“Branded”, co-created by Pullinger with Talan Memmott, was her first digital storytelling collaboration. It was developed during the “Mapping the Transition from Page to Screen” project at trAce Online Writing Centre and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board’s Innovation Award Scheme. “Branded” tells the story of 21-year-old James, accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend Lana. In prison, he hears the dead girl’s voice.

The final version of the work, published in March 2003, was based on concepts Pullinger developed and trialed during the “Mapping the Transition from Page to Screen” project as she explored the use of hyperlinks in storytelling. Some early versions of the work-in-progress (created by Pullinger without collaborators) were accessible briefly in her online “Transition Journal” blog, before she decided not to make them public. Pullinger described those first “Branded” versions as “incredibly basic hyperfiction, barely qualifying for the word hypertext”. In collaboration with Memmott, she created a work that uses audio and pictures with text which, in the absence of clickable links, offers a non-conventional hypertext experience.

Both creators described work as “a fragment of a larger work-in-progress”. The initial idea of “Branded” was later developed by Pullinger with Stephan Schemat and Chris Joseph as “The Breathing Wall”.