with. Furthermore, we would like to include additional elements such as a glossary to facilitate children’s learning of vocabulary.


Elements to be included in the story:

- A storyline that gives the young readers a space for imagination.
- Correct morals that the young readers should possess.

Aims:

We hope that the story and its underlying messages would be etched in the minds of the children, so much so that they will make repeat reads, and adults will also find it a good and meaningful story to read to their children.

We brainstormed for many ideas for the storybook and settled for the story below:

Long long ago, in the kingdom of nowhere, there live a king and a queen and their beautiful twin daughters. Yet, everyone was biased towards the elder twin, who was more outspoken and confident. One day, the kingdom received news of an inter-kingdom competition and everyone naturally nominated the elder twin. The younger twin longed to join in too. Feeling rejected, she secretly sang to her sorrow by the riverside. The king’s advisor happens to pass by and was mesmerised by the melody. But being afraid to go against the majority, he kept his discovery to himself. Then, the elder twin was taken ill on the morning of the competition. The younger twin stood in and everyone doubted her ability until she started singing and won the competition. Since then, everyone learnt not to show favouritism and hider other’s ability to perform.

Most of us feel that story outline 1 contain the most meaningful moral for our audiences, and thus we decided to work on it. During the process of developing, we found it is difficult to develop a twist and a climax for the story as the story revolves around real life issues. We thought that developing a twist and a climax will also be too heavy and confusing for the children to handle. Therefore, we met up again to brainstorm for new story ideas.

During our brainstorming session, we came out with some morals. They are: the value of true friends, never judge the book by the cover and you can overcome obstacles with a strong will. After our brainstorming session, we decided to work on the morale; a strong will will help one to weather through all obstacles.

Based on the last morale, we came out with a brief storyline for our final final storybook:

Our main character, Cinderella is a poor girl who marries the prince. She is not well-liked by the royalty because she is a commoner. She is very determined, eager to learn things and she sincerely loves everyone in the kingdom a lot. Thus, she went on a mission to save the kingdom from a wicked witch with the help of an old wise man, Wisely. She succeeded and was finally accepted by the royalty. They finally live happily ever after.

The wicked witch, who represents an evil character, finally died. This is to show the children that good acts or deeds will always triumph against evil acts or deeds.
Wisely, the old wise man represents an elderly with wisdom and many skills. The illustration of Wisely as a monk shows that he is well-respected by others and possesses great wisdom.

The other characters such as the king , queen and prince play minor roles in this story. The main attention is focused on Cinderella and whether she will accomplish her mission to save the kingdom.

Finally, our morale of the story is a strong will will help one to weather through all obstacles.

We have tried out many fonts and we have finally settled for New Century Schoolbook for all our bodycopy and Snap ITC for our title. We have used mainly warm colours to attract children's attention and appeal to them so that they will be motivated to read the book. We used art card for cover page and matt paper for the rest of the pages in the book. Finally, I shall present to you our final storybook, Kungfu-rella as shown below:

Problems encountered:

-The tight schedule was the biggest challenge we faced

-The difficulty in coming to a common decision due to everyone’s varying opinions; such as the disagreements regarding the plot

-Sourcing for a printing company that is of good quality and within our budget

-Deciding on the colours for an optimum colour representation

-We have used Illustrator to trace the hand-drawn sketches. However, the quality of the pictures is not up to standard. In the end, we have to trace the sketches again using Flash.

-Due to our haste in tracing, we have missed out certain portions of the sketches and we have to re-trace again.

-After placing the pictures in Photoshop, we realised that we have forgotten to colour certain parts of the pictures in Illustrator, so we have to re-do the colouring again.

-After completing the sketches, we realised that they are not beautiful without a background so we drew the background in Flash.

-The background sketches are difficult to combine with the previous foreground pictures. We end up having pixelated pictures after placing them in InDesign using the Photoshop software.

-Another error we made was not having our files linked properly so the pictures are pixelated and we could not print our storybook.

-Finally, after consulting Ms. Chiang and Mr Alfred, we re-placed the file and re-sized the pictures in Illustrator instead of Photoshop. We also placed all files within the same folder so that there will not be any missing links.

-After all these difficulties, we finally managed to print our storybook.

Lessons gained:

We learnt to work with a really tight deadline to generate a good story. It is necessary to do a lot of research on our target audience to write a story that is suitable for them, and to conduct clear planning. We have also learnt to plan our time wisely so that all the hiccups we faced in this project could be resolved within the stipulated dateline. More research should be ideally done on printers and printing shops before printing our artwork because certain printing shops are not able to print the artwork to our desired quality. Moreover this project has given us the opportunity to learn how to use the computer graphics software, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and InDesign in greater depth. In addition, this project helps us to apply the design principles taught in class such as the colour palette, typography, etc. Overall, through this project, we have realised the importance of teamwork. By consolidating each and every individual’s strengths, we managed to learn a lot from each other and put our specialities to good use.