Our project is an adaptation of the first and second episodes of a Netflix cartoon series called Hilda. We intersperse some simple games in the story. The story is about Hilda, a fearless blue-haired girl, who lives in a wilderness full of elves, giants, and other magical animals. The whole project is divided into five parts. The first part is the character introductions, which introduce the special creatures in the forest. The second part is a story that Hilda was drawing a troll, which is just a rock with daylight but will become a monster once the sun goes down. She didn’t notice that the troll has awake and started to escape. The user has to keep pressing the space key fast enough to run. Finally, Hilda found out that the troll has no bad faith but to return her sketchbook. The third part is the story that Hilda’s house was attacked by some invisible creatures. She heard someone talking, but can’t see it. The user has to click different parts of the screen to find out that creature. Then, Hilda will find out it’s the tiny elves. They attacked Hilda’s house because Hilda always steps on their house and influence their life. In order to resolve the contradiction, Hilda started the journey to find the king of the elves. In the fourth part, Hilda saw a giant. The user needs to press the space key for a proper time to jump onto the giant to find out his story. Hilda finds out that although the giant looks scary, he also means no harm to other creatures. He is just waiting for his lover. In the final part, Hilda successfully found the king on the mountain, but they encountered some danger since the mountain is actually another giant, who is waiting for the giant I mentioned before. Hilda also reconciled with the elves since she saved their king from the mountain.
Although these stories seem to be cartoons for kids, they are a metaphor showing how can human beings live with other creatures harmoniously without hurting them. In the story, the giants are driven away by people who moved to the forest, which is similar to what we human beings are doing now. People expanded their domain to other creatures’ habitat, expelled them, and even killed them since they influence or endanger our life. However, people didn’t notice that actually human beings are influencing other creatures’ lives. What’s more, people always regard wild animals as dangers and hurt them when they tried to get close to us, just like the situation of the troll chasing Hilda. However, sometimes they mean no harm to us. And the story of tiny elves attacking Hilda’s house also alerts us that not only human beings can control and expel other creatures, other creatures may also drive away humans someday. We will also emphasize the interesting relationships between the giant and human beings as well as human beings and the tiny elves. The same conflict exists between them, which is the inconvenience caused by their very different body sizes, but their relationships end differently. The giants finally left the earth because of the repulsion from human beings, while the tiny elves and human beings finally reconcile and live together.
In this project, we are referencing to the cartoon Hilda, which is created by Luke Pearson, a British cartoonist. We also referenced to some games with stories, such as the mobile game Onmyoji. In this game, the user has to accomplish certain tasks to trigger the next plot. This mode makes the users more engaging in the story because they have a sense of participation since their actions can determine how the story goes. The games also make the user pay more attention when watching the story, which can better convey what we want to express to the users.
For the techniques part, we will mainly use the form of video and comic to develop the storyline. We’ll edit the original videos of Hilda to better fit what we want to show. We’ll also record some Hilda’s voices by ourselves, for example, her self introduction, which is not in the original video but necessary in our project. The challenge would be how to make our voice sound like Hilda. If not, we may need to record all of Hilda’s lines by ourselves. If some parts of the original cartoon are too long, we’ll use comics instead. The plots of the story are complicated and there are lots of characters in the story that the users are not familiar with, especially the special creatures in this cartoon. Therefore, another challenge is how to develop the story clearly to the users in a limited web page. For the games, we will probably use p5js to realize some functions.
