The game that I have been working on at Stormfront Studios has finally been announced! From here on out, the project that I have referred to as Ogre shale be known as The Spiderwick Chronicles.
The project is being published by Sierra and is slated to be released February 2008. Check out the press releases on Kotaku and Gamasutra. It is also being developed as a film by Paramount; my friend Hans is working as a creature animator on this project at Tippett. Here is the trailer:
Or you can go here for a Quicktime version.
Serialization FTW!
The Spiderwick Chronicles film and game are both based on a series of serialized children’s booklets of the same title, much in the same vein as the Lemony Snicket booklets. Out of curiosity, I did an estimate on the total word count of all five Spiderwick books; somewhat to my expectation I discovered that it was approximately the same length as Roald Dahl’s classic The BFG. However, each of the Spiderwick books retails for a price greater than that of The BFG! Now, they are hardcovers, so lets say that they’re actual profit margin per book is the same as that of a paperback The BFG… they make five times the profit per word! I think this is a lesson that any creative type should pay attention do if they are interested in monetizing their IP—serialization for the win!
OK, so what was the estimated word count of THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES? The first Harry Potter was 78,000 words and it was nearly the shortest …
The Spiderwick Chronicles is approximately 53,600 words in total. There are also about 110 full page black and white illustrations, 10 full page color illustrations, and I’m going to guess approximately 100 quarter page black and white illustrations.
ok so i read the books wen i was younger……… they were great. but what from i have seen from the movie trailer is totally horrible!!! they added so much its soooo sad. the books were fine the way they were… why do they have to ruien the movie by adding things that never happened in the books!! the game will be awsome to play but im NOT looking forword to the movie.
The problem with any adaptation, especially an adaptation from a book, is that the director or creative team are going to be adding their own interpretation of the material, and this might not mesh with the interpretation that you had. I’ve heard that the movie turned out pretty good. Because The Spiderwick Chronicles has so many illustrations, as well as full color supplementary books such as The Field Guide, I think that the visual image in the mind of most readers will be well aligned with the visuals presented in the film and game. As for story differences, I think that the movie is pretty close to the books, in fact it is not that they’ve added so much stuff, so much as they’ve removed stuff such as the Dwarf city, the quarry, the junk yard, and the school gymnasium. We tried to add some of this flavor back into the game by having Dwarf artifacts, a quarry, and a changeling that you can fight.
??!!אני לא מבין פה איזה משהו ואני צריך פה עזרה.מישהו יכול לעזור לי