Given the nature of the project I was undertaking as an investigation, I had to give a lot of consideration to the feasibility of my ideas and think about what would be achievable in the allocated time for this project. The idea to produce a small-scale transmedia project is within the context of transmedia itself still a range of appropriate media that is used to illustrate and fuel the consumption of a fictional world by the audience. Since I was modelling my idea of transmedia mostly off of The Walking Dead, a graphic novel was at the heart of my project and would provide the largest entry point into the story world. This was not something I had attempted before so I was curious to attempt to work out if it was possible or not. I reasoned with myself that the most important aspect was the story and the characters, so as long as there is a coherent story that fits with my transmedia project there shouldn't be a problem if I don't produce a finished and published first issue by the deadline time as it would be unnecessary given purpose of the piece. So there were some caveats I was holding myself to in order to assure myself that it would be possible and with all of these considered I decided to do my best to produce at the very least a full illustrated first issue of a graphic novel or comic book series.
In order to encourage myself to keep on top of the tasks at hand I would create notes throughout a diary each week to suggest a number of things to have completed. If the task was not completed I simply rolled it over to the next week. This is quite an open way to plan a project but because of the nature of what I was doing my average day consisted of doing a number of different tasks from e-mailing collaborators, printing work, writing scripts and narratives, drawing, designing and planning out things that I would need to make sure to do such as travel to a destination and produce Polaroid photographs. Due to this way of working it would have been pointless to write a list of tasks and tick them off one by one, and I found the best way of working on a transmedia project as an individual was to work as efficiently as possible but also fluidly moving from task to task as I saw fit and not tying myself to one particular element at a time. I suppose in a way this was an attempt to keep the different elements, although different levels of complexity and time needed to complete them, up to speed with one another. This was important because it was imperative to me from the perspective of narrative and cohesion across platforms to make sure they work together and there is a good level of continuity and consistency across all platforms, not matter how simply they are.
To make sure I understood myself what I was trying to do I was as meticulous as possible in my planning. This is reflected in my transmedia production bible and some of the planning I did for scripts and the graphic novel layout. I believe this was important to me because it meant at all times I knew where I stood with the project and could tell more easily if what I wanted to do was achievable as oppose to going into the graphic novel for example without much planning and creating each panel as I went along.
Despite my best efforts, I do think large amounts of time were lost more towards the beginning of the project because of the difficulty in generating a concept that would benefit from this platform, as well as my inexperience with the nature of transmedia storytelling and the creation of stories that work in those worlds. Whether this was 20 hours spent staring at a wall trying to come up with a feasible idea or the creation of 10's of characters that I would not be included within the final story world, or at the very least kept for a later date. Although I would have liked to use this time to work on what would end up being the final project, I think I gained a lot regarding different processes - writing, designing and thinking very hard about narrative and character complexity definitely paid off and I hope this will be evident in any future work as well as this project.
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