Good news! We’re bringing the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival to San Francisco this May! It’s screening at the San Francisco Public Library main branch (Koret auditorium, lower level) on Tuesday, May 14, 6-7:30 pm. And it’s free! Bring the kids!

My co-host will be three-time Newbery honoree Jennifer Holm, who has won Newbery honors for Turtle in Paradise (2011), Penny From Heaven (2007), and Our Only May Amelia (2000). She and her brother Matt Holm are also the masterminds behind the Babymouse books. I’m honored to host the film festival with her!

But wait, what is the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival? It’s an annual video contest I started in 2010, in which kid filmmakers create movies that tell the story of a Newbery award-winning book in 90 seconds or less. No book trailers; the fun is compressing the entire plot into 90 seconds. These homemade movies are ingenious, hilarious, impressive, and surprising!

This film festival is in its third year, screening annually in New York City, Chicago, Portland and now San Francisco. This special San Francisco screening will be of the best movies of the hundreds I’ve received since the festival began—from a shadow-puppet version of Grace Lin’s 2010 Honor Book Where The Mountain Meets the Moon to a full-scale musical of William Pene du Bois’ 1948 Medal Winner The Twenty-One Balloons. For instance, check out one of the hits of last year’s festival, a Muppet-style retelling of Arnold Lobel’s 1973 Honor book Frog and Toad Together:

Come to marvel at the ingenuity of these young filmmakers . . . and maybe even to get ideas for your own 90-Second Newbery movie for next year’s film festival! Deadline is December 10, 2013. Full details, rules, and information about the 90-Second Newbery here.

(Wondering what a 90-Second Newbery screening is like? Here’s a recap of last year’s raucous screening in New York, co-hosted by me and kidlit titan Jon Scieszka (The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales), with special guests Newbery winners Kate DiCamillo (The Tale of Despereaux), Rita Williams-Garcia (One Crazy Summer), and Margi Preus (Heart of a Samurai).

In San Francisco, I will also be appearing at Books Inc. in Laurel Village on May 10 from 6:30-7:30 pm, where I’ll be doing readings from The Order of Odd-Fish.

(You might be wondering: hasn’t it been a while since I put out a book? And the answer is yes, it’s been a while. But that’s why I haven’t been blogging lately, I’m finishing something new, and I don’t want to ruin my momentum . . . !)

OH AND: Speaking of appearing at bookstores, and children’s literature, my dear old friend Betsy Bird of the New York Public Library (and the brains behind the influential Fuse #8 kidlit blog on SLJ) will be appearing at Oak Park’s Magic Tree Bookstore this Thursday, April 25 at 6:30 pm to promote her brand-new picture book, Giant Dance Party (illustrated by Brandon Dorman), which has already garnered rave reviews. Check out this cover:

Here’s Betsy talking on her blog about the book. Anyway, on Thursday I’ll be at the Magic Tree and you should be there too! If there’s someone who knows children’s books, it’s Betsy. She’s sat on the Newbery committee and she was the children’s librarian at the NYPL for years, doing storytime after storytime, so if anyone knows what makes for a good read-aloud, it’s Betsy!

I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this book for Lucy and Ingrid. So, Chicagoans and Oak Parkers, I’ll see you at the Magic Tree this Thursday. And San Franciscans, see you at the 90-Second Newbery in May!

It’s my birthday today, and so I’m staying off the Internet and hanging out with my family. But I received this great piece of Order of Odd-Fish happy-birthday art from Jacob of Portland and I want to share it with the world! I was lucky enough to meet Jacob when I was in Portland for the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival a few weeks ago. He was one of the remarkable animators behind this Frog and Toad Together. Thanks so much for the fantastic picture, Jacob!

Today I went to the Adler Planetarium with Heather, Lucy, and Ingrid. Heather took this picture of us on the rocket simulator. Lucy and I are ready for swashbuckling adventures in the stars! (Ingrid seems a bit more apprehensive . . . )

Can’t think of a better way to spend my birthday!

All right! The snow is dumping on Chicago today. The screenings of the 2nd Annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival are triumphantly finished. Thanks, public libraries of Chicago, Portland, and Tacoma, plus New York’s Symphony Space, for hosting them, and thanks to everyone who came!

