Final Project (Storybook - My 3 wishes) - Meeting 4 & 5

The meetings this week is very fruitful. We managed to develop most scenes and settled on the character's looks.

First I came up with the storyboard so everyone will have an exact idea on what scenes to work on and how the perspectives/camera angles would be.

Each of us went home with a few scenes to develop and here are the scenes which i have done.

This scene is rather last minute as all along we thought our story would start on the right page but it actually should start on the left page. In order to keep the back pages consistent (as some pages were linked form left to right), I had to include this scene.


This toilet scene is done based on the initial version ailin had drawn in photoshop with her tablet.


This bedroom scene is also developed from ailin's initial bedroom done in photoshop (below):




This is the outdoor scene that I had drawn. I added in the apples on the trees so that the whole page would not be green-dominated. The red kind of balanced the colour of the page. It took me a long time to draw the net for the goal post -.-"


This scene is intended to link to the previous page. so I had to make my illustrations on one file to sort of 'sync' it properly.

something like this :)

This next scene is to show that Nat had thought of using the book. After developing the first scene above, I felt that it would be more appropriate to do a close up shot on nat's cunning face to show that he is how he felt at that time.

Eventually we settled on this close-up scene.


This scene is actually not done by me. It's done by Min jia. But I just want to show the snail that I added in. Because I wanted to show what Nat was thinking and show a link between this and the nxt scene.

The snail actually represents Nat (because of the hair!)

So in this toilet scene, the snail shows that Nat is also present to see the toilet scene. and he was happy about it.
I had a black bathtub at first (to make it easier to see the shape) haha... I hated drawing the shower bcause I had to duplicate so many circles. but anyway, adding in the tiles was a challenge for me. If i added in all the tiles, the whole scene would look complicated and messy. So i chose to add in a few at different places and it turned out quite alright.


This is a kitchen scene developed from Min Jia's initial version.




Another scene in the story.


After the end of this meeting we went to Bras Basah to check out printing companies. A lot did not provide the kind of binding which we wanted (perfect binding) as our pages were too little. We collected all the scenes together to finalize and went home disappointed as we didn't find a printing company to do hardcover binding for us.

Final Project (Storybook - My 3 wishes) - Meeting 2 & 3

We met up to do some initial sketches. At this stage we still had to pixie idea in mind. We came up with a rough storyline and work on experimentation of the characters. I made a few sketches but I couldn't find it. =x But anyway, here's a sample of what Ailin had sketched.


Our 3rd meeting wasn't quite progress-ful as we were still exploring ways to draw the different scenes. our initial bedroom and kitchens:


We were trying different perspectives on the possible scenes involved in our story.

Final Project (Storybook - My 3 wishes) - Meeting 1

during the 1st group meeting, we went to Woodlands library to do our research on children books. We managed to find a few with lots of illustrations and tried to learn from the way the illustrators use the colours. We noticed that most pages were very colourful and ranges from vibrant to pastel kind of colour tones.

Book 1: Knuckle Heads

Book 2: Forgot the titles but it's related to a farm.
Book 3: Hansel and Gretel

I was attracted to this 3rd book of hansel and gretel because of the kind of graphics they use. It's very 'wooden' themed throughout the whole book. However I feel that children would be attracted to a more colourful and magical book such as 'Knuckle Heads'.

Kelly actually found a book titled 'I don't want to' and it inspired us to come up with a storyline about a boy who don't want to do things his mother asks him to do. Children nowadays take their parents for granted and from our observations, there are a lot of children 'ordering' their parents to do this and that, and some even climb over their heads to scold them. So for our book, we want to tackle the culture of children behaviour, hoping that they will cherish their parents better after reading our book.

Our initial idea was to have a wizard in our story to make it seem magical. Whenever the boy (protagonist) wishes for something he likes, the wizard would give him in exchange for something he doesn't want. Ultimately when the wizard took away his mother, the boy totally regrets.

However, we had issues regarding the limited amount of pages as we needed to dedicate a few pages for the appearance of the wizard.

So we moved on to another version which is a magical book. The boy would write wishes on the magical book and when he wished his mom to disappear and regrets, a pixie would appear and erase what he had written.

However, the pixie did not give a serious impact. It made it feel like the mother is able to come back easily with the help of magical powers. Our aim is to make the children feel the impact of losing their parents, so it must seem real.

This is how we derived at our final version, which is how the boy cried for the whole day while carrying the book, and his mother returned because his tears smudged away the part when he wished for his mum to disappear.

Assignment 3 Storyboard and Shot explorations

My initial storyboard




I actually wanted to add in comical expressions like:

It looks cute but then when I tried printing a sample of it, the creases of the aluminium foil with the expressions of the chocolates looked 'clashy'. So I decided to change the concept to a more romantic theme.
To actually convey the intended messages just by plain photographs is actually a challenge for me as there are only a minimal number of angles that are able to place the focus on the 2 chocolates. mainly 2-shots and medium close up shots. I also tried the over-the-shoulder shot which turned out to be quite successful.

some experimental shots:

Top-view for the introductory scene.


long-shot (full body)



exploration of positions


Over the shoulder shot

Assignment 4 (Colour Coalition)

For this assignment, we are supposed to do a postcard according to the theme: Youth.
Colour exploration is the main purpose of this assignment...

My idea is like Youth: Live it or Leave it. It kinda means we should make full use of our youth years before we leave it. Some youths tend not to cherish their youthful lives and they fail to realize there's so many activities out there for them to do.

I admit my design is quite bad... because I did it in quite a rush. all the mid terms comin up T.T I just did a rough work of what I intended to do, and basically my aim was to just explore the colours that could portray the energy of youths.


The critique I got was that the arrangement of the word youth should be explored further because in terms of the rules of 3rds, it is right smack in the centre. So it will not bring that kind of energetic or dynamic feeling. So I should work further in terms of my composition.

As for the colours, most of them preferred the green against black background (1st row 3rd column). As for me, I preferred the very first one because red , orange and yellow gives people a very exciting and energetic feeling.

Assignment 3 (U C What I C)

Before I say anything further, please spare some time to look at the following story:

In case it's not clear enough, it's actually a love story between 2 hersheys.

They met each other at a ball. It was love at first sight. They danced. Gold brought Silver home. AHEM. AHEM. What a happy family.

Actually I got this idea through my cousins. This is the new year season and we were talking about chocolates. then my cousin played something with the chocolates which then inspired me to create this chocolate love story.

It was quite challenging in the photography side because my room/living room is quite messy. So I had no idea how to deal with the backdrop. I wanted to cut out the chocolates and photoshop them into another backdrop so I decided I needed a plain background. Thus I opened up the drawing block and took the chocolates against it.

It looked kinda like this:


After exploring various shots, I decided to adjust the lightings into a goldish tint to make it look very royal.

Some feedback I got from the critique session:
- adjust the colour a bit to suit the printing (because the printed copy looked a little dull)
- but the lighting was nice
- explore making the last frame more exaggerating as in make more babies (a whole line of 'em)
- add a shadow for the baby