Wednesday, March 30, 2016

March Meeting: Audacity Audio and War Slogan Posters

We had a small but enthusiastic group at Monday's meeting. We talked about everything from aliens landing next door, to the awesome manga series, Library Wars, to who saved whose life in our March book, The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. (Consensus was reached that they sort of all saved each other in one way or another.)

We then launched into our first activity for the evening: writing a letter from one character in the book to another. We were pretty impressed by the animals in the book, since both Butter the horse and Bovril the cat played pretty big roles in Ada and Jamie's lives in the country. Thus, several Bookshop members chose to embrace magical realism and write letters from the point of view of one of the animals. The one member who chose to write from a human perspective tackled a British accent with impressive success. After finishing the hard part of writing, we rehearsed a bit before recording ourselves live using Audacity, a free Open Source software tool. The entertaining results are below. Enjoy!





While taking turns to record, we took inspiration from some vintage WWII British War Slogan posters and created some of our own posters.










Wednesday, March 2, 2016

February Meeting: Animoto Book Trailers

We had a fabulous meeting on Monday with a spirited discussion about Fuzzy Mud by Louis Sachar. The group gave the book another unanimous thumbs up, although the thought of an exponentially growing biological disease like Sachar's "fuzzy mud" was pretty terrifying to most of us. We all wished that the book had been longer with more character development and plot build-up and suspense. That said, the book's inherent suspense and creepiness lent itself very nicely to the book trailer medium, as you can see in the awesome examples below.

To create our book trailers, we used Animoto, a free online tool that allows you to quickly and easily match short snippets of text with images and music in a variety of different slideshow styles. Some of the features require payment, but we were able to obtain an educational account through the library, which enabled us to access most of the features. After a bit of a learning curve (and some frustrating browser issues), everyone was happily trolling the internet for cool pictures of sinister mud and evil bullies to include in their projects.

Enjoy our finished products below*, all of which will surely pique your curiosity and make you want to run over to the library to grab a copy of the book!





Josie's Book Trailer:



Stefan's Book Trailer:


Isaac and Gabriel's Book Trailer:



Christopher's Book Trailer:


Eli's Book Trailer:


Emily's Book Trailer:



*We ran out of time before the students were able to include their image and music credits.