OUAN601 - Development of Characters & Narratives

Many revisions of the story was made naturally to accommodate for coherence and continuity across all platforms. The story I created operates on quite a specific timeline and therefore any discrepancies within the stories timeline on any platform would not have held up to scrutiny. This was somewhat of a priority to me as I believed that any immersion created by layering media and narrative threads would have been broken down by the discovery of a continuity error. The story explores characters within this world managing and attempting to survive by the sudden onset of not only this threat, but the threat of other humans displaying desperation and a willingness to do anything to protect people they care about.

The narrative was developed as early as I could within the production process as it was the foundation for the whole transmedia project. It was being continually revised throughout the course of the creation process and is a lot different in its final form than at the beginning. Changes were made as I thought more critically about the world and as I understood it more through my own thoughts and through the characters that inhabit it, I felt the need to make amendments and correct for the developing narrative. I provided a lot of backstory for the world and a more general over view of the event and how the world changes after it, this is one of the more crucial sections I wrote that informed the nature of the events and what happens within the fictional world.



Once I had established who the main characters would be in the graphic novel I wanted to be able to understand more about them for the purpose of writing and the style in which they are written even if this information is not featured anywhere. I wanted to have a point of reference that I had created so that if I was contemplating about how a character would handle a certain situation, what a character would say, or what skills they possess in certain scenarios I could refer back and remind myself of the values and emotions the different characters hold. To do this, I created a table featuring each character and information about them that I thought would be important aspects to consider across a range of possible situations that they make encounter in the story world. These included person details that may be revealed but also, flaws, core traits, occupation, quirks, dialogue style and a few other factors that helped me to establish who they really were. I think by doing this and attributing to the characters certain values and specific elements it helped me to envision them as real people despite them not being. This idea came to me from a quote from Mckee (2006) :

'A character is no more a human being than the Venus de Milo is a real woman. A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they're superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable; whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift - just when we think we understand them, we don't.'

Below are some very early character sketches that I didn't end up using in the main story. I knew the types of characters I wanted at this point and tried to draw a range of people at different ages to help myself make decisions about style, and which types of characters to include. I made a conscious effort to think not only about appearance but personality and characteristics when creating new characters, something I hadn't considered as much as I now know I should have. Overall, the writing process although difficult at first came together quite well and I believe I managed to keep the story world consist over the different platforms, which was something I set out to do from the start.