I’m always sad to see one of my books go out of print, but I was particularly sorry when MONSTERS - An Owner’s Guide, the picture book created by myself and illustrator Mark Oliver, went out of print a couple of years ago as the book had proved very popular on school visits and had quickly become one of my most borrowed books from UK libraries.
So I was delighted when publisher Macmillan told me that they were giving the book a second chance by publishing it as part of their Let’s Readmini-picture book series. Although written in rhyme, the book is set out like a user’s manual, so it’s well suited to Let’s Read’s smaller handbook-like format.
Some important Dos and Don’ts to remember when using your monster.
To celebrate the book coming back into print, I’m running a PRIZE COMPETITION! Shambles, the mechanical monster featured in the book is just one of a range produced by the Monstermatic Company. Here they all are.
The full range of Monstermatic Monsters (click image to enlarge).
To have a chance of winning a signed copy of the new edition, send me your own sketch of a new Monstermatic Monster – and don't forget to give it a name! The competition is open to all ages, so get your little monsters drawing too! I’ll post all the entries on this blog and pick two winners, who’ll each receive a copy of the book. One copy will go to the creator of my favourite monster sketch and the other will be chosen at random. You can send me your monsters in the following ways:
Twitter: Tweet your monster picture to @ScribbleStreet including the hashtag #Monstermatic
Monstermatic Transfer: Draw your picture on a sheet of paper and then feed it into the mouth of any Monstermatic Monster while shouting my name repeatedly into the monster's ear / auditory orifice.*
The competition will close on Sunday 26th January 2014 and the winners will be announced shortly after.
Christmas day in the Emmett household always begins with a treasure hunt. It started when the kids were little and has since become a family tradition. It’s not one of those treasure hunts where clues or riddles lead you to particular objects (although we love doing those too) - it’s more like a quiz with an element of Hunt the Thimble. I thought I’d write a post about it in case anyone fancied doing something similar.
Every Christmas morning the family come downstairs to find all of the presents have been taken from under the Christmas tree and moved into a locked "Treasure Room" at the back of the house. This is the work of the Puzzle Elf, one of Santa's lesser known little helpers with a propensity for tricksy questions.
A rare photo of the original Puzzle Elf, caught shortly after he hid his letter in our Christmas Tree.
Hidden somewhere on the Christmas tree is a letter from the Elf, along with a gridded map showing both floors of the house and a piece of paper with two questions written on it.
The Puzzle Elf’s treasure map.
The questions always come in pairs with five multiple choice answers for each. Each question is for a particular member of the family. For some reason the Puzzle Elf never sets me any questions — I assume it's because she thinks I’m either far too clever or far too stupid. One set of answers in each pair of questions is accompanied by a set of letters, the other by a set of numbers. The correct answers to both questions will give a grid reference on the map (e.g. E-5) where another pair of questions is hidden. There are always 12 questions in all (6 pairs), the topics are always books, movies, science and history with each family member getting a question on each topic.
Here are some of the Puzzle Elf’s questions from last Christmas
The last pair of questions reveals the location of the key to the Treasure Room. When the key has been found and the Treasure Room has been unlocked, the family can open their presents.
The key is wrapped in a piece of paper.
It usually takes about an hour to find the key but both our kids insist that the Puzzle Elf keeps coming each year.
If you think your family might enjoy doing a similar treasure hunt (you don’t have to do it at Christmas), here are a few tips.
It’s nice to find a key, but If you don’t have a room, cupboard or wardrobe you can lock the presents in, the final piece of paper could simply reveal where the presents are hidden (e.g. In the garden shed or under mum and dad's bed).
The map of the house doesn’t need to be as neatly drawn as the one shown above (I suspect that the Puzzle Elf, like me, used to be an architect). A hand drawn map on squared paper will do just as well, but make sure each grid square only covers a small area of the floor plan as the larger the grid square, the larger the area of house that will need to be searched.
