"The Story-Eater" is an animated film concept that I worked on Spring 2018. I came up with the idea of using animation in order to direct children (around the age of 9) towards reading more books and telling more stories, both activities which are beneficial for child development.
In order to do so, I created a script for an animated film which featured a world where all stories had been stolen by and evil entity (The Story-Eater). In this setting, the main characters are Mia and Artie (two small children for a quiet village, that happen to discover the last storybook in existence), ‘The Forgotten Knights’ (great heroes that lost their identities when the Story-Eater erased their stories, whose spirits are released when the children find the last storybook), and The Story-Eater.
Some character development for Lady Aura.
In this narrative, it is the heroes that are in need of saving, and the children fulfil the role of saviours, helping the Knights regain their identities through learning and re-telling their stories, undoing The Story-Eater's work.
The idea behind that was to get the audience (children) attached to the character presented in the film (Sir Bran, Sir Leon, Lady Aura and Lady Leah), so that they would be interested in buying and reading a series of books base on the Kinghts' adventures.
Colour exploration and development for one of the book's illustrations.
Because the animated film uses 3D animation, I wanted the book to be illustrated using a different style, much close to traditional 2D mediums. This way, children would be less likely to get bored, and parents would not feel as if they are paying money to buy the same thing twice.
I challanged myself to try and tell a story using only three images.
Final examples of pages.
If you want to see more about this project, check out 'The Story-Eater: Animation'.