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Showing posts with label Stone Circle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stone Circle. Show all posts

Friday, 4 March 2016

Three Fantoms and a Ghost Ship

A treasured collection
It's been a while since I posted a book review, so I thought it was about time I put that right. Recently I have been reading a selection of books from Fantom Publishing, reprinting some novelizations of children's drama serials from my childhood days. It's funny but I don't actually recall them, and the stranger part of that is the subject matter would have wholeheartedly appealed to me then, and still does.

So how did I miss them? Maybe they clashed with something else at the time and I just didn't get to know they were on, remember this was the dark ages of TV when if you missed it, you missed it. There was no catch up, DVDs or even home videos. I have attempted to track them down now on DVD but delivery has been a problem, they have yet to arrive so I can't comment on the original dramas just yet.

But the books make for excellent reading, all very enjoyable.
So what were they?

My Good Reads rating *****
Children of the Stones 
by Jeremy Burnham & Trevor Ray
Based on their HTV TV series from 1977

The first of two fantasy series written by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray for HTV. Matthew and his father Adam Brake arrive in Milbury so that Adam can perform a study of the standing stones and the stone circle that surrounds the village. Very soon they become aware that all is not as it should be in the village, but the nature of their concerns is hard to fathom since the villagers all appear to ‘happy’. Only a few newcomers to the village are not in on the greeting ‘Happy Day.’

A wonderful blend of science and superstition make this a haunting adventure that will keep you enthralled to the end, assuming they are ever allowed to escape the stones.



Raven by Jeremy Burnham & Trevor Ray
Based on their ATV TV series from 1977

The second offering to children’s drama from Jeremy Burnham & Trevor Ray. This time the focus is on an underground cave system that the government are planning to take control of and use to store nuclear waste.  Raven is a young man with a troubled background, fostered to Professor Young and his wife, who are leading a campaign to prevent the development as the cave system has unusual markings and legends that go back to the time of King Arthur.


Drawing more on the concerns of the day this adventure, still full of mystery and suspense does lose some of the fantasy element with the inclusion of the nuclear factor. This time astrology sits alongside the science which muddles the fantasy elements a bit.



The Moon Stallion by Brain Hayles
Based on his BBC TV series from 1978

It seems that King Arthur and sites of ancient superstitious belief formed the backbone of children’s drama back in the 70s. It is 1906 and the Purwell family arrive in the Berkshire Hills at the invitation of Sir George Mortenhurze so that Professor Purwell can research the sites of the legends of King Arthur. On their way there Paul and his blind sister Diana encounter the Moon Stallion, a beast that has its own myths and legends surrounding it. Mortenhurze has his own reasons to search out the Moon Stallion and along with his horse master, Todman, have other plans for night of Beltain that will put them all in danger.

The original drama and the novelization were written by Brian Hayles famous for creating the Celestial Toymaker and the Ice Warriors for Doctor Who. Although that is not the only Doctor Who link, as Diana was played by a young Sarah Sutton who was to go on to play Nyssa of Traken in the series.

Another captivating and entertaining read, which again lifts from known legends and mythology but presents them with a new twist giving a setting to an exciting adventure which proves that writing for a young audience can be both original and inspiring.   



I will certainly be looking up Fantom’s other books in this range, Sky and Return to the Stones. Look out for reviews of them in the not too distant future.

A view of my own stone circle that features heavily in my writing and games
And finally, proving that I’m not easily pleased....

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste
By Valerie Martin
Published by Nan A. Talese

The book description promised adventure at sea, a ship without a crew, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writing about the mysterious ship and a spiritualist medium.  What it actually delivered was a mishmash of short stories that barely had the legendary ship as a passing focus. It was difficult to see how the initial account of the Briggs family, which suggested a very promising and engaging start to the novel, drifted off course like the ship itself into a sea of disjointed ideas. Unfortunately this has to be one of the most disappointing books that I’ve read in recent years.

That just leaves me to sign off this blog post by saying, "Happy day".

* This post has been updated to correct the fact that "Raven" was produced by ATV rather than HTV that produced "Children from the Stones" after viewing the Network release of the original series.
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Tuesday, 8 July 2014

Postcards from Miltonburg

Over on Karl's Facebook page I've been running a series of 'Postcards from Miltonburg'. I've included one or two on this blog from time to time to give some colour to recent posts. But it's not an easy thing to achieve living in a suburb of London, to generate a series of photos that would fit a theme of Ye Olde Worlde. You have to avoid modern housing and constructions, people clothed anachronistically for the period you want to represent, buses and cars thundering past, in fact anything that breaks the spell.

