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Official Graham Edwards blog and website

Beneath the Loch video

Some years ago I worked for a company that created theme park rides and visitor attractions. While there, I wrote a multimedia "history and myth" show called Beneath the Loch, aimed at families and children. The show used triptych video, surround-sound and animatronics to tell the story of a young otter who embarks on a quest into the depths of Loch Lomond to find the lost village of Camstradden. On the way, the otter plunges through a whirlpool of history and myth, finally discovering the Guardian of the Loch, who collects "all the stories that run down the glens and into the loch".

I've just put a page about the show on my website here. I've included links to some of the many people who contributed to the project, which was led by Nick Farmer. If you were part of the project and I've missed you out, feel free to comment on this post and I'll remedy the situation!

Meanwhile, you can watch a complete video of the show on YouTube here!

Get your free comic strip here!

I thought I'd kick off the New Year with a free gift.

Digging around in my bookshelves over Christmas, I turned up a copy of Colossus, a science fiction comic strip magazine I self-published with my friend Andy Wicks way back in 1985. After leafing through it in teary-eyed nostalgia, I thought it might be fun to scan one of the stories and make it available online.

I've posted some background on the story on my website here, but if you want to cut straight to the chase and read the damn thing, just click on the link right here (PDF file).

All I ask is that you're gentle with it. After all, I was only a student ...

Talisman and Dome

My appreciation of Stephen King started with the 1979 TV version of Salem's Lot, which had us all talking in the school playground about how we hadn't slept a wink after watching David Soul go up against Mr Barlow. After that initiation, my first reading experience wasn't that great. As a teenager I borrowed Pet Sematary from a friend and thought it was all a bit overblown up to the point where the resurrected kid gets hold of the scalpel. Then, at the age of eighteen, I read The Talisman ...

I read The Talisman at lightspeed, consuming the entire second half in a single sitting one wet Sunday afternoon. Jack Sawyer's adventures just blew me away. Years later I loved the sequel Black House nearly as much, for entirely different reasons. I'm not here to review these books, only to tell you to read them, and to say how great the new comic adaptation of The Talisman looks. (I have a particular interest in this as it's drawn by Tony Shasteen, who produced a couple of awesome illustrations for two short stories of mine.)

Since then I've visited Castle Rock and Derry on a regular basis. I've trekked through Mid-World with Roland and his buddies. I'm a true fan. When Mr King writes his introductions dedicated to his Constant Reader, I know he's talking to me. So am I excited about his new novel Under the Dome being published next month? You bet your boots!

Opening the 8mm archive

As threatened, here are a couple of bits of animation from those scratchy old 8mm movies I used to make back in the '80s. Since taking these first tentative steps I've had the joy of producing rather slicker pieces of work using pixels rather than plasticene. But hey, we all start somewhere!

First up is the epic opening shot of Matt Line Tidies Up the Universe, as detailed in my earlier post 8mm planetary approach ...



... followed by the previously mentioned demonic dressing gown from Fever.

Dig the demonic dressing gown

One of my earliest adventures in fantasy film-making was the epic Fever, made in collaboration with my long-time buddy Phil Tuppin. It was a four-minute horror movie made with a Standard-8mm clockwork camera and entered for the BBC's Screen Test Young Film-Makers of the Year competition. And, yes, it actually got broadcast in the Highly Commended category, although they censored the second half for fear it would "give younger viewers the heeby-jeebies"!

The key special effect in this epic is a shot of a demonic dressing gown crawling across a boy's bedroom floor, shortly before throttling said boy (who's lying unconscious in bed with a fever) to death. We did it using good old stop-motion animation. Each frame, I extricated myself from behind the camera, picked my way across the room without disturbing any of the artfully-arranged props, moved the gown the requisite inches, then clambered back out of shot ready for Phil to click the shutter. Our rudimentary lighting apparatus meant all this was done under the searing glare of bare 200W bulbs positioned close enough to our faces to act as sunlamps. Back-breaking stuff, but so rewarding to see it all come to life when we got the processed film back from Kodak a fortnight later – yes, this was pre-video and definitely pre-digital.

Most of the other gown shots were puppeteered with garden canes taped into the arms. But that hero shot of the thing crawling across the floor was a real winner. Once again, sadly, I'm posting before sorting out screen grabs from the DVD transfers of these ancient movies (see my previous post 8mm planetary approach), so stand by for a bumper crop of stills soon!

