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!

Question: Tell me about your muses

My favorite muse is my cat, Pu. She is the inspiration behind many of my characters!

And then there is the grizzly bear I grew up watching with my parents (they are wildlife photographers). I knew someday I’d have to do a story with this bear.

Since the bear lives out in the wilds of Montana Pu finds it necessary to supervise my projects.

If you’re interested in the art and creators of picture books please read this blog. It’s the best one out there. Thanks to Jules Danielson for creating and working so hard on such an awesome blog for us all to enjoy!

It feels like it was ages ago that I finished my upcoming book, Red Sled, but I just received my first copy of the book from my editor at Atheneum. Turning through the pages reawakened the delight I had in creating this book and I am reminded and overwhelmed at what a gift it is to create my stories. I still feel like I’m that earnest little 4 year old who was so moved at seeing my first picture book. I was forever changed and sculpted by it. That first picture book not only fueled my imagination, it gave light to a lifelong passion for creating art. From the day I opened the very first book, I knew I wanted to make my own, even if I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever make that dream come true. Red Sled was a story that began long ago, around that time my imagination was first startled awake. In my childhood musings and daydreams the characters of this book kept me company. It took years for me to grab their abstract elements out of the ether and put them to paper. But I’m grateful for all the happy hours I spent chasing them down in the wandering paths of my imagination, before setting them down in just the way I would have loved as that 4 year old girl. Somewhere in this sore, achy body that little girl is smiling bright.

So I am very excited by the fact that Red Sled is soon to be coming out – November 1st to be exact! I wish I was fully recovered and could charge on ahead with life, working hard on new stories, and hitting the road to share this book with my readers. But for now, I must persevere with my treatment and embrace all the kindness that comes my way when readers reach out to me and send me well wishes. I hope readers find this book. Its creation was such a celebration for me. And I was thrilled when my editor sent me the first review – a STARRED REVIEW from Kirkus!

Here it is:

Red Sled

Written by Lita Judge
(Atheneum; ISBN: 9781442420076; November 2011; Fall catalog p. 31)

Judge’s latest may be virtually wordless, but it packs a powerful visual punch that will stick with readers long after the final page is turned. At the end of a winter day, a child props the titular sled outside a cozy cabin. A bear finds it there and sets off to enjoy the ride of all rides, joined in turn by some other forest denizens. As each joins the ride, the animals’ positions change: The bear is on his back with the rabbit perched on his feet, then he is atop the moose’s antlers, a position next occupied by an exhilarated-looking porcupine. By the end of the hill, the tower of animals on top of the sled is quite shaky and collapses, “fluoomp…….ft” in a heap. The entirety is wordless but for the carefully chosen onomatopoeic words that perfectly capture the sounds and bring the adventure to life: the “scrinch scrunch” of footsteps in new snow, the “sssssffft” of the sled on its run and the “whoa” of the animals as they enjoy the ride. When the fun is over, they return the sled to the cabin, where the child puzzles over the footprints in the morning. Though rendered simply, Judge’s pencil-and-watercolor animals are gloriously full of life and infectious joy. Readers will be hard-pressed to finish this without letting their own joy show through. Pure genius.

I hope everyone is having a good summer. Some of you may have noticed a lapse in my blog posting over the last several months. I’ve been taking a bit of a hiatus to recover for health reasons, but hope to be on the mend soon and look forward to being much more consistent with postings in the near future!

And I wanted to thank all of the students and teachers who have sent well wishes over the spring. Thank you. It means a lot to me!

Lita

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).