Looking for Lightning

ROLE

Illustrator, animator

DESCRIPTION

Looking for Lightning (Bliksem in Dutch) is a story about a boy being bored and starts looking for lightning. Bliksem is written and structured like a traditional picture book, but it has interactivity integral to the story build into it. Together with sound and animation it's an unique experience.

I developed the world together with the author Christiaan Coenraads. Technical development was done by Het Woeste Woud. Development was spread out over the span of multiple years and scientific research by the Dutch VU has made it into very helpful product for learning language.

PROJECT DURATION

2017 release, project duration 2010-2017 (on and off)

CREDITS

Writer: Christiaan Coenraads

Illustrator: Leo de Wijs

Developer: Het Woeste Woud

FORM

Interactive children's picture book

LINK TO BOOK

You can read / experience Bliksem (Dutch version)

here

Designing a world

The story is about a boy causing mayhem with a weather machine on the 'world below', so I spend a lot of time thinking out a believable and fun city where he will disrupt the going-on's of everyone.

City Planning

I find a certain believability grounded on real world pretty important. So when designing a city for Boy wreak havoc on I tried to design it in typical European fashion with a historic center to the water and modern expansions radiating outwards.

Rough concept

This was an early version sketch of the entire city. If you want to experience the final version in detail I recommend checking the online book out.

Final look in the book

A snippet of the city seen in one of the pages. The idea is that you, as reader are going to wreak havoc in place of the boy, starting with adding snow. All the people on the street are effected, and I had great fun making lots of small visual stories of how the sudden weather events disrupt their going on's.

Cover it in snow

Here is a part of town covered in snow before adding the characters. Because all the illustrations are digital it was possible to add layers on top of the illustration so not everything needs to be drawn from scratch.

Development

The concept of what the story and character is about changed a lot during the development. Here are some examples of how this changed.

School early concept

The story about a boy being bored by learning about the weather at school, while he wants to learn by doing. This was an early concept to communicate this. The illustration style changed and way to present it, but a lot of the concept is already present, like the school being up in the clouds.

School - final illustration

Here you see how it evolved - into a layout where it's not about Boy (he is not at the center) and all about how boring the school is - the dull grey colour palette really enhances that. I like to put details in that show this society in the clouds is all about the weather in the weather themed ceiling mural for instance. I think most children might not notice it conciously, but will feel it ground the 'special' reality of the world of the story.

Early concept

A really concept of the book's opening. Boy has to be dragged to school by his father - who is an inventor - the office outfit of the father did not communicate this well, so was changed later. Early on we also played around with the idea of Norse weather gods as a strong influence - hence the Viking helm Boy is sporting here.

Final illustration

The concept evolved into this illustration (it ended up not being the title / cover image) - here you see an enthusiastic Boy excited by the prospect of school (only to be disappointed later) making for a much more exciting an dynamic composition. The father is now much more 'cool' and obviously a mechanic and tinkerer. If you look closely you can see even a concept for a weather machine floating in mid air.

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