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From an early age I was exposed to birds in an intense way. My grandparents were ornithologists (scientists who studied birds) and lived in an old farmhouse filled with a menagerie of owls, hawks, and eagles. We studied hawks on the marsh in the early mornings and raised a variety of orphaned or injured birds. Some grew strong and were released back to the wild. Others stayed for a lifetime. One bird in particular was a favorite of my grandmother's, who worked for years to breed endangered golden eagles in captivity. Each spring the eagle called sharply, and my grandmother responded by bringing sticks. Then together they built a nest. She observed her eagle so carefully; she could practically talk to it. I grew up watching this intimate relationship between ornothologist and bird, and developed a huge respect for how complex and diverse bird communication skills are.
As my grandparents worked on their research with birds of prey, I found my own area of interest. I recorded songbirds in the mornings before school so I could learn to identify them by their calls. At night, I lay in bed and listened to the screeching of rescued barn owlets, who liked to roost on the top of my grandmother’s refrigerator. One summer, when a storm took a tree snag down, I rescued several baby starlings that were nested in its trunk. I kept one of them and was tickled when it soon began to mimic the calls of my parakeet.
My parents were wildlife photographers and we watched many birds in the wild as well. In the spring before dawn, we hiked the high desert and listened to Sage Grouse boom. Their ritual performance made me laugh—I thought their puffed up chests and inflated air sacs looked like hard-boiled eggs.
But my favorite memory was canoeing alongside Western Grebes as they danced on water for their annual spring mating ritual.
As an adult I sketched the birds I watched and noted their calls and behaviors, piecing together what those calls meant. I read everything I could find about how and why birds communicate. And I wanted to create a book that explored this fascinating topic for young readers. With the illustrations for Bird Talk, I wanted to create a visual record of the exquisite forms of bird communication. What fascinates me most about bird communications isn’t just how they sing, but how they dance, strut, boom, and bob to make their meanings clear. The most rewarding part of creating Bird Talk was capturing these bird gestures with loose sketches and light color washes. What a joyful journey it’s been to grow that quiet kid who got up two hours early to watch and draw birds before school, to writing and illustrating a book about them.
If you’ve ever wondered—or tried to explain—what birds are saying as they flit about in trees or preen on their perches, help is here: Lita Judge’s new book, Bird Talk: What Birds Are Saying and Why, is a wonderfully illustrated compendium of bird behavior and communication for young readers.
BIRD TALK will be released on March 13th!
"Talk about joy rides...It's a perfect book for reading aloud, especially by expressive readers who can do justice to a walk in the snow: Scrinch scrunch scrinch scrunch scrinch scrunch."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/revie
Washington Post
".. a delightful winter book for very young readers. Each double-page spread features a serene snowscape bathed in moonlight, the perfect foil for the explosive humor of the animals' antics."
www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/boo
PEOPLE
"Just the right blend of danger and delight, this book is perfect for a wintry night."
http://www.people.com/people/archive/art
San Francisco Chronicle
"It's strikingly original and totally inspired."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg
Concord Monitor
"As with many a treasured children's book, the details are left to the fertile young imagination...the book is exactly what a book about sledding should be: pure fun."
http://www.concordmonitor.com/article/30
Book Page
"Parents and kids will enjoy this sweet, energy-filled tale."
http://bookpage.com/feature/let-the-snow-d
Shelf Awareness
"Like the red sled's riders, young readers will be pleading, AGAIN!"
http://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers-i
Newburyport News, Newburyport, MA
"Charmingly depicted"
http://www.newburyportnews.com/local/x10
Ithaca Child
"A delicate, beautiful book about the wonder of winter and play."
http://www.ithacachild.net/current/curre
Winter Indie List
"This is my new favorite snow book! The minimal text highlighted with fun sound effects is complemented by beautiful art...In this sweet and wonderful picture book, Judge successfully captures all of the joy of a great sled ride."
http://news.bookweb.org/news/winter-2011-2
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!
I was just interviewed on a fantastic blog called Seven Impossible Things before Breakfast and one of the questions was, "Is there something you wish interviewers would ask you — but never do? Feel free to ask and respond here." So here's what I asked and answered.
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!
So I am very excited by the fact that Red Sled is soon to be coming out – November 1st to be exact! 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.
Hello all,
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
Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.
We just posted a new Strange Creatures discussion guide on Lita’s web site.
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).
Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.
We’re back again after taking a brief blog break since the end of last year. We just received our first box of STRANGE CREATURES from the publisher and were psyched to see a nice review of STRANGE CREATURES in the Wall Street Journal this weekend. [WSJ Review]
And last week we heard that STRANGE CREATURES was picked as a featured elementary biography selection of the Junior Library Guild!
Here are a few things we picked out of the reviews so far:
“There’s much in Walter Rothschild’s story for a tyke to like, particularly the timid boy’s end run around his father’s ambitions, and Judge makes the most of the battle of wills in her humor-tinged watercolors. Wild animals pop up all over the swanky estate while portraits of ancestors glare down from their frames in disapproval of the family ado. A final note comments on Rothschild’s contribution to the burgeoning field of zoology and on the way collection practices and wildlife study have changed over the past century and a half. Primary-grade children who are encouraged (assigned?) to read a biography will find Rothschild to be one of the most engaging guys they’ve never heard of.” BCCB
“In richly colored paintings Ms. Judge shows readers … nautiluses and octopuses, lizards and kiwis, okapis from the Congo, capybaras from Colombia, and marabou storks.” WSJ
“Energetic, expressive paintings, many with unusual perspectives, fill the pages. Not surprisingly, the odd creatures that fascinated Walter are among the most engaging characters, like the giant lizard that peers out from Walter’s mother’s lily bed. Human characters are more sketchily drawn, which emphasizes Walter’s preoccupation with the natural world…“ Kirkus Reviews
“Judge’s picture-book biography of the shy genius may encourage readers to follow their own creative ideas…” School Library Journal
Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.