Here are links for if you want to read recaps of how the film festival went in Chicago and New York City (updated! with photos of Jon Scieszka in a muscleman costume, arm-wrestling Kate DiCamillo, and video of Jon and me singing the 90-Second Newbery theme!).

Now that the film festival season is behind me for now, I can concentrate on actually writing books again. So I’ll be taking a short break from the blog, just a week or two. In the meantime, here are pictures of my daughter Lucy Momo (above, with best friend Ezra) and below a picture of my daughter Ingrid!

We’re having two screenings of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival this weekend: Saturday (2/23) in Tacoma, WA, at the Tacoma Public Library, and two screenings on Sunday (2/24) in Portland, OR at the Central Library downtown. My co-host on Saturday is author Kevin Emerson (The Lost Code and more) and my co-host Sunday is author Dale Basye (Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go). Check events sidebar for details!

Last time I highlighted 90-Second Newbery videos I received from Portland. Today I want to focus on Tacoma. I previously featured two versions from Tacoma of Frog and Toad Together, by Sara Truscott and Jake & Nikki, respectively. But those aren’t the only fantastic videos I got from Tacoma!

For instance, check out the above 90-second adaptation of the very first Newbery Medal winner, The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon (1922!). It takes guts to adapt this 500+ page book, but Jennings Mergenthal and Max Lau of Tacoma were up to the task. With stop-motion clay, no less! I loved it! The running gag about the Crusades had exquisite comic timing. The absurd “India” conclusion to the “Exploration” bit was funny too. I loved the way we could watch humanity evolve from a fish to a modern human all within seconds! And the sound effects were bang-on, too—from the clanging swords to the superheroic music when Napoleon appears.

With Max and Jennings’ permission, I tweaked the sound effects a little for the video featured above. If you want to see their original version, along with their other stop-motion clay creations, check out their YouTube channel here. Lots of great videos here!

Another standout from Tacoma was also comes with the Newbery’s inaugural year of 1922, the Honor Book The Old Tobacco Shop by William Bowen. Here adapted by a mysterious Tacoma entity known only as “Parker”:

I never read The Old Tobacco Shop, but now it’s clear I absolutely must read it as soon as possible. A boy smokes some magical tobacco and goes on a hallucinatory journey with clown-pirates? They don’t make children’s books like they used to. Looking forward to showing this on Saturday!

To see all the 90-Second Newberys I received from Tacoma this year, head over to this special page I set aside for them. Really intriguing stuff, including The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle done entirely with dogs!

I’m in Chicago right now, but in a few short hours I’ll be getting on a plane and flying to Portland, Oregon! Why? The Portland screening of the 2nd Annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is coming up this Sunday, February 24th! Co-hosted by me and Heck series author Dale Basye! We received many great submissions from the Portland area this year, and I want to feature a few of them on the blog today. (We’ll be talking about the movies from the Tacoma screening on 2/23 later.)

Above is another very enjoyable 90-Second Newbery from Portland, courtesy of the Fairview-Columbia Library’s Teen Council, of Scott O’Dell’s 1961 Newbery Medal winner Island of the Blue Dolphins. Done with homemade puppets and cardboard cutouts! Ingenious puppet work, good use of the flashlight as a spotlight, and I especially liked the exchange “Come back or I’ll be stuck on the island for 20 years!” “But it’s my fishing spear!” “Fiiiiine” and when Karana bellows “Revenge!” (Nice flying devil-fish, too.)

In a previous post I featured the two versions of Arnold Lobel’s 1973 Honor Book Frog and Toad Together I got from Portland Community Media and the Seaside Public Library (check them out!). I’ve also featured Portlanders Xela and Riley’s Ramona Quimby, Age 8 previously. You can see those, and the rest of the entries from the Portland area for 2013, here.

Thanks so much, and I’m looking forward to meeting you all in person this Sunday!

That happy crowd above? It’s the audience at last week’s Chicago screening of the 2nd Annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. It was great fun! Thanks to everyone who came! (Don’t know what the 90-Second Newbery is? Here you go.)

If you’re interested, Time Out Chicago did a feature of some of their favorite 90-Second Newbery movies from this year. Go watch them!