Try to pick questions that only the family member they're addressed to will know the answer to so that everyone will feel they have played a part in finding the treasure. The Puzzle Elf usually sets questions on books and films that family members have read or watched in the last year or topics they’ve been studying at school. If your family is especially bookish, all of the questions could be about books.
Clues can be held in place with sticky tape or Blu-Tack, but should be in plain sight, so that searchers don’t have to move or open anything to find them, although they may have to look underneath or around the back of an object.
The Puzzle Elf rolls the clues up into tight scrolls to make them more difficult to spot.
In our house, the first clue and map are always accompanied by a letter from the Puzzle Elf. The Puzzle Elf's job has changed hands over the years. The original Puzzle Elf went on paternity leave a few years back and that year the Easter Bunny had to cover for him. However he was back at work the next year and was training up his daughter, Flummox, as an apprentice. The original elf has now retired and Flummox has taken over from him.
If your family are the doing the treasure hunt for the first time, it’s a good idea to include some sort of letter with instructions. Here’s some instructions from one of the original Puzzle Elf’s letters that you can adapt for your own use:
Santa has put all your presents in the Treasure Room at the back of the house. He has locked the room and hidden the key somewhere safe. To make sure that you - and only you - can find the key, he has set a treasure hunt that only the three of you, working together, can solve.
There are 6 pairs of multiple-choice questions.
The two answers to each pair will give you a grid reference on the house plan provided.
The next pair of questions can be found somewhere in that location.
The questions are divided into three groups and each of you will have to answer 4 questions each.
The final pair of questions will give you the location of the key.
Good luck and happy hunting!
If the Puzzle Elf has inspired you to do your own treasure hunt, do let me know - and I'll pass the message on to her! And if you already have your own Christmas treasure hunt, I’d love to hear about that too.
I'm doing a book signing in the Oxfam Books & Music Shop in my home town of Beeston, Nottingham on Saturday 7th December. So if you live in the area please pop in between 2.00pm and 4.00pm to buy a signed copy or just to say hello.
There will be around a 130 copies of my picture books on sale with a wide selection (as shown on the poster below) including many first editions. All the books are brand new and all the proceeds will go to Oxfam's Philippines Typhoon Appeal.
There are limited numbers of each book – so come early to avoid disappointment!
If you live in or near Beeston and would like to help promote this event, you can CLICK HERE to download a copy of the poster above.
My new picture book with illustrator Poly Bernatene is called "Here Be Monsters", a phrase that originates from old nautical maps. Cartographers used it (or it’s variant “Here Be Dragons”) to indicate an uncharted region. Sometimes they’d draw pictures of the monsters and show them attacking ships and devouring the unfortunate crew.
My favourite example of such a map is the wonderful Carta Marina, or “Map of the Sea”, created by Swedish cartographer Olaus Magnus in the 16th century. The map shows the Nordic countries and Magnus drew so many monsters in the sea surrounding them, it’s a wonder that anyone that saw it had the courage to set sail.
The map is packed with wonderful detail, including a monster that sailors have mistaken for an island. The sailors are shown lighting a fire on the monster’s back, which always makes me wonder if it has some connection to The First Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, in which Sinbad and his crew make the same unfortunate mistake.
A detail from the Carta Marina, showing some of its monsters.
Sailors have mistaken the monster on the left for an island and are lighting a fire on it.
This map, and others like it, were the inspiration for an unpublished pop-up book called Here Be Monsters that I produced in 1995. At that point, I was both writing and illustrating and this book was my first attempt at paper-engineering as well. In that early version, an intrepid young girl called Maggie discovers a magic map with an island labelled “Here Be Monsters” and sets out to see it for herself. Maggie travels across a pop-up landscape on her quest and as the pages turn a host of monsters are revealed to the reader, but Maggie sees none of them. When Maggie eventually reaches her destination, the reader sees that the island is itself a giant monster, just like the one on the Carta Marina. The magic map appeared on every page of the book, with the drawing changing as Maggie progressed across it.
