Contest Alert: The 90-second Newbery Film Festival

Friday, January 21, 2011

Over at Grace Li's blog, I've read that there's a video contest for students and teachers. It's the 90-second Newbery Film Festival Contest.

Any Newbery book can serve as your 90-second movie inspiration. Here are the rules according to the creator of the contest, James Kennedy:

1. Your video should be 90 seconds or less. (Okay, okay: if it’s three 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 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 at the New York Public Library in the Fall of 2011.

7. Deadline is September 15, 2011.

For more information please go to Grace Li's blog.

For inspiration on doing your video entry, use this Newbery Book: