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.