The magical map from my unpublished Here Be Monster pop-up book. The map appeared on every page
of the book, with changing details and the dragon and griffin scroll-heads fighting each other. You can see more of this pop-up version on my web site.
I reworked this early pop-up Here Be Monsters a few times, but was never able to find a publisher for it. For one reworking, I produced a bigger, more detailed version of the map, which folded out from the book’s back cover, like a map in a guide book.
The large “guide book” version of the pop-up book map. (Click image to enlarge)
The picture book version of the story is quite different from the original pop-up book. The little girl, Maggie, has been replaced by a band of villainous pirates. All of the monsters they encounter are sea monsters and, while their fearsome captain remains oblivious to them, his unfortunate crew do not. The stories also end differently. In the picture book version, the island does not turn out to be a giant monster — but there’s an equally scary twist!
Before Poly Bernatene started work on his wonderful illustrations for the picture book version, I mentioned to him that the Carta Marina had been a big influence on the story. So I was delighted to see that Poly had included some of Magnus’s monsters in the nautical map featured in the book.
The map in PolyBernatene's illustrations includes some of the monsters from the Carta Marina.
Whenever I have a new book coming out, I try to come up with a related game, puzzle or activity to go in the games section of my website. For Here Be Monsters I decided to make a card game that readers could print out and make for themselves. It’s a “pirate memory game” – a phrase that I’ll always associate with the very funny Little Britain sketch that you can watch here.
It’s one of those games where you collect cards by find matching pairs, but to make it a little different and hopefully a little more fun I’ve added some extra monster cards that change the way the game is played. When he first started working on the book, illustrator Poly Bernatene produced a set of individual character sketches of each of the pirates and he sent me these to use on the cards. The book is also being published in Spain and Argentina and Poly is producing a Spanish version of the game which will be available through his own web site.
I thought it might be fun to shoot a video showing how to play the game, so I asked next-door-neigbours Finn and Seth to me to help me make one. The book is dedicated to Seth and I gave him a set of the playing cards so that he and Finn could practice playing it before we shot the video. We filmed ourselves playing the game a couple of times and Seth won both times!
If you're wondering how we did it, the front shot of the video was taken with a camera mounted atop a kitchen cupboard and the overhead shot was taken simultaneously with my iPhone which was cantilevered out from another cupboard using a timber joist and G-clamp as shown below. Then the two shots were cut together using Final Cut on an iMac.
I mentioned in my last post that I love making home movies with family and friends. Thanks to advances in home computing, editing techniques and special effects that were the preserve of film and TV studios a few years ago can now be found on laptops or even mobile phones.
Most of our family’s home movies were made using Apple’s very user-friendly iMovie software. Recent versions of iMovie include movie trailer templates, which you can customise with your own film clips and titles. When my daughter had a movie-themed birthday party last year, we used a couple of these templates to make some silly movie trailers to show to her friends.
Carrots are Forever
My kids and I filmed this against a pop-up green screen so that I could add in the backgrounds later when I edited it. Although we only needed to shoot some short clips to make the trailer, we got a bit carried away and ended up coming up with an entire plot and filming most of it.
Quackula Rising
We couldn’t resist making another trailer and this time my wife got in on the act. Rather than shoot on the floor again, we hung the green screen up so that we could manipulate the toys from below. "Manipulate" may be too fancy a word — basically we just shook each toy a bit to show it was talking! As you watch the toys file past in the opening shots, try to imagine my whole family shuffling along underneath them, stifling giggles and desperately trying to keep our heads out of shot – it took a lot of takes before we got it right.
An invisible Nessie (left) makes
a brief, enigmatic appearance
in the trailer.
My daughter cast most of the characters from her cuddly toy collection and it wasn’t until I was editing the trailer on the computer that I realised that the Loch Ness Monster toy she’d chosen to be one of the tourists at the end was the exact same shade of green as the green screen we had filmed against. As a consequence, the only bits of the monster that are visible are his eyes, his tartan bow tie and beret and the name "Nessie" across his belly. Although his invisibility was unintentional, it seems appropriate for such an enigmatic beast.
