[1] The story was adapted from the 1974 children's picture book Ida Makes a Movie, which was written by Kay Chorao.
There, Ida gets another shock when she find out that not only will she have to leave it there, but that it will cost about $20 overall, both to repair the camera (which has a broken spring), and to buy a roll of film.
Ida and Cookie persuade Fred to join the filming, a story about the importance of picking up garbage and keeping things clean.
A simple enough plan, but it rapidly goes wrong: just as the garbage men arrive on the street, Fred picks up one of Cookie's dolls by accident, and they get into a tug-of-war over it, on camera.
Her mother reads the letter and expresses surprise (and perhaps, a note of skepticism) that Ida would take on a profound topic like war in her amateur film.
At the ceremony, the award is presented by the kindly Mr. Druffle, who announces that Ida's work, on "how devastating war is to children," is the winner.
So when Ida reluctantly takes the podium, she tries to decline the award in a fit of conscience, explaining to Mr. Druffle how the mistake came about.
Linda Schuyler, a media teacher at Earl Grey Senior Public School, and Kit Hood, a commercial editor, founded Playing With Time in 1976.
[4] Before leaving, Schuyler sought legal advice from Stephen Stohn, a young entertainment lawyer who had recently graduated from law school,[5] and who would eventually become her producing partner and husband.
[6][4] Stohn recalled in his 2018 memoir Whatever It Takes that he advised Schuyler that being out of print, buying the rights to the book on her own would be "relatively straightforward", and that involving lawyers would make the process "unnecessarily complicated".
[3][4] The feline characters were changed into human children on the advice of a distributor who said the market was flooded with animation,[7] and the story was also largely repurposed.
[3] The film featured production techniques that Schuyler and Kit Hood felt were missing from children's programming: it was shot in a cinéma vérité style, with handheld camera work and entirely on-location shooting.