Video Killed the Radio Star
Regular readers of the Penguin blog will remember my yearning for legwarmers and leotards when Puffin visited the Brit School of performing arts late last year. We were scouting for talent, and found it, casting brilliant young actress Chloe St. Clair Stannard as the eponymous Sara in Melvin Burgess’ latest paperback Sara’s Face. The novel is a gritty thriller about a young girl, desperate for fame and obsessed with plastic surgery.
Today we’ve launched the first of eight mini Sara’s Face ‘webisodes’ starring Chloe on Penguin’s teen site www.spinebreakers.co.uk. As far as we know, no publisher’s tried this before. Sure, we’ve all seen snazzy online trailers but this project’s just a little bit different.
In effect, Spinebreakers.co.uk is broadcasting a mini drama-series, gradually revealing a story which both stands alone, and enhances what’s in the novel.
Much of the book consists of transcripts from Sara’s vlog. She’s always recording herself, always creating new versions of Sara to present to the camera. Melvin worked with an experienced director to adapt these so that they were suitable to use as scripts for film shorts.
But teenagers are used to myriad extras, be they bonus features on dvds or the option to customise their mii to allow them to wander off into other peoples’ games. Melvin also wrote some brand new and exclusive material, which doesn’t appear anywhere in the book, to give readers/viewers an extra insight into the story.
According to Melvin, writing on the timesonline’s book site this morning, adapting his words from page to, well, webpage, wasn’t easy. But as each new webisode is broadcast Sara, and her destructive hunger for fame, become bigger, better, and even more believable.
Here at Penguin, we’re sure the challenge will pay off. And spinebreakers (any story-surfing, web-exploring, word-loving, day-dreaming, reader/writer/artist/thinker between the ages of 13 and 18, in case you were wondering) can also enter a competition to win a state of the art DV camera by uploading their own video-rant about fame here.
Jodie Mullish, Publicity Manager, Puffin
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