We filled the 385-seat Pritzker Auditorium of the Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago. Thanks to Emily Schwartz, founding impresario of The Strange Tree Group, for these pictures of the evening! We already screened the film festival in New York back in December. Don’t forget, we’re going to screen the film festival in Tacoma, WA on 2/23 and Portland, OR on 2/24!

Thanks to my co-host for the evening, Blue Balliett, bestselling author of Chasing Vermeer and other children’s books (including the upcoming Hold Fast, which I loved!). Blue was everything I could’ve asked for in a co-host, from her able banter right down to her glamorous gown, which had a black-and-white stole that was itself a sly Chasing Vermeer reference! Here we are singing the 90-Second Newbery theme song (b’garg, nobody videotaped it in Chicago! But here’s what it sounded like when Jon Scieszka and I sang it at the New York screening):

A funny thing . . . The night before the screening, I finished all my preparation and decided to settle in and watch the whole film festival screening on my computer, just to make sure all was well. I poured myself a nice glass of wine and . . . immediately spilled it all over my computer! Destroying it! With twelve hours to go before the screening!

Needless to say, I was freaking out. But thanks to my brother-in-law Chris and my upstairs neighbor David (and the fact my computer automatically backs up everything into the cloud via BackBlaze, and a couple trips to the Mac Store), I was able to pull everything together in time for the screening. But: frantic!

Here are some more choice shots from the screening. This first one is crowd response from when Chicago theater group Elephant and Worm (who did this year’s musical adaptation of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and last year’s musical adaptation of The Twenty-One Balloons) did a short audience-participation skit after their movie:

Here’s a shot from the first movie, Bookie Woogie Blog’s masterful retelling of Arnold Lobel’s 1973 Newbery Honor Book Frog and Toad Together:

The casts of many of the movies were in attendance, including Izzy, Zach, Alex, Amy, and Asher from Burley Elementary in Chicago, with whom I worked to make this 90-Second Newbery movie of Margi Preus’ Heart of Samurai entirely in Japanese, in the style of an Akira Kurosawa movie. It was great seeing them again after working so hard with them on this movie last year!

Other Chicago-area folks who showed up were Larissa Zageris’ students of Chase Elementary who made a horror-movie-trailer version of An American Plague, the Aurora Library that did a Real World version of Ingrid Law’s Savvy, and the Norborg family that made a very cute Belling the Tiger, all of which can be seen here. We also had an avant-garde version of Dark Star of Itza by my old friend Max Pitchkites (check out his Order of Odd-Fish art!) and an epic Tale of Despereaux by Play Mechanics. Not to mention another great puppet version of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH from Drummond Montessori and an assured, cinematic The Giver from Ian of Westmont, IL. And that’s just the Chicago area!

As with every 90-Second Newbery Film Festival screening, we featured some comical interludes. Now, since the Newbery Medal winner last year, Jack Gantos, spent 15 months in the federal pen over smuggling some contraband back when he was 20, I decided to investigate other Newbery winners to see if they also had unsavory pasts. Many of them did! So I decided to do a quiz about the Dark Side of the Newbery with a volunteer from the audience. All true, mind you. Can you guess the answers to the questions below?

Answers: A, B, B, and C.

We also played a game in honor of this year’s 75th Anniversary of the Caldecott Medal, in which children’s picture book author and artist Aaron Zenz faced off against a young audience member, trying to draw in 75 seconds what they think the cover of a particular obscure Caldecott-winning book might look like. (Aaron is also the paterfamilias behind the (home-schooled!) family that made some of the best 90-Second Newbery videos I’ve received: a shadow-puppet version of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, an animated version of The Black Cauldron, and this year’s aforementioned hilarious Muppets-style version of Frog and Toad Together). Here are Aaron and our young volunteer furiously drawing:

While we were waiting for them to draw their covers, we played a game of “If They Mated” with various Newbery winners:

Aaron managed to bring his many kids, whom I was delighted to meet after the show!

Now, some thanks are in order. The Chicago screening never would’ve happened without my main man at the CPL, Andrew Medlar:

The “Dark Side of the Newbery” research and “If They Mated” graphic work was courtesy of friend, librarian, and partner-in-crime Eti Berland. Thanks to Aaron Zenz for doing the 75-Second Caldecott with us. And of course thanks to everyone who made a movie this year, especially those who showed up at the screening. Thanks to the Book Table from Oak Park who showed up to sell books. And thanks to all the folks at the library who worked hard to make this a success!

