One Evening in Maine
We were all wide-eyed readers once–even the picture book creators that are making eyes widen today. It was grand to watch picture book creators Cathryn Falwell, Melissa Sweet, Charlotte Agell, Lisa Jahn-Clough, and Chris Van Dusen smile sheepishly and gleefully when meeting Jane McCloskey at the Maine Humanities Council’s celebration of the 60th Anniversary of the picture book, One Morning in Maine. As the celebration was called One Evening in Maine, Jane McCloskey, read a selection from her book Robert McCloskey: A Private Life in Words and Pictures about an...
Read MoreTrain Spotting with Lisa Jahn-Clough
Curious City follows the train of story to create discovery tools for children’s books and young adult. We followed Lisa Jahn-Clough’s May 2013 release of Nothing But Blue (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) right to the tracks this week. Mark Mattos Photography and I drove through back streets, visited abandoned lots, and walked down secret wooded paths, beaches, and finally train tracks to find photo locations for images for the book trailer for Nothing But Blue. Puppeteer Bela Rieger, Lisa Jahn-Clough, and Lisa’s dog Rico joined us on those byways for a morning...
Read MoreHades as Art Director
Nothing has pleased me more than playing the Lord of the Underworld. Curious City was once again invited by Mary Anne Lloyd to play Art Director for her class of Illustration majors at Maine College of Art. I was to assign a real world project and award a contract to an artist. Instead of real world, I went Underworld. Sirenz, a series by Natalie Zaman and Charlotte Bernnardo, features modern day NYC girls falling and and out of contracts with himself, the Greek God, Hades. Curious City previously built a blog for the series in which the characters of the book chat about...
Read MoreUsing YouTube? Double-up on Vimeo
Have your book trailers and author interviews on YouTube only? Changes at Apple for the future iPad and iPhone will exclude YouTube from those devices–highly irritating. Learn why you should also have your content on Vimeo here. Curious City will be following this “not all your eggs in one basket” suggestion soon! Share...
Read MoreThe Bow Wow Boys
Curious City’s mission is take books from what they are about to what they can do. When handed Mary Newell DePalma’s Bow-Wow Wiggle-Waggle (Eerdman’s Books for Young Readers) to produce a trailer, we knew we could not just tell you what the book was about. We needed instead to show you that the best picture books allow the reader and listener to completely engage with the page. We headed into Mind’s Eye Production’s studios with a reading 7-year-old, an observant 4-year-old, and their book champion mom. Together they read the story and talked...
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