The Remainders gang (myself, Finbar Hawkins & Jon Millington) have had a few sketches featured on Tilt, a BBC Radio 7 sketch show - so, finally got that credit on a BBC radio comedy show. My work here is done.
I think the most recent show is available on listen again, still, but this is the show’s page, which might prove slightly longer lived than any Listen Again link:
I’ve now uploaded Oscar & the Magi up to Scribd, the online writing community, where you can read it on screen in their lovely interface. You can find it at:
Well, it’s finally finished, the hardly awaited minimum opus…
“Oscar and the Magi” is a children’s book that I’ve written largely as a present for someone, but which I’m also making available online for everyone else.
It’s the story of a small boy who is sent a textbook for student wizards as a birthday present and who, as a result, finds himself caught up in a secret London, where a magical police force hunts evil spirits unseen among the Christmas shoppers and a desperate band of wizards dream of rebellion and freedom…
…and that’s just the first four chapters…
It’s a rip-roaring pulp adventure (I hope), full of magic, sword fights, terrifying monsters, extraordinary visions, rebellion, oppression, dragons, steam trains, rooftop chases, enchanted tea sets and a blink and you’ll miss appearance from the Prime Minister. Now I wish I’d mentioned the kitchen sink somewhere in it so I could complete that list properly.
You can download a pdf of the book for free from http://www.mediafire.com/?xxt13xx0mdy. The pdf is formatted for A4 for printing.
Or, if you wanted an actual book, you can buy a copy, paperback sized, from lulu.com: http://www.lulu.com/content/1198864. I’ve priced the lulu edition at £6.00, which, I must admit, includes a few pence royalties for myself, so you will be giving me money, if you buy it, so you have been warned.
I’d also like to point out that delivery from lulu.com can come in at over £2, and can take a while, so its worth bearing that in mind if you want to order one (on the other hand, of course, you do get a book out of it, which would be exciting for me, at any rate).
You can also download a pdf from lulu.com for free, but its formatted for print at paperback size, so you might be better off with the file hosted at mediafire.
I’m also going to be blogging the book here, a chapter every Friday, although you might prefer to use the www.ruritania.co.uk/book link, which will have just the text from book, without the various announcements, etc, that I might add in here.
I’m releasing the book under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/), so please feel free to pass on any copies and I would be absolutely delighted to know if anyone wants to create anything inspired by or playing with the book, drop me a line here if you do.
Anyway, here are those links again:
book: http://www.lulu.com/content/1198864
download (pdf): http://www.mediafire.com/?xxt13xx0mdy
download (rtf): http://www.mediafire.com/?rgguy2gmtdr
download (txt): http://www.mediafire.com/?wyt2ymmeaey
blog: http://www.ruritania.co.uk/book
Edit
Oscar and the Magi is now also available on Scribd, the online writing community, which has a very nice interface for reading online.
scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2516647/Oscar-and-the-Magi
Planet Protectors are a new range of environmentally aware action figures from the Early Learning Centre.
I helped develop the site and and its content. I built it in Flash to Will Richards’ colourful and dramatic designs.
The aim was to give the children an online destination that complemented and expanded on the world of the characters.
To this end the majority of the content is held in XML which is then pulled into Flash templates. This means that the site can easily be updated and expanded, turning it into an evolving, living online resource.
I also helped develop the characters of the figures themselves, along with Finbar Hawkins, fleshing out their world and storylines. I wrote an ‘origins’ story as an online comic for the site.
I also wrote the content for an online encyclopedia for the site to expand on the environmentally aware message of the figure range.
The entries in the encyclopedia are tied into the backstory of the characters and the events of the online comic, giving the children the opportunity to learn mroe about the world of the Planet Protectors.
For every programme that makes it to air, there are many that die on the way, whether strangled at birth, brutally murdered along the way or eventually euthanised to put the audience out of their misery. It is these programmes that are the Remainders of radio broadcasting.
The Remainders is a sort of pilot for an almost sketch show for, pretty much, radio. It was written by me, Finbar Hawkins, John Millington and Sally Hawkins and features all of the above plus Bill Nash and Jack Tarlton.
This was a pilot for an interactive soap for the BBC. The audience would have a mocked up ‘desktop’ and would receive video messages from the characters, each containing a segment of an episode’s plot. Occassional ‘instant messages’ would allow the audience to interact with the characters, altering plot outcomes by making decisions.
I was heavily involved in the development of the concept and the eventual show. I helped structure the interactive segments of the drama and how they fitted in with the main plotlines.
I also built the Flash application for the pilot, using Flash video, XML data and components to create the desktop effect (to a design by Will). The interactive sequences required the video to seek and jump to different cue points depending on the audience choices.
For a couple of years or so I contributed a column to Internet World magazine. It was a ’sideways’ look at the web industry which mostly consisted of me finding the funnier news stories of the month and poking fun at them.
And also sneaking in gratuitous William Shatner references. Well, it amused me.
Well, yes, FightBox.FightBox was an interactive TV show for the BBC. Players could download a PC game from the BBC website and use it to create and train their own FightBox warriors. The most successful players won a place in the televised competiton.
BBC technology allowed us to film what was essentially a televised gaming tournament as, effectively, a live virtual sporting event as the players brought their warriors into the arena to face each other and our created characters, the Sentients, to fight to the death for the title of champion.
I helped develop the basic concept and did a lot of work on defining the look, feel, world and characters of FightBox. I helped design and develop the PC game and elements of the TV show. I built and helped run the FightBox website. I worked on the commentator’s scripts and wrote some segments of the TV show. I’ve even got a t-shirt.
FightBox aired on BBC 3 and eventually crossed over onto BBC2 where, after a reasonably strong start it suffered slow death by scheduling shuffle. It was very popular with the online audience, especially the ones that thought they might get on TV. My five-year-old godson loved it.
The Maze House was an interactive ghost story we produced for the Sci Fi Channel.The show went out in short episodes on the Sci Fi channel in the days leading up to Halloween, apparently showing the progress of a small team investigating a haunted house in Northumberland. As the week went by events in the house got stranger and stranger until on Halloween something terrible happened to the team.
The audience were able help with the investigation, by watching web-cams, for example, or using a custom built piece of software that apparently measured levels of electro-magnetic fields round the house. Both the web-cams and the EMF monitors were rigged to produce anomalous results in conjunction with events in the show.
There was also a network of ‘hidden’ background websites that the audience could discover through search engines and links, which gave clues to the background of the hauntings and gave the audience a chance to try and warn the characters of the fate that awaited them.
I came up with the original story line and developed the concept and the show along with Finbar Hawkins and Tim Usborne. I also wrote the scripts, built the website, helped cook for the production crew and even played all 6 characters in a live web chat.
Maze House featured fantastic work from all concerned, especially the actors (including John Millington, of course) and proved extremely popular with the Sci Fi Channel audience.
It’s the show that’s big, not the giraffe.
This was a short series of tiny animated interstitials for Nickelodeon in the UK. Originally it was going to be a chat show hosted by a Giraffe in a Spacestation (although no one can remember why) but then he had as guests a pair of Goldfish with astronomical IQs and minimal attention spans and they took over.
Nickelodeon loved the Goldfish and wanted an entire series of them, which was a problem, since while I had a lot of jokes none of them concerned short term memory loss. Any kudos are due to the animators, JonJon, and the voice talent, including Bill Nash, John Millington and Sally Hawkins among others.
I created the characters and wrote the scripts.