You probably know some movies or TV-series that were
based on a book. With Spellbinder this is different. The Spellbinder
books were based on the script, which is written by the same authors
(Mark Shirrefs and John Thomson). Both authors already worked together
before on e.g. 'The Girl From Tomorrow'. They are well known for their
scripts in Australia.
The Spellbinder books were written because of
different reasons. A first reason is to give people who couldn't see
the (entire) series a chance to read the story. Another reason is that
the authors want to encourage children to read (which stimulates
imagination etc), and since books of TV series seem to be popular with
them, the authors decided to make books of Spellbinder.
They made two books out of each series (4 in total). This was because
of the complicated storyline (and they didn't want to leave parts out).
Dividing the story into 2 different books solved that problem.
Making the books wasn't an easy job for the authors. They normally
work on scripts, which means that they only give the instructions to
all the people of the crew (e.g. for the costume designer to make an
electrical suit), while when writing a book, they had to describe
everything themselves. But after hard work, the compensation comes:
children are reading the books and I believe that there has been a
reprint of them as well.
The books of series 1 have sold old
and will not be reprinted anymore. The ones of series 2 are still
available until they get sold out as well. When you read the books,
you will notice that some parts are different from the series. This
was because they wanted the books to be finished in time (so near the
release of the series) and therefore, the authors didn't have the
episodes available for viewing. So the books are made directly from
the script. But while filming, they changed some things, because some
scenes took longer or shorter than foreseen, or because some things
weren't good when filmed. This is the main reason for the difference
between the books and the series.
The Spellbinder script is written by two authors:
Mark Shirrefs and John Thomson. Writing together isn't really an
obvious thing. Here is how they basically work:
In normal occasions, both authors write
some scenes and then they edit each other's work. In early stages, or
on difficult scenes, they sometimes both write the same scene, and
then choose the best version. So it's maybe a bit harder, but the
result can be of higher quality.
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