OUAN603 - Why I've Chosen These Platforms To Tell The Story

The different platforms to tell the story were chosen with the intention of being complimentary to one another but more importantly, on an individual level suitable for the stories they are telling. This can be determined quite easily after the story has been established and an appropriate platform chosen rather than the other way around. One thing I do like to do [and this is normally as much for the story as it is for myself looking at the different narrative threads] is to have one particular platform that is larger than the others but tells a lot of the story, in this case [part 1] of a novel. In COP3 the backbone of the story was the graphic novel and the other media was supplementary to this. It isn't that I want all of the other platforms and stories to be supplementary per se to one larger story it is just that I'm using this main narrative to deliver large amounts of information and set up some of the other narratives, such as introducing characters within the main narrative for a backstory to be provided in another.

The animation was always intended to provide insight into a visual story world where something like a written story would fall short in this sense. The limitations and advantages of a given platform is always crucial to consider when planning stories and how to tell them. In this case the things you can do technically with animation are almost infinite, but I wanted the story to provide a sensory look into the world through a vignette of the main story. The morning after Takahiro's dream and the interaction between him and his father before the news broadcast seemed like a good length of manageable story but also highlights a key moment in the story itself.

The graphic novel segment hasn't been produced during the production of this project, but I have decided and documented my ideas within the story bible that this would involve the two main detectives from the narrative, Hirota and Kobi, providing a back story for these characters in another possible case that they worked on together. The artwork would be in black and white, rather than the same colour that works in the other visual mediums, in order to give the 'crime' themed graphic novel and noir feel. I like the idea of exploring them through a different genre in the sense that this isn't a direct magical realism stem from the main thread but a crime/mystery, so switching up genres across the same story world could be an interesting experiment.

The design and production of artworks and other designs has been crucial at informing the different visual aspects of the story world as well as making some of the written documents easier to produce as a result. For the audience, high quality art work is always a strong entry point into a story world because they can use their own mind, feelings and emotions to draw what they like from a given image if it is left open enough.

A longer series of animation or a feature film would be an interesting way to tackle further aspects of the story world. I do feel that with the magical realism genre and the type of narratives I'm working on there is in fact very few platform options that wouldn't work very well.