How to transform a picture-book story into a film narrative? How to appropriate the static graphics of the print text for constructing the audio-visual dynamics of a film? This paper explores this adaptation process, based on a case study of the film [Hugo] from the picture-book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret", by focusing on the potentials of picture-books as transmedia narratives. Typically combining graphics and text in its print format, the picture-book is actually rich in intermediality useful for the adaptation. Thus, the text of the picture book, used to fill in where the visual scene might lack, could be actualized by the narrator in the film to enhance the immediacy of the scene as reality. By specifying the role "intermediality" plays in the process, the author identifies several adaptation mechanisms at work, which suggests what needs to be considered in transmedia narratology.