Overview:
This story tells the tale of how Alina and Ylva, two demon hunters, got started in their profession. These two characters are actually some of my more recent creations, having only been thought of just a few months ago - very young, compared to my oldest characters, which are around 3 years old. After coming up with the original sketches for these two, I quickly became very interested in thinking up their backstory - who they are, what they did, and what their world was like, and this project was the perfect opportunity to do so. It was very fun to see where this project took me and my characters - I got to see my them go through several different stages in their development, and while I’m not sure I can say they’re quite finished yet, I’m still very happy with how this story turned out!
Please Note!
This story is NOT meant to be read using the links in the nav bar! The end of each part of the story links to the next part, so please follow those links instead!
Details:
This website is meant to showcase a short-story about my two characters, Alina and Ylva. I decided to use a website as the primary platform for this story because it offered easier interactiveness, and greater customization (and readability) of the text and appearance of the website. The story is split into three parts: an introduction, which sets up the rest of the story - this section only consists of text; an “ask-blog” hosted on Tumblr.com, meant to carry conversation between the two main characters, Alina and Ylva, and their many nieces, and nephews. I chose this platform for this part of the story because I felt like this website is very good for holding conversations in a way that’s perhaps a bit more natural than on other social media, or even just in text as in a book. Finally, there’s the bulk of the story, which uses both regular text and “hidden” images to portray what’s happening.
Background:
This story started all the way back in October, with the creation of the two main characters, Alina and Ylva. When I heard that I had to make a digital story for prof. Barber’s Digital Storytelling class, I thought it would be a good idea to use this chance to build up Alina and Ylva’s character, rather than letting them collect dust in the pages of my sketchbook. Design-wise, Alina and Ylva were heavily influenced by one of my favorite animated movies, Princess Mononoke. Character-wise, these two were really based off of all the “tough on the outside, soft on the inside” character troped that I’ve grown to love over the years - and although I want to have them deviate from this trope a bit, I have yet to think of a way to do so. I had a lot in mind for this project - sound, animation, images, text - but unfortunately, I just didn’t have the time, skill, or materials necessary to pull a lot of this off, but I managed to scrape by with the minimum of what wanted. I plan to keep improving the website to include more and better features, though I don’t know when I can follow through with this.