OUAN601 - Connecting Stories via Smaller Details

I've often thought that the best stories are sometimes the ones that play with subtlety rather than placing important details in front of the face of the audience. The humanisation of characters, by the use of quirks, dialogue specific to them in terms of the language they use, and the picking up of small details such as Lucy's camera and the Polaroid photographs are elements that I wanted to incorporate into my own work. To do this I attempted to make the characters as authentic and human as possible. This was also a conscious effort within the dialogue, as I intended it to sound as natural and unscripted as possible. I think the dialogue is one of the more difficult things to do well because if character dialogue was written the same way that people talk in every day life it would be perhaps, boring? Or seem unnatural in this way because it would be difficult to gauge easily what the characters are saying and intending. In this respect I think dialogue is about finding the correct balance.

The details across stories that connect them can range from the largest and most important features of a story world to the smallest almost unnoticeable details. I tried to use a spectrum of different elements to bring everything together across the different media outlets ranging from some characters simply appearing in other stories to the example of Lucy's photographs which in some regard showcase where she has been and the type of place they live. Furthermore, consistency on the smallest details can be the different between have a cohesive story world and members of an audience discovering errors in continuity and losing any immersion within the story world they previously had. So, overall, the small details matter and are not to be overlooked. One of the perhaps most futile and unnecessary examples of me trying to make sure everything works coherently is that the route Jesse takes from his bedroom in the graphic novel to wake up Lucy and Thomas before going downstairs into the kitchen and then basement is accurate to the layout of their home as depicted in the house plan below.