DVD Update #8 Guest Illustrator

The English team is always looking for talented creative types that are willing to help out a good cause. We are in constant need of illustrators and designers to help us add the fun, creative, and cute touch to the educational materials we develop.

I would like to publicly thank Vaibhav Kumaresh, recipient of India's Best Animator Award 2005, of Vaibhav Studios for being our guest illustrator! He has been working on our 'Simple Instructions' illustrations and they are cute beyond words. I love his cartoon style--mischievous yet naive characters sometimes with overly exaggerated noses and sometimes without noses at all. The kids are going to love these! Stay tuned, you'll be seeing these and more like them in the upcoming DVD modules.

Thanks Vaibhav! If you'd like to contact him regarding your own animation or illustration project please email him: vaibhavkumaresh [at] hotmail [dot] com

Write your name.

Hold your nose.

Materials Update #5: Teacher Pic

Our revised and much improved 'teacher' picture.

Materials Update #4: Editing

With over 360 images, it has been a challenge to keep track of all our requests, the changes and the final images, although we have managed to keep it pretty well sorted. And our illustrators have been very patient with us and all our demands. Today I was going through the picture cards for a final edit to make sure there were no glaring errors--spelling, the wrong picture with the wrong word, etc. I thought we had finalized all the images, but for the word "teacher" this is what I found:



Eek! This is exactly the image of a 'teacher' we are trying to avoid. In our instructions to the illustrator we said that the teacher SHOULD NOT have a cane. But perhaps she misread it and thought it said 'should have a cane.' And for some reason this image didn't get sent to us in the initial preview, otherwise I'm sure we would have caught it. The last thing we want to do is promote the image of the teacher as having a cane and looking as if she is ready to beat a child. That may be a reality in many schools, but should not be reflecting in our materials. But it is comical that something like this almost got through. This just means we need to look at everything with a very fine tooth comb!

Materials Update #1: Illustrations

In order to get all our materials ready to be printed we need two things 1) content and 2) illustrations. Most of our content is complete, although it's in constant revision. But the biggest piece has been contracting out illustrations for this project. Not only do the illustrations have to be simple and bold, they have to be culturally relevant and appropriate for rural primary children in India. Currently we are working with five illustrators. We have collected 242 illustrations, but we still need 80+. We are desperately waiting for our illustrators to make corrections, send us sketches for approval and finally send us final images. It has been a really fun process thinking about what images we want to use to teach certain sounds or groups of sounds. And it has been really fun seeing what the illustrators send back to us. We are working with some very creative people. Here are a few examples of what our materials will look like and include:

"This pig has pants." This is the image on the 'p' flashcard.

"A rabbit rides a rocket." This is the image on the 'r' flashcard.