2. Does your final product reflect your
original intentions?
• Compare your planning/digital flat plans/ storyboards to your final product
• My final product matches my story boards almost perfectly; the only changes I
made were to the colour of certain objects (like the walls on page 9 and 11 as well
as the door on page 11). I made sure they were almost identical because that’s
how I envisioned each page looking. My final product looks fairly similar to my
digital flat plans but due to the limitations I had, there were lots of changes that
had to be made to work with what I had.
4. How well have you constructed your
images?
• How well have you constructed your images? You could talk about the overall
visual appearance and well as the use of texture and colour.
• I think I have done an ok job at constructing my images; I have used a wide variety
of colours and textures across all 11 pages of my finished product and none of
them clash in a way that is visually unappealing to look at. Compared to something
more professional, like a comic book page, there is a lot less detail and the colours
don’t pop out as much. However, my product’s simpler look is better suited to my
audience.
5. Page 2 of my children's book Spider man comic page
6. How well have you used text to anchor
your images
• You should talk about the combination of words, images and text.
• On some of my pages, I have used text to anchor my images very well as they all
reinforce what is happening on the page. However, some of my pages are very
poorly anchored by only having around one sentence talking about what’s on the
page. The children’s book “Giraffes can’t dance” is good at using text to anchor its
images as it has a lot less text than my book.
7. Example of good anchoring in a
children’s book aimed at the
same audience as mine.
Good example of
anchoring in my book; it
describes what is
happening in the image.
Bad example of
anchoring in my book;
the text describes
actions that doesn’t
take place in the
image.
8. Is your product suitable for your
audience?
• Reference your proposal
• Give an audience profile and describe suitability in reference to content
• My product is suitable for my intended audience; it is not targeted to any specific
class or gender. The target age I set for myself (3-6) is too broad for what I actually
made which is a book that is suitable for 5-6 year olds. I think my book is too
wordy for 3-4 year olds and that the large amount of text would make it a boring
read for them, whereas a 5-6 year old might appreciate more words as they have
either just started or have not been at school for a long period of time and are
starting to develop a better understanding of language.
9. Where the wild things are
is aimed at a similar age
group to my book and
has considerably les
words than the average
page of my book.
10. What do you like/dislike about the
techniques you have used?
• Reference specific tools you used with images
• The “cut-out” filter is good to make things look simpler for a scene in my book.
This matched by using the layer for an overlay, provided some simple, quick, and
effective look for my backgrounds which I liked. Rotoscoping the animals using the
lasso tool and copying the layer provided an interesting look for my characters
which are appealing on their own but doesn’t go as well with what I did for the
background. Rotoscoping wasn’t a long process which allowed me to stay on my
schedule.
11. Rotoscoped Chimpanzee
Background using the comic
book effect of making a
layer black and white, using
the cut-out filter, and
overlaying it onto the
coloured shape using a
clipping mask.
12. What do you like/dislike about how
your final product looks?
• I like how simplistic each element looks; it looks suitable for what a young child
should be seeing as it is not to overpowering to look at. The backgrounds look
really nice and understated on most of the pages and the trees stick out to give an
uncomfortable feeling in the forest. I like how the animals look cartoonish yet
accurate to the actual animal. I dislike how both of the effects go together as they
clash in a lot of places which lead to an unnatural look for the book.
13. There is a clash
between the characters
and the background on
this slide, which is
partly due to the angle I
wanted for the image.
14. Why did you include the content you
used?
• Images, fonts, effects, colours
• I chose to use “Arial black” as my font as it stood out, even when small, which
would make it easier to read, especially for a young child. I decided to use the
comic book effect for the background because I liked how it wasn’t very distracting
to look at. I chose to rotoscope the characters as It would save time over drawing
them myself (which would result in poor quality character designs) or using the
warp feature on Photoshop to manipulate shapes to look like an animal. I chose
the colours I did to have a wide variety as it looks nicer than looking at the same
few colours over and over. I also did it because children’s books are usually filled
with vibrant colours to get the attention of a child.
15. A page from “the Gruffalo”
which features a nice, bright
colour pallet.
A page from my book which
features a darker, but still
varied, colour pallet.
16. What signs, symbols or codes have
your used in your work?
• Choices of colour, style, locations, character design and tone all give additional
meaning to your work.
• I used real tree textures in the monkey’s forest home as a subtle way to create an
unnerving effect as every other texture I have used in the project has had the cut-
out filter used to make it look softer and more cartoonish. I have also tried to
implement certain angles to emphasise power or lack there of. This is most
noticeable on page four where the monkey is attacking the crab from far up, the
crab is being looked on from a high position so I made him look smaller to
reinforce that he is powerless in the scene.
17. Page four from my book. The
crab looks like he is looking
up to the monkey which
represents the power
struggle between the two.
18. What representations can be found in
your work?
• How are men, women or children shown in your work? Does your work feature
different ages, races, social groups or religions? Does a lack of any variety of
character types create its own representation?
• There are no humans in the story so there is no misrepresentations of any race,
gender, religion, etc.. However, the story I have used is from Japan and therefore
the animals have different meanings/symbolism than if it was an English story. In
Japanese mythology, crabs (specifically Heike crabs) are linked to the start of the
Feudal era of Japanese history, where the emperors of the Heikegani clan were
overthrown by the military lead Shogun and were reincarnated in the crabs that
ate them. Due to this, they are seen as very noble while also being keen on
revenge. This is something that is clear in the original version of the story but I had
to tone it down to make it suitable for children. The monkey in Japanese culture is
seen as devious and a trickster (after the 13th century, at least), which is similar to
western culture, so I could easily portray the monkey as it was already familiar to
me.
20. What style have you employed in your
products?
• Discuss influences/ existing products
• What visual style does your work have and why did you choose it?
• My work has a mix of the comic book style of simplifying edges as well as a more
realistic look with the rotoscoped animals. I chose this look because I liked the
contrast between them, even though I can produce a lot of visual noise at times,
as I thought it would allow me to make something unique. An example of a
textured background it like is the front cover of another children's book: rex. It has
a notebook aesthetic and uses crumpled paper textures at the top and bottom of
the page.
22. What were the strengths and weaknesses
of the pre-production and planning
• How did the planning and research help
• How well did you manage your time
• Reference specific examples
• Planning for how quickly I should be making my pages helped a lot because I knew
what I should be doing in a certain period of time. I already knew what I wanted to
make thanks to the planning so the amount of time that I spent making the book
was shorter as a result. I was way ahead of my schedule which gave me plenty of
time for improvements. My mind map was well explored but I didn’t realise some
of the ideas on it, mostly relating to the variety of characters, during further
planning and development.
23. Historical and cultural context
• How does your work compare to what has come before? What other similar
products have existed in the past? What current products exist?
• Older versions of the story, like the original folk tale, have a much darker tone
featuring graphic murder and revenge killing. Obviously, this would not be suitable
for my book so I decided to change it. Andrew Lang's version of the story in his
1903 book “the crimson fairy tales” is more bowdlerised than the original but still
features death at the end which is still too violent compared to my version of the
story. A more modern version of the story by Japanese novelist Ryunosuke
Akutagawa features an ending where the crab’s children are sentenced to life for
killing the monkey which adds a morally sound ending but is too mature for my
young audience.
24. Peer Feedback
• Summarise peer feedback and discuss
– Responses you agree with
– Responses you disagree with
