OTT & Transmedia : Playing with mediums to tell your story by Banafsheh Esmailzadeh

Hi everyone~ here goes my inaugural Mod post lol

One thing I love about multimedia projects is the opportunity to show or not show different things. Like in my Petal series, I have different stories lined up depending on them being a novel or a comic; with both of them I can play with form and symbolism in different ways.

For example, in novel form, I can tell a story where I play with different quotation styles to show what kind of language someone's speaking by using different bracket styles (or even special character-specific ones), like

[Japanese,]

||Death God||,

-->penetrating inner voice<--,

-->|resistant inner voice|<--

-->failed connection||,

etc.

In comics form, I can of course show the symbols in the story if they're significant, as well as more easily show side-by-side/split-screen stories more easily if that's what I want, as well as play with fourth-wall breaks like you only can with comics (like a character appearing outside of a panel), to directly play with the "camera."

Naturally the series being what it is, with several areas of overlap, this means I can tell the same story in different ways using different characters, and different mediums. It can definitely make for some fun experiments and make it so you're not rehashing the same story; the same one can have an entirely different meaning if you consult the comic version vs the novel.

For example, in Petal proper, Jiro's awakening sprouts three different timelines with one being the real one, and one of the bad timelines is explored in earnest in the comic Conviction, which includes a particularly bad zombie apocalypse.

All this to say, try playing with form and formatting and even mediums to see how much you can think outside the box, really challenge yourself and the reality you create. Don't be afraid to break your brain a little bit if it means unlocking something revolutionary and unique to YOU.