8mm planetary approach

I've always been into visual effects in the movies. I have whole shelves full of ''Making Of' books and a pile of Cinefex magazines that may soon collapse under its own gravity. What better place to recall some of my own humble efforts at emulating the FX masters than this blog?

I made my first SF spectacular as a teenager – along with my good friends Phil and Andy. Called Matt Line Tidies Up The Universe, it was filmed using the miracle of plasticene animation in glorious Super-8mm. The opening shot of Matt Line shows our hero's spaceship (constructed by yours truly out of left-over Airfix kit parts) approaching the planet on which the beautiful Princess Arriflex is being held prisoner by the Evil Lord Multiplane.

In true Cinefex style, I'll tell you how the shot was achieved. We waited until after dark to get a true blackout, then hung the ship on black cotton out in Phil's back yard. We lit it with a single 200W bulb and shot it in the top half of the frame with a slow, steady zoom out. We then (a terrifying process this) took the film cassette out of the camera and wound it back using a temperamental cranking device. Next step was to point the camera at a previously-prepared photo of the Earth from an astronomy book, only we put a red gel over the lens to make it look all alien and, well, red. By positioning the planet in the bottom half of the shot, we made sure it didn't overlap with the ship.

So there you go. A simple double exposure. Stationary planet, judicious use of zoom to give the ship the illusion of movement. Bingo!

I don't visit YouTube much but when I do I'm amazed at the technical skill of some of the amateur film-makers out there. However, nostalgia dictates that I should call the old 8mm generation to arms and celebrate the good old days. Don't get me wrong, I've done my share of animation using CGI software and non-linear editing. I love the new ways. The joke is that half the rigs I've built in 3DSMax are virtual replicas of the kind of string-and-sealing-wax affairs we used to build in the old days.

More 8mm FX memories to come include the Demonic Dressing Gown, Tyrell Corp Homage and What Bleach Does To Kodachrome. If you're lucky, I'll dig out some stills!

Masquerade remembered

For all of you who, like me, once tried to fathom the secrets of a book called Masquerade by Kit Williams, check out this story on the Guardian website. Masquerade contained elaborate picture puzzles with a trail of clues leading to buried treasure. Apparently, Kit's finally been reunited with the golden hare that captured the world's imagination thirty years ago.

For trivia fans, a few years ago I had the pleasure of working with an extraordinarily talented artist called Steve Pearce, who was the winner of Kit's second book-based competition. This time the challenge was not only to find out what the title of the book was (the cover had a blank space where the title should have been), but to represent it in as creative a way as possible. Steve built a beautiful mechanical contraption to do just that and walked away with the prize. There's a picture of it here.

Eddie reboots

Andy may have come up trumps with a lead about the Theatre Clwyd stage version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (see previous post if you want to know what the hell I'm talking about).

Hitchhiker memory bank failure

Years ago I saw a stage production of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. What a fun topic to write a nostalgic blog about, thought I yesterday. But, as I tried to pull a few memories together, I realised something shocking: my own interior version of Eddie the Shipboard Computer seems to have had its hard drive all but wiped clean!

So this post has become something of a plea. Who can remember a low-budget UK touring production of HHG2G from somewhere around 1980? Andy Wicks and I saw it at the Poole Arts Centre (now known as The Lighthouse). We've pooled our failing memories of what was actually a great night out and come up with the following:

– Northen accents were apparent in the cast. There's a vague connection in my head with the Hull Truck Theatre Company, but that could be erroneous, especially as there's nothing on their website about them ever staging HHG2G. I also suspect Ken Campbell's name may have appeared somewhere on the programme, but I'm not sure he ever staged the showoutside London's West End, so again that could be a red herring.
– Free 'space sweets' were handed out before the performance.
– During the poetry appreciation scene, Arthur and Ford ran out to sit in the audience (right next to me in fact) to scream at the Vogon verse.
– The show may have started with a Deep Thought scene
– The falling whale scene was visuallised with animation and voiced by a man on a ladder!
– There was lots of smoke.
– It was a whole heap of hoopiness!

It's appalling how little I remember about this show. So I've no choice but to send this request out across the world – if you know what the hell I'm talking about, please comment on this post! In the meantime, I'm off to defragment my frontal lobe in the hope of undeleting a few critical files.

