World premiere of bestselling author Kate Mosse's The Ship of The Dead 'motion comic' is coming to Ports Fest

And her works have, not surprisingly, been translated for stage and screen.

But this year’s Ports Fest, the city’s annual celebration of arts and culture, is to play host to something new – the world premiere of a ‘motion comic’ adaptation of her short story, The Ship of the Dead.

This classic ghost story has been reimagined by a local team of internationally celebrated creatives including Kate, her husband Greg, who is also a playwright and novelist, as well as Emmy-nominated producer Lou Doye, and star of the comic book world Andy Lanning who has worked on both DC and Marvel titles – notably co-creating the Guardians of The Galaxy team.

While the story is drawn from Kate’s 2013 collection The Mistletoe Bride & Other Haunting Tales, she says: ‘Greg is very much the driving force behind this because he works in so many different media and I am really interested in how you extend reading and a love of stories into different ways of telling stories. This seemed a very good way to go about it.

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‘It’s about using the very new technologies and the ways in which you could shift a reader’s or listener's perception. This is a motion book, which owes a lot more to comic books and is almost moving into video games, it seemed a really exciting thing to try and experiment with.

‘And it also puts the voice of the author – me – in a listener’s and reader’s head in a way that you can't when you're reading on a page. With audiobooks they are sometimes narrated by the author, particularly in non-fiction, but they are mostly actors for fiction.’

They have also been creating an immersive, augmented reality (AR) version of the short story – with this being a spin-off of that work.

‘The motion book version is a way of making it more accessible,’ says Kate, ‘because of course the big VR headsets aren't for everybody, and a motion book is more familiar. We've got some of the top people in the world working on this. It's been really great. It's very exciting seeing characters I've dreamt about, which come from French folklore, on the screen and on the page. It's been a real learning curve for me as it's not my area of expertise.’

Greg adds: ‘Fully immersive AR isn't for everybody, because of things like motion sickness, or even simply because it's a weird thing to be doing on the train on your way to work with the massive headset! Our AR version of The Ship of The Dead works on any old phone, and as you listen to Kate tell the story you can point your phone anywhere, and the screen will show you the 360 degree world of the story – it's an incredible thing.

‘By switching part of our resources to the motion book, we're also creating something that is accessible for people who aren't as au fait with technology, but also for people for whom a shorter thing, more bite-size, is more rewarding. Even though it's now only two dimensions, we still have all of the camera work that Hitchcock or Spielberg might put in their storyboard before they make their movie – we have that on the page because we pan and zoom and cross-fade and transition and it is an incredibly fluid way of experiencing the story.’

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The motion book makes its premiere at Storehouse 9 in The Historic Dockyards, which Kate says is fitting as she’s been spending a lot of time there recently while working on her latest novel, The Ghost Ship, which is released on July 6.

‘We're absolutely thrilled to be showing this at Ports Fest. I've been hanging around the dockyards a lot for my new novel, which is a pirate novel. I've been writing about the 17th century, but we're using technology and doing the storytelling of the future in this historic setting, so that's a lovely idea about how stories work together over all of these different technologies.

‘There were people who thought audiobooks were witchery when they came in,’ she laughs, ‘and there will be people, particularly I expect young men and boys, who maybe slightly put off by words on the printed page, but have an enormous hunger for stories which is often fulfilled through games and comic books. And as we know it's a huge market. It's to try and bring those two things together – it's all about finding new readers.’

They have already started work on moving the project along.

Greg explains: ‘We’ve already embarked upon a version that is “lettered” – the text appears on the moving images, so you can experience it just like a comic book, but it's called a motion book because the camera moves. You can therefore experience it in a way where you're not actually listening to it – if you're in a place where you've not got headphones, or it's not suitable to have the sound on, you're still getting the entire story from the letters on the page, and that's an amazing accessibility option for it.

‘We're also preparing a version in French to honour its heritage, which is a translation I'll write, and we're also prepping a Polish version to honour the more recent populations that have immigrated into the UK, particularly in Pompey.’

Explaining why they picked this story for the project, Kate says: ‘I'm not normally a short-story writer, but there were lots of things going on in our personal lives – my father was very ill – and I couldn't really be away researching for my big historical novels.

‘I write gothic and ghost story fiction anyway, and I wanted to keep writing, so I wrote different short stories. I didn't write it as a collection quite, and I took some inspiration from the Sussex and Hampshire landscape,’ the couple live in Chichester, ‘some from English folk tales – I've always been very interested in English folk tales and legends and myths.

‘And I also had my lovely uncle – he lived France and was a French teacher – he had a collection of French books which my cousin gave to me. In there was a collection of Breton folk tales. We used to go as a family on holiday to Brittany, and I was looking for something that was ghostly and slightly unnerving.

‘When we were looking for a story to use, firstly this is a self-contained story which is much better for something like this, and secondly it is properly “horror”, and it seemed like it would be a brilliant one to animate whereas some of the other stories were a bit more reflective, which is all very well on the page, but looking at someone just sitting there thinking for 20 minutes would be rather dull!’

The Ship of The Dead motion book world premiere is at Storehouse 9 in The Historic Dockyards, Portsmouth on Friday, June 30 from 7pm. The team will also share insights into how they created the adaptation. Tickets £8, to include drink on entry.

It will also be screened for free in the same location on the hour from 11am to 4pm on Saturday, July 1.

Go to portsfest.co.uk.