It's 'Blue Noon' at Smoky Hill
RSSTerri Clark, teen patron specialist, Smoky Hill Library, Centennial, CO
Watch out Martin Scorsese! Our teen advisory board has just finished making its third annual book trailer—and this time, it's based on Scott Westerfeld's Blue Noon, the third volume of his popular "Midnighters" series. When we finished the project, we sent it to Westerfeld and anxiously waited to hear what he thought. We needn't have worried. For starters, he thought it was really cool that our kids embraced books. He also thought that our ambitious adaptation brought his story to life. Our teen advisory board was psyched to get such high praise from the author himself, and they hope their book trailer will help promote literacy here at the Smoky Hill Library, which is part of the Arapahoe Library District. (You can check out our most recent book trailer on the ALD Live YouTube page.) In the last three years we've also created trailers for Christopher Golden's zombie-licious Soulless and Markus Zusak's moving historical novel, The Book Thief. The way things are going, I can hardly wait to see what our kids come up with next. This article originally appeared in School Library Journal's enewsletter SLJTeen. Subscribe here.
Westerfeld generously donated the books to our group, and our kids picked out three pivotal scenes to portray. I put on my director's hat, wrote the screenplay, cast the parts, and got everyone involved in the production. The teens had pages of emotionally rich dialogue to memorize and they nailed their lines as professionally as a Hollywood actor. The entire trailer was shot on the library's grounds-the kids even created a "cave" in a meeting-room closet. My fellow librarian's Kristen Bodine and Nick Taylor shot the trailer with two cameras and spent hours painstakingly editing it. Taylor even had a cameo role as a teacher whom the Midnighters mess with during the blue noon.