Forgotten books emerge from slow glass

Just discovered a heap of Bob Shaw books buried in a forgotten corner. Ah, the joyful anticipation of rereading some old favourites!

Bob's concept of slow glass is still one of those ideas from heaven - a dream of an idea that gets right under your skin and just wriggles there. In case you don't know, slow glass simply transmits light at a slower rate than usual. The thicker the glass, the slower the transmission. Bob teases a wealth of material from this apparently simple concept, from streetlights that use 12-hour slow glass to store up sunlight and let it out at night, to a piece of glass through which a murder may be observed ... when the light finally comes through.

Another of his ideas that always tickled me (I think it was in Who Goes Here?) was his FTL drive that involved a teleportation transmitter at the back of the ship and a receiver at the front. The ship teleports itself in a series of jumps, each one exactly the length of its own hull. Like a cosmic inchworm. And since each individual jump is pretty much instantaneous, so's the whole journey. That story was played for laughs but Bob was mostly a serious writer. And without doubt the master of the high concept from left field.

Finding these books again is a bit like watching something come through slow glass. Nice to have them in the light again. Orbitsville here I come!

Do you want source with that?

On my bookshelf as a young kid I had a book called Bambi by Felix Salten, another called The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith and The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. I suspect my parents bought them for me when the Disney movies came out. However, these were 'real' paperback editions, not movie tie-ins. So, from an early age, I was very conscious of how adaptations play with the source material.

Thanks to their popularity – not to mention the power of the Disney marketing machine – it's the animated features that most people think of when you throw them the title. And that's a shame. Don't get me wrong – I love these movies – but they're just one studio's interpretation of the texts. And for all the rewards movie success may (or may not) bring to an author, it's a pity if it's at the expense of the original work.

Adaptations can lead to some fairly bizarre situations. PKD famously refused to write a novelisation of BladeRunner and no wonder – why novelise a screenplay adaptation of a book you wrote yourself? Just read the damn book! Or take Michael Crichton's novel of the The Lost World, written concurrently with the movie script, which is a sequel to the movie version of Jurassic Park rather than his original novel, and amongst other things has to deal with the tricky problem of resurrecting Ian Malcolm, who dies in Jurassic Park the book but not the film! Confused? Let's not even go into the different iterations of The HItchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy (although the mutability of that particular sequence of stories has a charm all its own, and seems entirely appropriate given the rather unreliable reputation of the Guide as a definitive source of knowledge).

Of course, it's not a given that the original is better than the adaptation. There are plenty of movies that spin literary flax into cinematic gold. But seek them out all the same, if only to see what you've been missing. And ponder, for example, why this scene never made it on to the Disney storyboard:

"(The assassins) tied Pinocchio's hands behind his shoulders and slipped the noose around his neck. Throwing the rope over the high limb of a giant oak tree, they pulled till the poor Marionette hung far up in space. Satisfied with their work, they sat on the grass waiting for Pinocchio to give his last gasp. But after three hours the Marionette's eyes were still open, his mouth still shut and his legs kicked harder than ever ... The rocking made him seasick and the noose, becoming tighter and tighter, choked him. Little by little a film covered his eyes ... He closed his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched out his legs, and hung there, as if he were dead."

Big, dumb and primitive

I recently re-read Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, having not picked it up since I was a teenager. What struck me – apart from the remarkable clarity of the prose and the clean straight lines of the narrative – was the geometry.

Rama, the alien spacecraft featured in the novel, is an enormous cylinder. Now, there are sound scientific reasons for this (the cylinder's hollow so, when it spins, the centrifugal effect creates artificial gravity on its inner walls). But the cylindrical shape also creates something far more important than mere gravity. It creates an icon.

I have this theory that if Rama was just another spaceship, with the usual bulging engines and industrial twiddly bits, it wouldn't have stuck in my mind nearly so well. It's the simplicity of the cylindrical form that makes it memorable and somehow epic. And it's not just Rama. Think about some of those other big dumb objects floating out there in the literary universe: Niven's Ringworld, Shaw's Orbitsville, Baxter's Sugar Lump. Rings and spheres and cubes. Shapes a geometry professor would call primitives.

This primitive iconography gets into the movies too. Those classic Star Wars designs, for instance: Death Star, Star Destroyer, Millennium Falcon, TIE fighter. Or, if you prefer: sphere, triangle, circle, pair-of-hexagons-on-a-spherical-mount. Star Trek delivered that big Borg cube and the Enterprise is just a bunch of primitive shapes faired neatly together. And what about good old flying saucers?

I'm not saying you have to stick to these basic forms to create a memorable piece of hardware. Serenity looks like she was built from spare parts but I'd just love to take a ride in her. All the same, primitive is good, because of what the word really means: original, or irreducible. Ancient, if you prefer. Primitive shapes stir you in the same way Ice Age rock art or tribal music stir you. Primitives pull back the veils of civilisation and give you a glimpse of something fundamental. Something that's been around a lot longer than we have. Something true.

So do I dig big dumb objects? Absolutely. The bigger and dumber the better. Just so long as they're the right shape.

Feeding the monster

I once wrote a story called Dead Wolf in a Hat in which I fooled around with some of the standard werewolf conventions. In researching the story, I stumbled on a Bavarian variety called a Boxenwolf, whose ability to shapeshift was controlled by a special belt, and I got to wondering what other accessories or articles of clothing might have a similar effect. I also got to wondering exactly when it was I encountered my first werewolf.

The mundane truth is it was probably watching Scooby Doo, but I reckon the first lycanthrope that really got to me - and still the most memorable of the movie werewolves IMHO - appeared in John Landis's An American Werewolf in London. That transformation scene was just so bone-crunchingly real. The next milestone for me was Wolf in Stephen King's The Talisman (read the book and I guarantee that particular hairy beast will break your heart).

What's always intrigued me about the whole shapeshifter thing is why the wolf has become - in Western culture at least - its primary incarnation. Of course there are Asian weretigers and so on, but let's face it, wolves rule and all the others drool. I've always assumed it goes back to hunter-clan folklore when man and wolf were first united in chasing down prey. Wolf became dog became man's best friend. But a friend with teeth, who was perfectly capable of tearing your throat out if the call of the wild came too loud and strong. Or when the moon was full.

If you believe everything you read on the internet (why wouldn't you?) there are maybe half a billion dogs in the world. And dogs are genetically almost indistinguishable from wolves. There may be one in your home right now. So whenever you open a can of Pedigree Chum, just remember you're feeding the monster. And next time you go to sleep ... consider locking the bedroom door.

Small steps

Why do I like speculative fiction? Am I hard-wired that way? Is there a gene? Was I abducted by aliens as a small child and infused with an urge to read about strangers in strange lands? In short, was it nature or nurture?

I don't recall any incidents with aliens (although if they used mind-altering drugs to adjust my memory I wouldn't, would I?). However, I do have a vivid memory of creeping down the stairs at the age of four and peeping through the bannisters to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing on the late evening news. Even now, whenever I see that ghostly black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong taking his one small step into the Sea of Tranquility, I see it through the eyes of that small boy. Some moments are pivotal in history. I think that one was for me.

So much for science fact. What about science fiction? I'm fairly confident my first experience of it came thanks to Roald Dahl. Yes, I know he's rarely mentioned in the same breath as Clarke and Heinlein and PKD but stick with me on this.

Dahl wrote a very famous book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which practically everyone on the planet has heard of. He followed it up with the rather less famous Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. The story of C&TGGE involves a giant orbiting space hotel, an invasion of agressive aliens called Vermicious Knids and a pair of new drugs that make you respectively older or younger. Over-use of the former makes one of the charactes hundreds of years old and suddenly able to remember the voyage of the Mayflower. Abusing the latter results in someone achieving a negative age. The resulting trip to Minus-land - a dark, disturbing realm full of flesh-eating monsters - was, as far as I recall, terrifying.

Pretty heady stuff for a kids' book? Not really, especially when you consider Dahl's famously fertile imagination. C&TGGE is a great example of big SF ideas being slipped in under the radar. Many of the ideas it plays with have now become so familiar through movies, TV shows and – god help us – adverts, that it's easy to forget their raw power. We're blase to the idea we could go back in time and kill our own grandparents. We've seen so many monsters on telly that we've forgotten how scary they really are. It's like the scene at the end of Joe Dante's The Howling, when Dee Wallace's news anchor character goes public by transforming into a (rather cute) werewolf on live TV. A couple of old geezers watching the programme in a bar remark to each other that "it's amazing what they can do with special effects these days".

So next time you pick up a story about alien invasion or time travel, don't be cynical, or even worldly. Instead, try considering it from the point of view of a four year-old child. I guess I'm talking about good old sense-of-wonder here, but I can't help trotting out my favourite ever SF quote. It's from Philip K Dick and it points out where speculative fiction differs from its mainstream counterpart, and it goes something like:

"(Science fiction) is not just 'What if?'. It's 'MY GOD, WHAT IF?!!'"

Science fiction double feature

It's the middle of the eighties, the middle of a winter's afternoon and the middle of one humdinger of a storm. Andy Wicks and I are in the middle of the stalls of the huge Gaumont cinema in Bournemouth. There are maybe six other people in there with us.

We're treating ourselves to a double bill of John Carpenter's The Fog (which we haven't seen before) and Ridley Scott's Alien (which we have). We endure Rank Screen Advertising and a scattering of dismal previews. The Fog begins. The storm's so loud we can hear it over the soundtrack. In the opening campfire scene, a hand snaps shut a dangling pocket watch and makes us jump out of our seats. Outside the storm gets louder. We're hooked. Then, about halfway through the movie, Adrienne Barbeau's face begins to melt. Toxic waste erupts from the middle of the screen and splashes all the way out to the edges. The film just melted in the projector.

Everything goes black.

And there we sit, in the pitch dark in a vast empty auditorium, with John Carpenter's repetitive score still echoing in our heads despite the distant boom of the thunder. And we sit. And sit. There's nervous laughter from a complete stranger sat a few rows behind us. We're kind of laughing too. Kind of.

After a while a nervous manager scurries down the aisle with a torch and apologies. Some time after that Adrienne is restored and we watch the fog consume the lighthouse. By the time the Nostromo starts rumbling across the screen, we're really in the mood to be scared.

My point in relating this anecdote? Simply this: get acquainted with the dark. Watching a zombie movie? Turn off all the lights. Reading about vampires? Do it by candlelight. Just like in The Fog, it's all about sitting round the campfire, this business of ours. And, as everyone knows, campfires spill the best of their magic when the sun goes down.

My first time

What's in a cover? Sometimes everything. The first science fiction book I ever bought was the old Granada paperback edition of Isaac Asimov's Foundation, and the thing that made me pick it up was the fabulous Chris Foss spaceship on the cover. But there was more to it than that, enough to make this a truly formative moment. Because next to this book were two others that were clearly part of the same series - Foundation & Empire and Second Foundation. They also had fabulous spaceships on the front. But, as I read the blurb on the back - seductive blurb that promised epic tales of galactic empires and something called psychohistory - I realised something incredible: the three covers fitted together like jigsaw pieces to form a single image! The exotic combination of Granada and Foss had actually created not just a trilogy but a triptych. And I'd discovered it! I was tickled pink. And hooked, for life.

I've discovered all manner of wonders in bookshops over the years, but I can't recall ever being so utterly enchanted as I was that day. Asimov's Foundation launched me on an SF odyssey that lasted through my teens and only began to wane when I wandered into a little Maine town called Castle Rock. The spaceships got the better of me again when the Clear Air Turbulence went on its outrageous spree through the heart of the Culture megaship in Iain Banks's Consider Phlebas. Reading that sequence, I felt the same daft WTF grin on my face that my ten year-old self had worn when I picked up Asimov.

Still, the first time's always the best.

The Godwhale

One of the things I thought I'd do here is dredge up a few old memories before they fade forever. I'm not planning to re-read books, or re-view movies, just spill out what's stuck in my head about them. Which will no doubt be utterly subjective and, just possibly, entirely inaccurate. I'll kick off with The Godwhale by TJ Bass. I doubt it's still in print but what I remember most vividly is a hemi-human (I think he got chopped in half by an airlock door?) who got grafted on to a pair of mechanical legs, and a giant robot whale called Rorqual Maru. Someone wound up mind-melding with the whale - possibly even becoming it. Also there was an undersea civilisation of evolved humans with gills called Benthics. Few people I've met have heard of the book, and I really can't say if it was any good, but when I read it at the age of eleven or so it filled my head up with some pretty startling images. I think it's fair to say that, much, much later, some of them got echoed in a novel of mine called Stone and Sea.