This really leaves me with very few options locally, just the local park, hopefully when there are not too many people about and a few holiday photos that reside in the collection that can be adopted and manipulated.

Parsloe's Park has become the edge of the woods around Miltonburg, photographed from very tight angles to avoid parts of the Becontree Estate in the distance popping up through the trees. Photos in the collection come in a variety of shapes and sizes depending on how much I've had to crop. A visit to Cornwall gave me images of Bodmin Moor and Tintagel which have found their way into the collection along with The Bishop’s Palace in Lincoln.

That's all well and good, but not only is this world from the books Olde Worlde, it's also somewhere else in the universe, with a different sun, planets and moons in the sky and hence different light.

So now we need the additional tweaks - I need to adjust the brightness, contrast, colour depth and tone of the picture. A few years back that would have been quite a task. Getting the photos printed and then scanned and the amount of processing effort to get them adjusted based on what you had to work with in the first place would have been incredible. The photo editing tools were out there, but I find I could spend hours in front of the pc struggling with these tools not really knowing what was going on and not having the time to work through and comprehend some of the tutorials.



Now we have these mobile phones devices which do just about everything except make the morning coffee. (I’m not much of tea drinker.) They have apps, which are quite simple and quite powerful for image manipulation that would have taken some computers from my youth ages to achieve and process. There are quite a few of these apps out there but I’ve found PEStudio (Photo Effect Studio) does just about everything I need from cropping, re-colouring,  light manipulation plus the odd special effect thrown in for good measure. However I cannot find it the App Store any longer to tell you who made it, and there are no credits on the app that I can find. However I’m sure there are many others that can provide the same. And what’s more the image is transformed into a whole other world within a matter of minutes allowing me to post it direct to the page in question. So different from how things used to be.

Dungeon in Bishop’s Palace (Lincoln) becomes the Dungeon in Esmay

The Hurlers in the distance on Bodmin Moor (Cornwall) becomes Karl’s long walk home

Parsloes Park (Dagenham) with some cropping becomes secret way to Gerranthaul’s

View from Tintagel Castle (Cornwall) becomes a coastal climb for Karl & Spiker

Own model stone circle becomes gifted with special Solstice light

Karl's adventures are available in paperback and on the Kindle from Amazon.

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Saturday, 18 June 2011

Archive Collection – Stone Circle

I know I’ve shown the stone circle a couple of times but I realised that I had never actually talked about it. So, just to put the record straight or curved as the case may be here goes...

The stone circle came about around the same time as I was making the water mill when I had a lot of wall filler mixed up which I couldn’t keep. 




The question was what to do with it; I didn’t have any other models on the go at the time which were ready for wall filler to be added. Rather than waste it, I looked around for ideas as to what to do with it. I had been watching a lot of ‘Robin Of Sherwood’, and some of the scenes featured a stone circle, and with ‘Magical Ring’ and from ‘Clannad’ being one of the albums I often model to it was quite inevitable what came to mind. Oh and not to forget the ‘Doctor Who’ adventure ‘The Stones of Blood’, which must have been in the mental mix somewhere.

The base was a sheet of corrugated card board, and the stones themselves were small off cuts of foam board stuck together, some of the stones were single pieces of foam board, others would have had extra pieces stuck to them to add extra thickness in parts. These were quickly stuck down in a circle, with top pieces placed to make cap stones. I would probably have used quicker drying super glue as I had a pot of filler to use up before it set. Then I liberally plastered the mix over the arranged foam board pieces, ensuring that the surfaces had some curious textures.


Once all this had dried the base was covered with PVA glue and sprinkled with saw dust to add a first level of ground texture.

The whole lot was then painted, in those days all I was just using the Games Workshop paints, so these would have been the colours used.

Various green shades for the base, along with black, white and some of their grey mixes for the stones. Those early paints although having wonderful names were never labelled on the pots in those days, so my memory fades and some have been renamed since I believe.

Additional green flock was then added with more PVA glue, along with some scenic foliage.  I used the oasis foam for flower arranging on the front garden part of the watermill to allow model trees to be poked in at will. Small slithers of the oasis were shaved from the blocks of the foam and glued and pressed down in patches on the base of the stone circle. You can clearly see them around some of the stones where the ground work is a sort of brown-green colour and a different texture.




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