The deadline for movies for the 3rd Annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is December 2013. Get cracking!

We’ll wrap this up with the closing montage we showed of all the movies we featured, plus a few extra pictures (thanks to Mark Greenberg of Mayfair Workshop for the music!)

Right now I’m working on a full recap of Sunday’s Chicago screening of the Second Annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. It should be up tomorrow!

In the meantime, here are four Order of Odd-Fish valentines in honor of today’s holiday, courtesy of our old friend Emily Bricker! Here everyone’s in character: Jo puckishly hinting at her dark divinity, Nora speaking in paranoid code, Colonel Korsakov huffing and puffing about his digestion as usual, and Sefino sternly exhorting his beloved to do something scandal-worthy with him. Wonderful stuff! Thanks, Emily!

In the past Emily has done an Odd-Fish Christmas card as well as a plush doll of Sefino, as well as drawings here and here (and a video!).

Thanks so much for this, Emily—I love it! Happy Valentine’s Day!

The sold-out Chicago screening of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is this Sunday, February 10, at the Harold Washington Library! I visited co-host Blue Balliett’s house today to work out our banter and our singing (!). Can’t make Chicago? We have screenings in Tacoma, WA (2/23) and Portland, OR (2/24) coming up! All details here.

Speaking of Tacoma, check out above this super-stylish, Wes-Anderson-esque 90-Second Newbery adaptation of Arnold Lobel’s 1973 Newbery Honor Book Frog And Toad Together, as done by Sara Truscott of Tacoma! Sara takes one of the vignettes from the book, “The List,” and makes an entire elegant, bewitching ye-ye music video around that. A brilliant stroke to make Frog and Toad young lovers. I loved all the little touches: the way she rings the doorbell, the way he answers the door, the flying-in-the-wind list special effect, “go to sleep” written out in flowers . . . this is great stuff!

UPDATE! Crazily enough, that’s not the only Frog and Toad Together adaptation I got from the Pacific Northwest! I have three more to share with you today. From Portland Community Media comes this masterful animated version of Frog and Toad Together—all five vignettes from the book, each one animated in a different style:

Wow, what a doozy this one is! Five different teams worked on animating this. “The List” is done as a silent movie with intertitles in a gentle, casual hand-drawn style. I liked the sunset effect in particular. “The Garden” was done as a three-dimensional cut-paper stop-motion movie—I loved the weird voices, the cotton clouds, and the “night” effect! The third, “Cookies,” uses sock puppets and a gorgeously elaborate set. I particularly liked Frog and Toad’s voices, the effect of going “through” the window, and the birds attacking the cookies! The fourth, “Dragons and Giants,” is an great Claymation that boasts a terrifyingly slithery snake and flying bird (I also like the totally stripped-down dialogue)! The last one, “The Dream,” is a slickly (computer?) animated, atmospheric piece that is just as dreamlike as the story. Tremendous job, Portland Community Media!

But wait, we’re not through yet! There’s also this very enjoyable Frog and Toad Together, by Jake Keister and Nikki Baldwin, which also covers all the vignettes in the book:

I love the breakneck pace at which the vignettes flash past, some in as few as 10 seconds! Now that’s compression! I especially liked the shot of Toad on the high wire above Frog. It’s all wittily done. Interestingly, Nikki and Jake use the same sort of dolls that Aaron Zenz and family used for their own breakout adaptation of Frog and Toad Together earlier this year.

Weird thing: last year I got only one Frog and Toad Together movie for the 90-Second Newbery. This year, tons! What gives? It’s a mystery! Here’s one final wonderful Frog and Toad Together adaptation for today, this time from Seaside Public Library in Seaside, Oregon:

What a great idea to do it as a silent black-and-white movie! And the music choice really made this shine, too. It’s impressive how much of the vignettes the folks from Seaside were able to get across just with movement and facial expressions. I especially liked how Frog was becoming “smaller” in the chair until Frog disappears in “The Dream.” Another winner!

