“A Wrinkle In Time” In 90 Seconds from James Kennedy on Vimeo.
When author James Kennedy heard that the Today Show had canceled the traditional appearance of Newbery and Caldecott Award winners in favor of reality show star Snooki (ouch!), he decided to do something positive to promote children’s literature.
With librarian Betsy Bird and the New York Public Library, Kennedy is sponsoring a video contest called “90-Second Newbery.” The contest challenges book lovers to create a video that compresses a Newbery award-winning book (or Honor book) into 90 seconds or less.
As Kennedy says, “It turns out that any book, no matter how worthy and somber, becomes pleasingly ludicrous when compressed into 90 seconds.” To get us started, Kennedy posted a video of Madeleine L’Engle’s 1963 Newbery winner, A Wrinkle in Time. I love the tessering-explanation part.
Game on! Lexie checked out the list of winners and is leaning toward Hoot by Carl Hiaasen. You can find more information about the contest here. The winning video will be shown at a special 90-Second Newbery Film Festival at the New York Public Library in the fall of 2011. Good luck!
This is so engaging! Pure genius.
Love it! Definitely on the top of our summer list! Thanks.
Oh dear, I was grinning through most of that video. 🙂
I haven’t made a whole lot of progress with L’Engle. I got sidetracked by my Jasper Fforde and Anne Lamott books. However, over the weekend, I found a nonfiction, new-to-me L’Engle book (A Stone for a Pillow) at a used bookstore. So, I’ll probably move to that next. I love finding treasures at used bookstores.
I wish I had more encouraging feedback about waiting at Georgetown Cupcakes, but the only time we could stomach the wait was for my birthday. Every other time we came, looked at the line and changed our mind. Will you be around on a weekday, during the day? That might work. Have your kids visited your old DC haunts before?
The rickshaws are definitely only in the busy downtown area, but there are more than I expected.
Of course, this is the book I would have chosen as well – but these kids did a better job than I could have! I’m probably 20 years older than them, but I wonder if they’d be my friends?!?