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Artist/Animator Interview

29/8/2012

2 Comments

 
PictureTom Johnson directing a member of the cast
Very shortly I plan to release the third and final part of the animated cat and mouse trilogy of short promotional films that began with A Gripping Tail and continued with The Purr-fect Crime. I thought it was time to praise the excellent hard work of my son Tom Johnson who has been responsible for almost all the artistic presentation of Niedermayer & Hart. This is the first blog interview I've ever done! Here goes!

Martin: Please tell us a little bit about yourself.
 
Tom: I studied Fine Art (Painting) at Wimbledon School of Art and spent three or four years afterwards doing various jobs to pay the bills as well as putting on a few shows in and around
London. I've been working full-time as an art teacher and running an art department over the last four years but have continued to produce art work as well as doing some open studio
exhibitions. My work has mainly been commissioned portraiture. I still paint people but have stopped taking on commissions for the time being because of the limited time I have.
 
Martin: Where did the idea of making an animation to promote the book come from?
 
Tom: I'd been running a local community art project the previous year and the theme had been stop-motion animation, so it was a medium I'd been experimenting with already. I've always loved the animations of Ray Harryhausen - in particular the famous fighting skeletons scene from Jason and the Argonauts.  So animation was something that I'd always wanted to try, and I think it was my mother who suggested it might be fun to do an animation to promote
Niedermayer & Hart.
 
Picture
Martin: Why did you choose two cute characters to promote a fairly dark and disturbing horror/thriller?
 
Tom: The cat and mouse theme immediately conjured-up a sort of Tom and Jerry rivalry - the idea is that the book (because there's only one copy) is compulsive reading and unputdownable - they both want to get their hands on it.

Martin: Art imitating life then!

Tom: You hope!

Martin: Alright, carry on!

Picture
Tom: There's no tie-in to the actual plot of Niedermayer & Hart at all. Their characters developed as I made them out of plasticine, although I did have an idea about how I wanted them to look.  I often doodle cartoon cats and mice.  Their personalities really began to emerge once I'd started shooting. You feel that although there's some animosity between them they reluctantly accept each other too.
 
Martin: How long does it take to make each animation, start to finish?

Tom: After making the figures and the initial set-building and painting, and making the tiny props for the characters to use, I suppose the first two (A Gripping Tail and The Purr-fect Crime) took about two whole days, to shoot the scenes and then to edit everything together before adding sound effects, music and all the titles and credits. The third instalment took longer - more like four days - because of a few more complicated and fiddly bits that were involved.
 
Martin: What kind of software did you use to make the films? 

Tom: A Gripping Tail was made with a piece of software called ZU-3D on a PC, but the second and third were made with i-Stop Motion on the Mac. There's not much difference between the picture quality of the animations but I found i-Stop Motion easier to use and there were more options when it came to the post-production. 

Martin: How did you do the sound effects, voices etc? 

Tom: I recorded all of the sound effects myself, straight into the computer, with the exception of the music tracks (although you can hear my ukulele and some singing in the animations). I spent quite a bit of time recording and re-recording sounds whilst sitting on the sofa, watching clips over and over again. Sometimes I had to overlap several sound effects in order to get it right. It's the kind of thing you need to have a bit of privacy for - anyone except for my girlfriend that heard me making snoring-cat sounds and little mouse noises would think I'd gone barmy.

Martin: Most people don't know you like I do!

Tom: Thanks, Dad.

Martin: Would you like to do more animations in the future, or have you had enough of  messing around with plasticine?
 
Tom: I'd like to do some more in the
future but my main priority right now is my painting.

Picture
Martin: You also designed the book cover for Niedermayer & Hart. What did that entail?
 