My daughter and one of her friends used one of the templates that comes with the iPad version of iMovie to make the trailer below. My wife helped a little with the costumes and I held the iPad for them during the filming, but the girls put the rest of the trailer together on their own.
If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed that I occasionally tweet about music videos which have been an enthusiasm of mine since I was a teenager. I think the best picture books are the ones where the images and words mesh perfectly, but each offers a different perspective, making an end product that is greater than the sum of its parts. The same goes for the visuals and music in the best music videos, many of which display a degree of imagination of ingenuity that’s rarely found in other forms of film-making.
Here are a few of my favourite music videos as well as one of my family’s homegrown efforts.
The Chemical Brothers • LET FOREVER BE by Michel Gondry (1999)
When I first saw this video on Top of the Pops in 1999 it made me an instant fan of both The Chemical Brothers and the video’s director Michel Gondry. It’s a brilliant blend of choreography, production design and simple video effects seamlessly edited into a sequence that fits the psychedelic feel of the music perfectly. Trying to figure out how Gondry put it all together will make your head hurt.
I could write a whole blog post about my favourite Gondry videos, but I’m going to limit myself to one more by another band with a sibling-based name.
The Living Sisters • HOW ARE YOU DOING? by Michel Gondry (2011)
The Living Sisters’ lo-fi, folky sound is very different to The Chemical Brothers’ electronic rock and Gondry matches it with this wonderfully quirky video that has a low-tech, home-made feel. Handheld camera footage combines with some amusingly amateurish special effects to show the three sisters converging, against all odds, for a very special event. Like many of Gondry’s videos, you have to watch it several times to take it all in.
OK GO • THIS TOO SHALL PASS by James Frost, OK GO and Syyn Labs (2010)
If you’re not already familiar with OK GO’s remarkable work you’ve been missing out. To make this video the band recruited Syyn Labs, a group of talented engineers, to construct an incredibly elaborate Rube Goldberg machine, the movements of which synchronise perfectly with the music. You can find out more about how the video was made and watch some behind the scenes videos in this Wired article.
L’Ogre is a collective of four French film-makers: David Freymond, Bruno Mendes, Olivier Tixier and Catherine Villeminot. The French seem to have a knack for quirky, inventive film-making and this video for Paris band Hold Your Horses is every bit as impressive as the videos created by fellow French director Michel Gondry. The seven piece band are carefully posed, costumed and lit to recreate a range of iconic artworks from da Vinci’s The Last Supper to Warhol’s Marilyn screen prints. Several of the artworks feature female nudes and, although there’s a woman in the band, one of the amusing aspects of the video is that these roles are always filled by male band members.
There are 24 artworks featured in the video. How many can you name?
The Cinematic Orchestra • TO BUILD A HOME & BREATHE by Andrew Griffin (2007)
Andrew Griffin’s narrative videos for The Cinematic Orchestra’s To Build a Home and Breathe are fine examples of how emotionally intense music videos can be. The two videos combine to tell a moving story that is skilfully shot and beautifully acted. The story opens with a devoted husband carrying his wife across the Cumbrian countryside to a dilapidated cottage – I won’t spoil it by telling you any more.
Eels • EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE COOL THIS CHRISTMAS by The Emmett Family (2011)
If the last video has left you an emotional wreck, this piece of homegrown fluff might help cheer you up again.
As well as watching videos, I love making them with family and friends and we have a big home movie collection including several home-made music videos. When BBC 6 Music’s Adam and Joe ran a Video Wars competition a few years ago, my family’s entry (set to Joe Cornish’s musical adaptation of the cooking instructions on a packet of meatballs) was one of the runners up. We made the video above a couple of years ago and included a link to it in a similarly themed Christmas card (shown opposite) that we sent out to family and friends. It’s not in the same league as the other videos on this page, but we had great fun making it – and no, that's not my son's real hair!
