When Lita and I work together on these types of things, she does all the story-boarding and then I produce something quickly to get started from and then we tweak and change things until it feels right. There are many, many iterations of tweaks and changes. To get the right feel for the animation we did a lot of experimentation. We used Adobe After Effects CS5 (mac version) for the whole thing and for the animation. Here’s what the project looks like in After Effects:

We had various ideas for the music but then I saw a snippet of Prokoviev’s Romeo and Juliet on Pianopedia. It wasn’t quite long enough so I made up the rest and recorded it and it seemed to set the right mood.

There are many video settings, and I’m not sure if I went down the optimal path, but I find it quite helpful when other people post their settings, so here’s what I did. I made the “master” copy at 1280 x 720 pixels, 29.97 frames per second, using Apple QuickTime mov format. This created a 230 MB file for just over a minute of video. Then I compressed the file using Adobe Media Encoder to an MP4 format, still 1280 x 720, but now more like 20 MB. Then I upload that to YouTube where it gets compressed again into whatever format they use.

We hope you like the video!

It contains projects and activities for Vocabulary, Music, Art and Science, and includes an author interview. The guide was created by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer, a reading specialist and children’s author (visit her Web site here).

And last week we heard that STRANGE CREATURES was picked as a featured elementary biography selection of the Junior Library Guild!

Here are a few things we picked out of the reviews so far:

“There’s much in Walter Rothschild’s story for a tyke to like, particularly the timid boy’s end run around his father’s ambitions, and Judge makes the most of the battle of wills in her humor-tinged watercolors. Wild animals pop up all over the swanky estate while portraits of ancestors glare down from their frames in disapproval of the family ado. A final note comments on Rothschild’s contribution to the burgeoning field of zoology and on the way collection practices and wildlife study have changed over the past century and a half. Primary-grade children who are encouraged (assigned?) to read a biography will find Rothschild to be one of the most engaging guys they’ve never heard of.” BCCB

“In richly colored paintings Ms. Judge shows readers …  nautiluses and octopuses, lizards and kiwis, okapis from the Congo, capybaras from Colombia, and marabou storks.” WSJ

“Energetic, expressive paintings, many with unusual perspectives, fill the pages. Not surprisingly, the odd creatures that fascinated Walter are among the most engaging characters, like the giant lizard that peers out from Walter’s mother’s lily bed. Human characters are more sketchily drawn, which emphasizes Walter’s preoccupation with the natural world…“ Kirkus Reviews

“Judge’s picture-book biography of the shy genius may encourage readers to follow their own creative ideas…” School Library Journal

Lita will have some of the original artwork from all her books and lots of studies and sketches (many for sale) along with various watercolor paintings she’s done over the last few years during our travels. And she’ll be signing books too! It’s quite a nice tour — below are a few pictures of Lita at work in her studio, and a beautiful barn in Hancock.

Please drop in and visit in case you find yourself in our neck of the woods (we’re in Peterborough, NH — number 20 on the tour map — and the tour is also in Hancock, Dublin, Jaffrey, Harrisville, and a few other towns around Mt. Monadnock). Maps are available here. Monadnock Art / Friends of the Dublin Art Colony presents the Art Tour each October during the peak of the colorful foliage season in southwestern New Hampshire. The Tour is self-directed, and it’s free!

Anybody can nominate a book (starting on October 1st), and all the books that are eligible, and deemed to be in the proper category, go to the first round judges. (Actually quite a few publishers fail to send us books so I usually get them through library loan.) Last year I was a 2nd round judge for Middle Grade/YA Nonfiction — we got to pick the one winning book from the group of finalists picked by the round 1 judges. Two years ago, I was  a panelist (round 1 judge) for non-fiction picture books, and this year I’m a round 1 judge for the Middle Grade/YA Non-fiction category. I’m thinking a lot of books will be nominated this year — seems like the numbers go up every year — so I’ll be doing a lot of reading. Last year there were some great books in this category — but amazingly, the Sibert Award winner was not even a finalist. Of course the Cybils finalists are picked before the Sibert is announced, and the criteria are different (here is the Sibert criteria).

Anyway, I grabbed this list of all the round 1 and 2 judges for Middle Grade/YA Nonfiction from our panel organizer, Susan Thomsen at Chicken Spaghetti. It includes panelists’ Twitter feeds, marked with an @ — follow them and keep up with book news and conversation.

Panelists (Round I Judges):

Karen Ball, Mrs. B’s Favorites

Sarah Mulhern Gross, The Reading Zone @thereadingzone

David Judge, Adventures at Wilder Farm

Jessica Leader, Jessica Leader @JessicaLeader

Susan Thomsen, Chicken Spaghetti @C_Spaghetti

Judges (Round II):

Edi Campbell, Crazy Quilts @crazyquilts

René Colato Laínez, René Colato Laínez, La Bloga @renecolato

David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy @largeheartedboy

Colleen Mondor, Chasing Ray, Bookslut @chasingray

Sandhya Nankani, Literary Safari, Sepia Mutiny @litsafari

The panelists in many other categories have also been announced. See the Cybils blog for details.