Tom: I made a large watercolour painting of Valle Crucis in North Wales for the main image and for this I had to work from a composite image which I made using photos of the abbey taken in summer along with winter photos taken a few years ago in Kent when we had a heavy snowfall. When I was happy with the finished piece I scanned the painting into the computer.  I used Photoshop to set up the dimensions for the front and back covers as well as the spine allowing extra space for what the printers call "bleed" and for crop marks. I added in the text and after a lot of adjustments the file was sent off to the printer. We had to do one extra tweak after seeing the first proof, but in the end I was really happy with the result.
 
Martin: So, what are you working on at the moment?
 
Tom: I've just completed a portrait which I've been working on for some time. The actual time that I've spent on it probably only amounts to a few weeks work, but over the same period I've worked on various commissions and generally been very busy with my day job, so it's a great feeling to finally get it finished. I've also got a few more paintings in the pipeline which I'm looking forward to working on.
 
Martin: Thanks very much, Tom - both for taking part in this interview and for all the help you've given me with the book. Without your help the finished product most certainly wouldn't have had such a professional look. I know I'm probably biased but I think it's a lovely book to look at and hold - a real thing of beauty. 

Please take a look at Tom's website at www.tomjohnsonart.com

2 Comments

Curry

22/8/2012

1 Comment

 
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If you order a curry in South Wales, you will generally be asked if you want it "Half and half?" This is shorthand for half rice, half chips. The Welsh love chips. My late father used to quip that because the Welsh ate so many chips they had developed square backsides. When I moved to London in my late teens and ordered my first curry, I was rather surprised by the bemused response I received from the waiter when I asked for a "Medium chicken and mushroom half and half." I wondered if he was from some remote part of the sub-continent with unique dietary habits. Nope, he'd just never been to Wales!
 
My older brother led me to my first curry house when I was about thirteen or fourteen. He ordered me a mild one and I managed about three mouthfuls before my head felt like it was about to spontaneously combust. Ian, who has always had a good appetite, ate two curries that lunchtime. Sitting opposite, I watched him put away the food with immense respect whilst pouring the contents of the water jug down my burning throat. However, hot food is something you definitely get acclimatised to.
 
I think I can safely say that over the next fifteen years I probably had at least one or two curries a week. No real surprise that Chicken Tikka Masala has ousted Fish and Chips from its number one spot as the UK's favourite takeaway. However, I never went really hot! I only ever attempted a Madras once and I'd never mess around with a vindaloo or above. I can still remember the particular flavour of the vegetable curry they used to serve at Mother India on Lower Clapton Road, Hackney, where I lived for a number of years. I've tried many times to re-create that taste, got close a few times, but never quite got there.
 
When we moved out of London to a village in East Sussex in 1987 - just before the hurricane struck - we were horrified to discover that the nearest Indian restaurant was six miles away! And what's more, it turned out to be a pretty mediocre one too!
 
Flippin' 'eck, this was serious!
 
Then our friend Anne came to the rescue. She kindly lent us her copy of Indian Cookery by Madhur Jaffrey. Anne (like us) didn't have one of those kitchens where the cookery books are kept in fine pristine condition, and I recall the book was already well-used with a lot of curry stains on its pages. A humorous person by nature, in reference to this she joked that it was a "Scratch and sniff edition!"
 
Believe me, that book saved our lives!
 
Eventually, after many months, Anne asked for it back. The book had become such a part of our culinary life that confronted with separation we took the only possible alternative there was to running away from home with it - yes, we bought a copy! Ours wasn't the scratch and sniff edition, however over time it has gradually been converted into one. I've bought other Indian Cookery books over the years but to be honest I've never come across better recipes. The book came out to accompany Madhur Jaffrey's classic series on Indian Cookery for the BBC in 1982. It is a jewel!
 
Know what? After writing this, I could murder a curry.


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Dandelion

15/8/2012

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I've heard it said that if the humble dandelion could be found only on the remotest, most inaccessible slopes of the Himalayas, it would be the most highly prized flower in the world. Ever taken a good look at one and how superbly formed it is? Like so many of the truly wonderful 'ordinary' things that surround us, I often have to remind myself to look more closely - because so much of what we consider to be familiar is barely 'seen' in our daily rush. This gift of sight is indeed a strange phenomenon! We human beings so often fail to see that which is right beneath our noses. 

