Happily Ever After …

Finally …
we have presented our story our course-mates. And yes, the respond was good. Although it did not really impress our guest judge, it was still pretty well received by the rest. I’m glad most of them enjoyed the humor and twist in our story. I wish to thank all those who had voted for our story. The best book award had made our effort even more paid off. I believe every group had spent a lot of time and effort while working on this assignment. And yes, time was a major problem we have to tackle as many of us have also other projects to rush during the past 3 weeks

Time management and team work are two important issues everyone needs to handle when working on a group project. We have to come to a common agreement before we can proceed to do any task. If not, things might turn out quite messy and time and effort will be wasted. All these can be achieved through proper planning and good coordination in the team.Similar to all pervious assignment, creativity was also a major requirement to the assignment. Thanks to my group mates, we manage to squeeze out all our juicy ideas when drafting our story. Initially, we kind of dwelled out of our scope with the first idea (almost thinking of producing an animation or comic) but when we had all our mind set to the idea of a fairly tale twist, all the funny and crazy ideas start to flood our mind. However, due to amount of time we are given to produce the storybook, we have to select those ideas which we find most interesting and captivating to the story.
 
I have gained a lot while working on this assignment. Firstly, I was introduced to a new graphic application – Corel Painter; it was slightly different from Adobe Photoshop as it can handle water paint graphics better. In fact, when it used together with a tablet, the painting effect was quite similar to real painting. Although I did not have the chance to try it out on the tablet, I still manage to play with some of its unique features such as the realistic paint mixing. In result of these features, we are able to produce the paint-like images for our story theme.
 
Secondly, the whole production had given me a first hand experience of producing a storybook. The stages starts from brainstorming for ideas, drafting the story, sampling the tryouts, organizing the layout, illustrating the contents, compiling the pages and finally, printing the storybook. I learnt that each process is closely related to one another. For example, the page order of a double sided book will be jumbled if the pages are not organized initially; the colours and fonts should be sampled with various printing papers as the end result may encounter some colour degradation when printed on the wrong choice of paper; a consistent page layout allows reader to focus better on the context, it help to capture the reader’s attention; page and gutter margins must be laid properly to give space allowance for book binding.Sourcing for the right printer and paper for our final printout was also a challenge for my group. Firstly, we need to find a print shop that provides hard-cover binding and printing. We found many shops that provided the binding services but not the printing of hard-cover. And when we finally found the shop that fit our requirements, we were advised by the print master to print on soft cover instead. Fortunately for his advices, we realized that soft-cover was more appropriate for the thickness on our storybook. He pointed that the end result would look weird if the thickness of the cover is thicker than the page body. Furthermore, it was more time consuming to do a hard-cover binding as the whole process is done by hand and not by machine. Unless the production is in bulk, the printing and binding will be a costly service. On the other hand, soft cover binding is less costly and only require staple bounding (most suitable for thin book). Considering these factors, we believe we can equally present an aesthetical feel to  our storybook with a soft-cover.
 
At the end of the production, we are very satisfied with the final print-out. (It is amazing how much we can achieved within three weeks, and the opportunity to have our own designed book published – limited edition) However, if given more time we wish to add more interesting story and go ahead with the initial plan of a hard-cover storybook design. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed the whole production especially the time when working as a team. (Not to mention how I was entertained by my group mate’s magic tricks ha… )

For details on the production please read our Final Design Documents :
+ Design Documents – 2007-04-12 – FINAL

Feel free to preview our Final Storybook Design :
+ Final Printouts – 2007-04-10