OTT & Transmedia

For you all, what's a good adaptation?

For me, an adaptation is a translation from one media (example: book) to another media (example: tv show, film). When you are adapting a film to a book, do you change how the characters look? I think not. Because of this, I don't like much the idea of changing the characters appearance in any way, from hair color to everything. But I do understand why some adaptors do this: today, racial and feminist movements are more powerful, and people do demand for representation in what they watch. For me, a TV show (example: Percy Jackson and the Olympians) that changes all the characters appearances, but maintains the essence of the character, is a really good adapted work, but a medium-level adaptation. Note that here "adaptation" means "translation", which means that fidelity is included.

I know adaptation needs to change somethings. But in all translations this happens in some way. For example, if I say "I'm tired" in Korean, it would be 피곤해요 (pigonhaeyo). But if I add 잖아 (janha) and do it like 피곤해잖아 (pigonhaejanha) it still translates as "I'm tired", but now the Korean version has a nuance that the listener knows the speaker is tired. The same translation principles of loosing or adding something are present in the adaptation. But that mean I can change letters in a language translation? Of course not. If 피곤해요 means "I'm tired" I cannot say "oh no is actually 'I am sad'".

Okay, language translation and adaptation are not the same thing, but one thing must not be changed in an adaptation: the core narrative. Character personalities, what happens, the climax, that cannot be changed. Maybe you can make Percy a blonde guy, but keep in mind who Percy Jackson actually is.

Well, that's just my opinion on this. What do you guys think?

"You have to think about it as you’re just trying to gain audience, especially in 2026, when everybody is just fighting to grab your attention at all times," says Spotify's head of talk strategy Bill Simmons.

(https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/spotify-netflix...)

I don’t fit neatly into the way Hollywood usually categorises people, and for a long time I assumed that was a flaw. Now I’m starting to understand it’s simply because of how—and why—I work.

I’m a creator, but not in the narrow sense. I don’t just write characters or design visuals or pitch isolated ideas. I build systems. Worlds. Frameworks that are meant to hold stories long before those stories are told. When I create something, I’m thinking about how it lives, how it expands, how it contradicts itself without breaking, and how it can grow without losing its identity.

Most of the time, this kind of work is done collectively. One team handles character creation. Another handles tone. Another focuses on brand, another on long-term continuity, another on licensing potential. In studios, that fragmentation is normal—and often necessary. What’s unusual is doing all of it alone, upstream, before permission, funding, or validation.

That’s where I seem to confuse people.

Hollywood is very good at identifying specialists. Writer. Director. Showrunner. Executive. Consultant. These are boxes the industry understands because they’re built around existing pipelines. But when someone originates the IP, defines its internal logic, establishes its aesthetic language, anticipates its scalability, and protects its thematic spine—without being hired to do so—it creates a kind of administrative discomfort. There isn’t a clean label for that.

I’m not saying this as a complaint. I understand why it happens. Institutions are designed to manage risk, not to predict outliers. And most original myth-making doesn’t look polished or coherent at the beginning. It’s messy. Mine isn’t. It’s structured by design, and that can be unsettling because it arrives already shaped.

I also don’t come from a legacy system. I didn’t inherit a catalogue of characters or reinterpret something already loved. Everything I’m working on is original. That means there’s no historical safety net, no pre-existing audience, no shorthand explanation. It requires people to evaluate the work on its internal logic rather than on brand recognition, and that’s a harder muscle to use.

I don’t believe this makes me better than anyone else. It simply makes my process different.

What I care about is coherence. I care about whether characters exist for a reason, whether factions behave according to believable incentives, whether power has consequences, and whether the world would still function if no one was watching it. I care about tone consistency, about why something should exist at all before asking whether it could be monetised. Those concerns aren’t glamorous, but they’re foundational.

I’ve learned that when you lead with foundations, people sometimes mistake you for being inflexible. In reality, it’s the opposite. Structure allows freedom. It’s the absence of structure that forces constant patchwork and reinvention.

