Project - Storybook!

Title of Book: Where's My Mummy"

Summary:

Timmy and his mother arrive at a busy airport. Timmy, a small boy, loses his mother in the crowd. He searches for her in vain until a policeman reunites them. He encounters different people and their occupations in his search for his mother.

More information about our book...

Introduction & Target Demographic

1. Where’s My Mummy was conceived with the simple aim of providing a heart-warming, educational and ultimately, fun story to be enjoyed by children between 6 to 7 years of age.
2. It is designed for international appeal and thus commercially viable in overseas markets.

Educational Messages

1. The story content is made up of the consequence, anxiety and final relief of a child lost from his mother in an unfamiliar environment. This serves as a cautionary lesson to the young reader.
2. Through the use of many colours which vary according to mood and tone of the narrative events, the child learns to associate these colours with emotional and cognitive response.
3. Eight occupations are featured within the story in job-relevant settings. The child learns how to identify these occupations through detailed representation of individual uniforms. Also, clear titles and descriptions are featured with every character, offering more occupational information to advanced readers

Storyboard

For the project, most of the sketches were done by me, especially the development of the main character. I started off sketching in pencil, and then passed the sketches to one of my groupmates for inking; all the inking of lines was done by hand, which accounts for the pleasant uniqueness of the linework. :) I also helped to put together the whole design document, together with my groupmate, Melvyck.

Our final storybook for your perusal...




I enjoyed doing the character study the most of all because it was fun coming up with cute expressions and postures for our main character, Timmy. The following is a sample of the character study I did:

Round shapes were chosen for the physique of this character to make him more appealing to our target readers. In fact, I also took special care not to make the adult characters look too adult too; they all share the same friendly eyes as Timmy, which makes them less intimidating to young children.

We chose to have flip-up pages (i.e. flaps) in our book as it adds a small element of excitement and discovery to the storyline - and most certainly, it does fulfil the 'Crook' portion of 'Hype, Crook and Lyric'! :) It was hard making the flaps because we had to figure out which was the bst fool proof way of attaching the flaps such that printing errors would be minimised and or totally eliminated. It took much fiddling with different paper samples - 75 gsm, 110 gsm, 174 gsm, etc - to come up with a satisfactory prototype model for the book page-flap combination. Our design document has a proper documentation of all these.

I really could go on and on about the project because there are so many things in the design document that we're extremely proud of...oh well. ;P This is definitely one of my best and most interesting projects ever.