I lay in bed just after waking, just before 7am this morning beside my wife. We've been together for over thirty years. We met when she was nineteen and I was twenty. Both of us were a bit bleary-eyed after several busy days, and with less sleep than we operate at our best on. I'm not quite sure how it came about but we started discussing some of our favourite lines of poetry, and perhaps because I've not long returned from Swansea, Dylan Thomas came to mind. I  recited some of the first lines from Under Milk Wood, "It is Spring, moon-less night in the small town, starless and bible-black ...". Jude quoted, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower ". She remarked, "Imagine how pleased we'd be with ourselves if we ever wrote a line that good?"
 
She's absolutely right of course.
 
But you know what? I think the thing I'm most pleased about is having a partner I wake up next to every morning who doesn't think I'm barking mad if I feel like discussing poetry at 6.50am.


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Lore's Tale

8/8/2012

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Lore's Tale by Lore Bolwell and Peter F Bolwell

Lore Weil was born in Prague in 1925 of Austrian Jewish parents. Her father Franz served during the First World War in an elite regiment of the Hapsburg army, was promoted to the rank of Oberleutnant and decorated by Emperor Karl. Lore's mother Angela was multi-lingual and had attended a 'finishing school' in England. Ironically, her father, something of an Austrian nationalist, was greatly disappointed when he returned home after WW1 to discover himself in the new state of 'Czechoslovakia'. Lore had one brother Herbert who was born in 1930, the year the family moved to Dessau in Germany. She was seven when Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and it was around this time that she began to be aware of the anti-semitism surrounding her. Within a few years the comfortable, middle-class life they had previously known became a thing of the past for the Weil family. The children and their mother were in Austria at the time of the Anschluss in 1938. There then followed several hurried changes of location to try and evade the Nazis who were busy gobbling-up Europe. They briefly returned to Prague and realising it was unsafe, eventually found themselves stranded in Holland at the outbreak of World War Two. They were awaiting word from Franz to follow him to England where he had gone on ahead in the hope of setting-up a new home for his family. He would never see his wife again.

At this point Lore's ordeal truly begins as she attempts to survive in a Europe that is increasingly hostile and dangerous to her personally simply because of her ethnicity. The story, as told without any hint of sensationalism by Lore to her son Peter and which he has recorded in the first person is, like every Holocaust testimony, horrifically shocking, not just for its brutality and inhumanity but because of its close proximity to us. The people in her story don't always behave in the way we expect them to, the bad guys aren't always bad and the good guys sometimes act in the most despicable ways. The enemy wasn't some barbaric horde back at the dawn of recorded history but the civilisation that gave us Mozart and Beethoven, Erich Maria Remarque, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pastor Niemoller, Meister Eckhart, Albert Schweitzer, Freud and Einstein (to name but a very few). These events happened only a short distance away from the country that I myself call home, and it's sobering to think that I was born only a decade after the end of the War in Europe.

I have known Peter Bolwell, Lore's son, for a number of years. He is a committed Quaker, an Esperantist and someone whose views I am personally always prepared to listen to. He has a terrific sense of humour, plays several instruments, and has a strange and inexplicable appreciation for some really quite bad Spaghetti Westerns. Although he is invariably busy, I have always found him to be extremely generous with his time. He kindly helped edit and proof-read both of my novels, so it was my great pleasure (utilising recently developed formatting skills) to help him set up the ebook version of Lore's Tale.

This short, well written book, a personal memoir, is an important snapshot of one of the most dreadful and degrading periods in human history. We must never forget the stories of those like Lore who suffered in ways that are almost unimaginable for us now to comprehend. Indeed, should we ever forget, then we who have been forrtunate enough to have enjoyed mostly peace and harmony in our lifetimes are in grave danger of once again repeating the mistakes of the past. Some years ago I taught Engish as a foreign language at a summer school to a nice bunch of Belgian teenagers. I read them Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori - they were noticeably moved by the words. Yet in the discussion we had afterwards, the consensus of opinion was that such cataclysmic events as WW1 and WW2 could never happen again in Europe. I felt quite shaken by their confidence and told them that I sincerely hoped they were right about this - that idea of 'never again' still troubles me!