I’m looking forward to seeing all you talented filmmakers at the upcoming screenings in Tacoma and Portland! Now: time to concentrate and get myself ready for this Sunday’s screening in Chicago!

The Chicago screening of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is this coming Sunday, but today let’s check out some beautiful art inspired by The Order of Odd-Fish that I found recently!

In the book, Dame Myra is the Odd-Fish knight who studies Improbable Botany. These pictures of Dame Myra’s greenhouse on the top of the lodge, and the bizarre plants one might find within, are by the young and enviably talented Thomas Kendall of London. He’s associated with the folks at the Urban Physic Garden and Registry for Wayward Plants, two groups that one associates quite naturally with improbable botany! (And indeed, they are planning a special “Improbable Botany” exhibition this summer in London, and I’m contributing a short story to their upcoming anthology based on the theme of Improbable Botany. More on that in future posts! It’s exiting stuff!)

If you want to see all these pictures on Thomas’ blog, check it out here. Above we see Thomas’ vision of the greenhouse. As he says on his blog, “Run by Dame Myra, the greenhouse at the Order of Odd Fish is filled with strange, exotic and completely unknown plants of the kind that we don’t believe exist in our world.” Beautifully done!

But that’s just the beginning! Here is some improbable botany Thomas invented for the greenhouse, a “balloon fruit”:

According to Thomas,

This plant is a parasite. It draws its nutrients from the tree it latches on to but it gets pollinated by the rare and noble gases in the air around it. It has a tiny delicate flower nestled at the heart of its leaves which has a small vacuum inside to pull in the gases. As the fruit ripens it fills with new flavorsome vapours which cause it to float. Once the fruit is mature it detaches and floats away. Harvesters cover trees in gigantic but fine nets to trap the striped fruits. Once rotten though the gas escapes and it falls to the ground with a squish and disperses the seeds.

Brilliant! I wish that was in the book! This is what I like best about seeing Odd-Fish art: the way different artists expand the world of the book according to their own interests and ideas, extending it in all sorts of interesting ways.

But Thomas isn’t done yet. Behold the Cat’s Cradle Tree:

Take it away, Thomas:

This tree grows in particularly arid areas. What appears as a barren trunk in periods of drought, sprouts vines in rain season. These vines knot and twist together to form elaborate patterns. These vines draw water and nutrients from the air and surrounding soil which fattens the trunk to maintain its life span through the dry seasons. In these seasons it returns to a bare trunk pulling in all the vines to protect them.

This makes me want to write an entire book just about Dame Myra and her adventures in a world of plants created by Thomas! One more, the Apple of My Eye:

Explanation, Thomas?

This plant is the result of nymphs mating with trees on an all-too-regular basis. Over time the trees have gained human characteristics. What was a traditional English Cox’s apple has developed eyes… Its center is filled with an apple-flavoured aqueous humour and the leaves grew eyelashes to swat away unwelcome insects.

I like a fellow who can deploy a term like “apple-flavoured aqueous humour” with such aplomb. And these sketches are all absolutely first-rate, glorious! Thanks a million, Thomas—and I hope to meet you this summer as the Improbable Botany exhibition gains steam!

I’ve met lots of talented folks through the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. Madison Ross is the thirteen-year-old mastermind behind two great 90-Second Newbery movies (adaptations of Linda Sue Park’s A Single Shard and Carl Hiassen’s Hoot). When I was visiting Rochester, NY this past November, we had the idea to record an interview together. Our twist: do it in the style of Zach Galiafanakis’ wondrous fake interview show, Between Two Ferns.

Madison and I improvised it. She has great comic timing, really nailing the passive-aggressive vibe that is the heart of Between Two Ferns. I had a ball making this with her. Watch out for Madison, she’s the real deal!

This was shot at RCTV-15 in Rochester by Joshua Bloodworth and edited by Carol White Llewelyn. Along with Deb Ross (Madison’s mother), we also shot some more straightforward interviews that aired on RCTV-15, talking about The Order of Odd-Fish, the 90-Second Newbery, being an author, etc. The interview is in three parts, and you can watch them here: Part One and Part Two and Part Three.

Thanks, Madison, Deb, Carol, Josh, and everyone at RCTV-15!