Story development

The story has now been developed up to the first stage which was to create a dummy version. This works in with the schedule and now allows other works to begin. I realised that I have never blogged about any stages of the development so far. The first stage was to write the back bone of the story based upon the tale of the Scots sent to Barbados in the 17th century, this is shown below.


The next stage was to then create thumbnails for each of the 14 points shown above, some examples are shown below for the first two scenes.



The following stage involved sketching some of these ideas in a larger scale, developing each idea by adding things to them or creating new ideas. Some examples of these sketches are shown below.




These sketches not only formed the basis of the story but also brought a chance to play around with the textual elements. Changing the words so that what was said and seen were not the exact same, trying to create spaces between them is important. These sketches also allowed for the formation of a storyboard which is shown below, this is designed to suit a 32 page formatted picture book.





The storyboard images were then scanned in, enlarged and text added then printed out. This allowed me to create a little dummy version of the book. I feel this has many advantages over the storyboard as you get a sense of the page turning experience, things that look fine in storyboard may all of a sudden jar with each other as pages are turned. Text and images can be seen in there flow or disjointed sections become more apparent. The dummy version is shown below with a couple of extracts from the book with colour experiments carried out. These show how the colour palette may work for the image and also show any issues with composition.