Storytel, which has taken the Indian audiobook market by storm, brings Vidyut: Ek Superhero, yet another creative concept to its audience. Anupam Sinha, the Indian comic book artist and writer, along with publisher Priyamvada Rastogi has created the first audiobook superhero for Storytel. The first season is out and has ten episodes.
Vidyut is a teenage character who has electric power as his superpower. The Indianness of the character is maintained by associating its super power to ayurveda and jadi buti.Vidyut has also an alter ego in this series and his sidekick is Urmi. The language of narration is Hindi and it focuses on the teens and young adult category. With this new project the idea is to create a superhero universe in the world of audio books.
During a Facebook live session on 2 July, hosted by Storytel publishing manager Giriraj Kiradoo, Anupam and Priyamvada talked about their experiences and challenges of working on this new format.
Anupam Sinha who is the creator of famous Indian comic book superhero Super Commando Dhruva, said that the biggest challenge for him was to learn the format of writing for audio to create the imagery in the minds of the listeners when they listen to the audio.
Speaking about the storytelling style, Sinha asserted that it needed a different approach. “It took some time to understand this new format of storytelling,” he added.
Elaborating how the idea germinated in their minds, he noted, “Priyamvada was clear in her thoughts and in her selection that they needed a teenage character, with superpower and action; and make it appear believable.”
Rastogi said, “Vidyut is an audio drama with multiple casts. To make it more realistic and entertaining sound design, sound effects, background music and sound effects are used by the production team.” Sinha also shared that for writing the pilot episode of Vidyut: Ek superhero, he took three to four drafts but it was ‘really a nice learning experience and enjoyed this journey.’
They also confirmed on Facebook live that looking at the good response; the team has already begun working on the second season of Vidyut: Ek Superhero.
