ITP Thesis Archive 2025

Project Description

Why “My Storytelling Memories?”
As a passionate storyteller raised in a small village in Ghana, I was deeply influenced by oral traditions and indigenous storytelling. However, due to curriculum changes and modernization, these rich cultural stories faded away over time, replaced by contemporary narratives that often lack the authentic tone and identity of the past.
This project is inspired by my desire to preserve and reintroduce these forgotten stories through interactive video storytelling by bringing these tales to life on screen with visuals and voiceovers. Hoping to reconnect modern audiences with the indigenous Ghanaian storytelling.
In doing so, I decided to collect a few of my favorite Ghanaian stories that focus on Anansi stories. (Anansi, which literally means "spider"), a unique central character in almost all Ghanaian folktales, especially within Akan storytelling traditions. He’s known for his cleverness, trickery, and cunning nature, and is often seen as the custodian of Ghanaian folklore.
Each of these stories is told from multiple perspectives, based on the storyteller's background, where they live, their age, and life experiences.
I believe that when people engage with creative work from Ghana, whether reading, watching, or listening, there’s an expected element of identity they hope to experience.
That’s the legacy I want to continue building on, the unforgettable storytelling memories the legends before us created, starting with this very project.
This project also carries a personal meaning for me. Back in my undergraduate years, I told my professor (Adolika Nenah Sowah), who is also my mentor, someone who shares my passion and concerns, that if I ever had the resources, I would create something like this. A project that tells our stories. So, for me, this is more than just a thesis project; it’s a promise fulfilled.

Technical Details

At the beginning of the project, I had selected my three favorite Anansi stories to use.
As the project progressed, I had to make a practical and realistic decision to focus on just one story, my favorite, “Anansi and the Wisdom Pot.”
I used Miro to visually lay out the roadmap of the ideas in my mind.
Another component of the project was prototyping the opening scene of the storyline.
I initially used an AI tool, RunwayML, to prototype this scene, but it couldn’t fully capture the vision I had in mind.
I created a storyboard as part of my prototype to provide a clear visual representation of what the final product could look like and to support the overall vision of the project.
This project features two main groups of characters: the Anansi character and the storytellers.
I modeled the Anansi character, rigged and textured it in Blender, and fine-tuned the rigging and texturing using Meshy AI (meshy.ai), a powerful tool for 3D character generation.
The storyteller and other characters in the story were generated with Meshy AI and rigged entirely in Mixamo (mixamo.com).
Finally, I built the world for the story in Unreal Engine and used Premiere Pro to edit the cinematic animation created in Unreal Engine.
Tools Used:
Unreal Engine,
Blender,
Premiere Pro,
Meshy AI,
Miro,
Mixamo,
RunwayML.