Choose Your Own Movie Showing

"Good gosh, Nick! You're talking more about movies than books these days."
"Well, uh....yeah, I've got nothing to say."
Our Choose a Movie Showings have been pretty successful, so I figured we'd talk about them a little. Typically we've held these (we've held about three) as one of our Summer Reading events, but you could do it any time of year.

Our basic thought was, "Wouldn't it be fun to have a movie premiere at the Hayden Library?" Now the licensing fees and logistics of making that happen are a little bit difficult, so we figured we would show a movie that had already come out.

But how do you get middle and high school students to come to something like that? Wouldn't they just watch it on Netflix? Promise them pop, popcorn, candy, and the chance to choose the movie they want to watch! Want it to be even more special? Hold it later at night (say 11pm), so it feels more like a movie premiere (well what a movie premiere used to feel like. Why is it that midnight showings are more like 7pm or 8pm showings now?)

The way I figure it, you could choose the movies in a couple of ways:
1) Ask your members to bring their favorite library appropriate film, and have your attendees vote for their favorite favorite.
2) Choose five films that you think they'll enjoy and have them vote for their favorite.
3) Do a mixture of both ideas (what we do). Have some pre-selected films for the group, but leave it open so someone could bring a suggestion if they wanted.

P.S. Here are a couple of suggestions: The A-Team, Back to the Future, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Dark Knight, Divergent, The Fault in Our Stars, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Maverick, Oblivion, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, The Princess Bride, Star Trek Into Darkness...just to name a few.

P.S.S Make sure you have the rights to show the film. Even if you aren't doing it for profit, movie companies (and the law) don't smile on organizations that show a company's work without permission. We use Movie Licensing USA, and you can purchase a one-time license, or a subscription to show available movies for a specified amount of time.

Library Teen Film Fest: 5 Promotional Things To Try

1. Find out if your local schools have video production classes, and promote to those students directly. Most likely, these students will be excited about participating, and will have the necessary equipment too.

2. Ask a video production company to offer an internship or a day pass to the creator of the top film.

3. Create a promo video (this one was from last year).

4. Include a Public Service Announcement category, and send the winner to the CSLP Video Challenge (The Collaborative Summer Library Program has teens from across the nation submit PSAs, and then uses them to promote summer reading).

5. See what other film fests do. Obviously there are the big film festivals like Sundance and Toronto, but there are also many libraries (Yorba Linda, Houston, Topeka and Shawnee, and Greenwood for instance) that have done film fests before. Each one of them does it a little bit different, but they are definitely worth checking out.

Next Week

I'm going to chat about cool things you can do at the film showing event, or as we like to call it, The Red Carpet Event (because who doesn't want to see their project on a big screen?).

Library Teen Film Fest: How Ours Works

So here comes a combination of a program idea and shameless self-promotion. For the past four years, we've held a Library Teen Film Fest, and this year, I'm going to tell you a little bit about how we do it.

Basically, teens (ages 13-18) create a video using a theme (typically the Summer Reading theme for that year), and then we show the films at the library and give out cash prizes.

This year, the videos will all be Short Films (up to five minutes long), created around the theme, "Beneath the Surface." Once the films are created, we have teens fill out an entry form, and upload their video to our YouTube Channel.

The first year we held the festival, we allowed participants to submit on YouTube by giving us a link to their video, or giving us a DVD. But, we found it was difficult to promote these videos on social media, and also made the Red Carpet Event (where we show the films) not go as smoothly as we would like.

Now, when a participant enters the competition, they are given the username and password for our Film Fest YouTube Channel to upload their video. This allows us to keep the videos all in one place, and makes setting up the Red Carpet Event much easier.

While I've found most teens who enter the competition would have done so anyways, it never hurts to have some incentives. We ask our Friends of the Community Library Network group for funds to offer snacks, refreshments, and cash prizes.

Well that's about enough for this post, but I'll be writing next Monday about ways to make the Film Fest work better (sometimes you got to learn the hard way lol, and sometimes there are ideas that you just can't quite implement that might work for others).

Book Fair of Death: Murder Mystery

One of the final High School programs that we did over the summer was a Murder Mystery Night. It was called Book Fair of Death, and it gave participants a chance to take on a role, and solve a mystery.

Emily Thornton was supposed to appear at a book fair and author signing at the Hayden Library, but just hours before the event, she was found dead! But, don't worry. Detective Bibliophile is on the scene, and he is going to get to the bottom of it...with a little help from the program participants.

Ultimately I got the idea and the majority of how to run this program from the Collaborative Summer Library Program 2012 Teen Summer Reading manual. They had already written the scenario, given some short character sketches, and a list of the props necessary.

The manual mentioned two different ways of running the program: getting volunteers and staff to appear as the characters in the murder mystery, and then the teens that came would just be asking questions and trying to piece together what happened. Or, the teens that came could be the characters, and try to figure out which one of them had murdered the victim. We kind of blended the two ideas with a couple staff members and volunteers mixed in with our teen participants who also played some characters.

Between examining evidence, getting statements from the characters, asking questions, and accusing someone, the program took about an hour and a half and was way too much fun! The teens really got into asking other characters questions and trying to figure out which one of them had done it.

If you would like to run a similar program, you can purchase scripts and character lists from MyMysteryParty.com, or you could get a hold of me and I could most likely share more information about the script and characters that we used =D

Tell Your Own Ghost Story

So each year, the Collaborative Summer Library Program (representatives from each state team up to offer better and more affordable summer reading programs) chooses three themes; one for kids, one for teens, and one for adults. This year, the teen theme is Own the Night. In addition to choosing a theme, they also offer incentives and prizes and a manual full of program ideas.

One of the suggested programs was making up your own ghost stories, so I thought we'd make a program out of it by giving our older tween group (6-8 grade) some suggestions and then videotape what they came up with.

I figured that like most stories, there were certain things that a ghost story would need (who, what, where, etc.) and I wrote the questions down and some possible answers to them. I gave an answer sheet to each participant, made up my own story to show that it wasn't that bad, and then let them at it. I've posted some of the videos on my YouTube Channel, and the rest will be coming soon.

Enjoy!


P.S. Here's the questions that I asked just in case the program sounded interesting :)

Who are you? (TV reporter, Ghost survivor, local farmer)

When did you first hear about it? (Childhood, 10 minutes ago, sometime last year)

How do you know about it? (Lived through it, your friend survived it, heard it from some neighbors)

What is this thing called? (The Big Hairy, Terribleautapus, The Reptile)

When did it come into existence? (18^th century, last week, every eclipse)

How did it come into existence? (freak experiment, untimely death, no one knows)

Where does it lurk now? (an old house, graveyard, in the library)

Why should we be afraid of it? (decapitation, tickles people to death, creeps up and says boo)