Lore's Tale by Peter F Bowell

Peter Bolwell's email address: piffkin@gmail.com

Paper version - price £3.00. Available to purchase from the author via his email address, or by ordering from any good bookshop quoting the reference ISBN: 978-0-9571588-0-1

Lore's Tale Amazon Kindle - price 77p ($0.99)


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Summer Chill

1/8/2012

1 Comment

 
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I'm doing a bit of a promotion throughout the month of August and reducing the price of Niedermayer & Hart on Amazon and Smashwords by 40%. I think the book makes a good summer read (I suppose I would say that, wouldn't I?). Summertime, with its longer hours,  is especially handy for those with over-fertile imaginations where extra daylight can help to lessen the tension caused by the dark and dastardly goings on in the book.

I've been giving pricing quite a bit of thought. I could make the book free of course and hopefully get lots of downloads that might artificially massage its rankings, which in turn might produce lots of positive reviews that would then generate paid sales - but you know what? I'm not going to! The reason being this: I don't personally believe that anyone should receive no recompense at all for their hard work (unless they themselves choose that path, of course!). To my mind, giving stuff away for free can't ultimately be good for anyone, least of all independent authors. And anyway, do the people who download all these free books actually bother to read them? Some do, I don't doubt it. However, in the fairly short time I've been twittering and involved with indie authors, I could have furnished my Kindle for PC with enough reading material for the next two or three years easily. Yes, I've people-pleased and taken their books when Twitter pals have been doing Free Day Promos - but I have to ask myself, is this really helping them, and perhaps more importantly is it helping independent publishing, or is it helping to wreck it from the inside? I'm not at all sure!

I'm certain that the big publishing houses aren't concerned that indie authors give their stuff away for free. They know full well that the reading public will always want whatever is currently flavour of the month, and if you want 'flavour of the month' I guarantee you'll have to pay for it.

Like I said, I don't believe it's right to give work away for nothing. Perhaps I feel this way after many years in the theatre where experienced actors are constantly being asked to work for all kinds of reasons for either no money or less money than they truly deserve, "It's an ensemble piece ... There's not much money in the budget ... Stephen would love you to do it, and knows you'll be brilliant in the part ... I'm afraid the entire budget has gone to pay for the star and everyone else is getting paid Equity minimum ..."

Niedermayer & Hart is 162,000 words long, was seriously considered over several months by two major publishing houses and in the process received considerable praise from quite a number of people in the publishing world (I have the letters to prove it!). When it didn't happen, I felt utterly crestfallen and didn't write again for ages afterwards. Some time later, after I'd completed another book, it was my wife who suggested I might reconsider N & H - I read it, realised it was still a decent read but re-drafted it because I felt my style had improved after the exercise of writing book number two. I then had it proof-read by three people that I trust implicitly.

The trade paperback is (IMHO) a beautiful looking book and I've organised a few compos and promotional giveaways. However, this has, and will always be, limited to a certain number of copies at a time. The paperback sells for £12.99; unfortunately some people have contacted us to say they've been having trouble ordering it from Amazon, and if you find this is the case for you it is easily available through most other sources including via PayPal through this website.

The ebook is easily available from Amazon and Smashwords and is now at the special August-only price of £1.96 UK (price including VAT) $2.99 US. I hope as many of you as possible will take advantage of this offer and enjoy reading the book.


1 Comment
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    Available in paperback and ebook:
    Amazon.co.uk
    Amazon.com
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    Available in paperback and ebook:
    Amazon.co.uk
    Amazon.com
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    Available in paperback and ebook:
    Amazon.co.uk
    ​Amazon.com
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