The 90-SECOND NEWBERY Film Festival

We had a star-studded 90-Second Newbery Film Festival screenings at the main branch of the New York Public Library on November 5 (read a full recap here) and the Harold Washington library in Chicago on November 16 (recap here). The next 90-Second Newbery screening will be March 3, 2012 in Portland, Oregon at the downtown Central Library, 3-5 pm. See events sidebar for details.

I am pleased to announce the 90-Second Newbery Video Contest!

It’s a film festival curated by me and Betsy Bird of the NYPL and the School Library Journal’s Fuse #8 blog.

The Newbery Medal is the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The American Library Association has awarded it every year since 1922. That’s a lot of Newbery winners. Maybe too many? You can’t read all 90 books! (Well, maybe you can.)

But you do have 90 seconds to spare, right? So here’s our contest, open to anyone: make a video that compresses the story of a Newbery award-winning book into 90 seconds or less.

It turns out that any book, no matter how worthy and somber, becomes pleasingly ludicrous when compressed into 90 seconds. Please watch our very first entry, in the video above: a 90-second version of A Wrinkle in Time (1963).

Teachers, here’s a fun project that will get your students reading Newbery winners. Students, here’s an excuse to mess around with video equipment. Librarians, here’s an activity to do with your teen advisory boards. Anyone can enter. Everyone wins!

There’s loads of great material among the Newbery winners, ripe for a ridiculously compressed 90-second treatment. The exploding volcano of Krakatoa in The Twenty-One Balloons (Medal Winner, 1948)! Karana’s brother getting torn apart by wild dogs in Island of the Blue Dolphins (Medal Winner, 1961)! The terrifying zombie-warriors of The Black Cauldron (Honor Book, 1966)!

Yes, that’s right: Newbery Honor books are fair game too. So if you want to do The Cricket in Times Square (1961) or indeed The Story of Appleby Capple (1951), then go for it (Come on, everyone knows the story of Appleby Capple, right? Right?!).

Indeed, this is a good excuse to snoop through old, forgotten Newbery winners. Many of them are unjustly forgotten. Even better: many more are forgotten for a reason. Not naming names, but some Newbery award winners are absolute stinkers, or even slightly offensive! But I have a feeling they’ll become delightful again if accelerated to 90 seconds or less.

In that spirit, we’re particularly excited to see videos that will actively mess with their subjects.

Everyone loves the tender, heartbreaking Bridge to Terabithia (1978), but you know what might make it even better? A 90-second machinima version done with the characters in the video game Halo (Confused? Here’s a Halo machinima version of Hamlet.)

Or how about breaking out the knights-and-dragons Legos for a stop-motion Lego video of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village (2008)? Don’t think it can be done? Check out this stop-motion Lego version of the greatest story ever told, Super Mario Bros.

Or even, dare I dream, Charlotte’s Web done in the nightmarish style of David Lynch’s Eraserhead? Sign me up.

If the film is sufficiently ingenious, we might even bend the rules. Okay, I admit it: for years I’ve wanted to see the rodents of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh (1972) fight their counterparts in The Tale of Despereaux (2004). Rat-fights make for gripping cinema!

Another title ripe for crossover? When You Reach Me (2010), with its myriad references to A Wrinkle in Time. What happens if we tweak its climax so that the host of “The $20,000 Pyramid” turns out not to be Dick Clark, but IT of Camazotz? Make it so, people.

Look, the American Library Association and I have had our disagreements. Ever since I exposed them as a bloodthirsty cult of obscene troglodytes, I’ve felt a definite chill from them. And it didn’t help when I tackled Neil Gaiman at the ALA conference and wrestled away his Newbery for The Graveyard Book (2009). People can be sensitive! I’m hoping that this “90-Second Newbery” Video Contest will mend fences.

So, the rules in brief:

1. Your video should be 90 seconds or less. (Okay, okay: if it’s two minutes long but absolute genius, we’ll bend the rules for you. But let’s try to keep them short.)

2. Your video has to be about a Newbery award-winning (or Newbery honor-winning) book. Here’s a list of all the winners.

3. Just to be clear: we’re not looking for book trailers. We’re looking for full-on dramatizations, with mostly child actors, that manage to tell the entire story of a book in an ridiculously short amount of time.

4. Your video must condense the plot of the book in 90 seconds or less. Again, exceptions will be made for something really ingeniously bonkers, but it has to be related to a Newbery winning book.

5. Upload your videos to YouTube or Vimeo or whatever and send me the link at kennedyjames [at] gmail [dot] com. Make the subject line be “90 SECOND NEWBERY” and please tell me your name, age, where you’re from, and whatever other comments you’d like to include, including whether you’d like me to link to your personal site. You can give an alias if you want; I understand privacy concerns.

6. Sending the link to me grants me (James Kennedy) the right to post it on my blog and to other websites where I sometimes post content (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and to share at public readings, school visits—and hopefully the “90-Second Newbery” Film Festival screenings!

7. The deadline for the second annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is October 29, 2012.

Now go, dust off your beloved copy of Song Of The Pines: A Story of Norwegian Lumbering in Wisconsin by Walter & Marion Havighurst (1950), and make me a movie!

James Kennedy is the author of the young adult fantasy The Order of Odd-Fish, which did not win the Newbery (or did it?). He lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters. Here is his blog.

Posts about the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival: