The Progression of Story and Character Development

First we want to thank all of our backers for your continued patience and support for us as we push forward and make the last homestretch to get Outsmarting Manet into your hands. We’ve come across a few hurdles in the process including the tolls of parenthood and most especially continuing to push the creative envelope to create a product that is of high quality. We’ve gone through at least a dozen revisions of the story itself (for ease into Chamorro translation) trying to make it kid-centric and simple to read and the artwork. In the process of getting everything done, one of the challenges we’ve experienced specifically with the artwork is figuring out how to bridge modern and traditional depictions of how we interpret the legend. We had to go back and forth between the different storyboard versions and some scenes had to be created from scratch. For us to create a literary piece that is extremely visual, we made many visits to Pago Bay and the surrounding areas. We looked thru photos from the past, took aerial shots of the existing site, and we looked thru other historical literary books to get inspiration to make the scenes as genuine and realistic as possible most especially for young audiences who may have never been to Guam.

You’ll see in the storyboards how our vision has evolved into a more cohesive rendition of the legend. The process overall has been extremely enlightening. There are a total of 32 scenes that have been created to produce the legend.

Initial Sketches 

Version 02 

Version 03 Color   

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