I’m also aware that confidence can be misread. When you’ve spent years quietly building something that feels internally complete, it’s hard not to notice the gap between how much thought has gone into it and how quickly it can be dismissed from the outside. I’m still learning how to hold pride without letting it harden into defensiveness. That’s part of the work, too.

If Hollywood struggles to place me in a box, I don’t think it’s because I don’t belong there. I think it’s because the box hasn’t been drawn yet. Not everyone is meant to slot into an existing role. Some people arrive early to something that only becomes legible later.

I’m not chasing titles. I’m not trying to be an executive for the sake of authority, or a creator for the sake of recognition. I’m interested in authorship, longevity, and integrity—whether a world can outlive its first story and still feel intentional.

If there’s a role for that, I’ll step into it when the time comes. Until then, I’ll keep doing what I’ve always done: building carefully, thinking long-term, and trusting that clarity eventually attracts its own language.

In the old days of entertainment, a story was a closed loop. You watched a movie, the credits rolled, and that was that. Today, we live in the era of the Transmedia Narrative—where a story isn't just a single book or film, but a sprawling ecosystem that breathes across games, social media, podcasts, and physical experiences.

Transmedia isn't just "marketing" or a simple sequel; it’s a method of world-building where each medium does what it does best to push the story forward.

1. What is Transmedia, Exactly?

At its core, transmedia storytelling is the process of unfolding a single narrative across multiple delivery channels. Crucially, each piece of content is self-contained but contributes a unique piece to the larger puzzle.

Multichannel: It’s on TV, your phone, and in your VR headset.

Non-Redundant: You aren't just seeing the "movie version" of the book. You’re seeing a prequel on a podcast and a character’s diary on a blog.

Synergistic: Each platform adds a layer of depth that wouldn't work as well elsewhere.

2. Building the "Mother Ship": IP Development

When creators develop a modern Intellectual Property (IP), they often build a World Bible before they even write a script. This document ensures the "physics" of the world remain consistent, no matter where the story goes.

Stage Focus Goal

Foundation Core Lore & Rules Establish the "laws" of the world (magic, tech, history).

Expansion Side Characters Identifying secondary figures who could lead their own spin-offs.

Bridge-Building Narrative Hooks Leaving "breadcrumbs" in the main story that lead to other platforms.

3. How Worlds Expand (The "Rabbit Hole")

IP expansion usually follows a "Hub and Spoke" model. The "Hub" is the primary entry point (like a hit Netflix series), while the "Spokes" are the expansions:

Deepening Lore: A video game might allow players to explore a city mentioned only briefly in a movie.

Character Backstory: A series of "in-universe" social media accounts (like LinkedIn profiles for characters in a corporate thriller) makes the world feel real.

Audience Participation: Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) use real-world clues (websites, phone numbers) to let fans "enter" the story.

Key Concept: Negative Space. Great transmedia leaves intentional gaps in the main story. These gaps act as invitations for the audience to seek out the rest of the narrative in other formats.

4. Why It Matters

Transmedia turns viewers into explorers. By distributing the story, creators build a "sticky" ecosystem. If you love the show, you’ll buy the comic; if you read the comic, you’ll want to play the game. It’s a perpetual motion machine of engagement.

Examples of Mastery:

Star Wars: A galaxy where a background character in a 1977 film can get a three-season prestige TV show forty years later.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU): Interconnected films and series where events in one directly impact the world of another.

There might be a more technical term for it, but one thing I rather enjoy doing for my bigger series (so far it’s only Petal and Finding Elpis that lend themselves well to this) is a half or canon spin-off. Which is to say, the continuity is different but it still nonetheless is part of the main story.

For example, my comic Conviction is a canon spin-off of Petal proper (novel), in that even though it’s about an entirely different character and circumstance, it still deals with canonical events that were simply implied in the novel. Kind of like a parallel story; the choices and events of one directly impact the other. It helps too that both protagonists are foils to each other, playing key roles in the events of the universe, and neither is complete without the other. I’m working now on a joint half/canon spin-off for both of them (a quarter spin-off? lol), probably in screenplay form, step by step.

Have you done this with your own projects?