Posts in Category: Animation

Hypnic Jerk by Alan Peat

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Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.

An homage to Henri Rousseau by Austin-based collaborative filmmakers Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran.

British poet Alan Peat has won top awards in the Golden Haiku Contest, the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, the Otoroshi Rengay Contest, the BHS Ken and Norah Jones Haibun Award, the San Francisco International Haibun Contest, the Sanford Goldstein International Tanka Contest, the Heliosparrow Semagram Contest, and the Time Haiku ekphrastic haibun contest—all since 2021. He was one of three winners in the Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun competition (2022). He is clearly on a roll.

Judges’ statement: “We loved this one in the way that one loves a children’s book even as an adult and can’t wait to share it with one’s own kids. It has a warm and playful feeling of familiarity, excitement, fun and fast-paced adventure. The idea of the moving layers of jungle and animations within, and the cuts to the paintings in a gallery are fabulous. Can poetry be a lighthearted and fun action movie? Yes, it can!”

Directors’ statement:

Hooked by the mention of Rosseau’s jungle in the first line of Allen Peat’s evocative and mysterious Haibun, “Hypnic Jerk,” we wondered if we could create a wholly imaginary world cut from the cloth of Rousseau’s fantastical paintings and the dream illogic of Peat’s brilliantly fragmented, hypnic poetic strategy. We had previously tried something with a similar kind of logic, when making a film based on Wallace Stevens’ out-of-copyright “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” another anything-goes kind of videopoetry project, where our method was to capture the startling images his words evoked for us using whatever crazy means necessary, and to manipulate those images in unexpected and visually poetic ways. Very early in the pre-production stages, we thought we might need to supplement Rousseau’s painted imagery with video of jungle plants shot in public conservatories and gardens in Illinois and Texas, which could be collaged to create a virtual jungle backdrop for the poem’s action. Then we we reviewed Rousseau’s body of paintings, which included a substantial number that we hadn’t seen before, and we realized we could go whole hog and construct an entirely imaginary Rousseau world by animating and collaging his painted imagery, coupled with an evocative soundscape score composed almost entirely from natural sounds.

Weighing In by Rhina Espaillat

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An uplifting animation about age, gravity and being human, Weighing In is from a poem by Dominican-American writer Rhina Espaillat. The film was directed by Casey McIntyre for MPC Creative in Los Angeles in partnership with Motionpoems. It was especially designed as a film for children. The poem can be read on the page here.

Foxtrot by Rosemary Norman

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A fun text animation by long-time videopoem collaborators Stuart Pound and Rosemary Norman, who appear also to have a new videopoetry collection out, though I haven’t seen it yet.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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From the brief and powerful poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), this animated version of his Ozymandias is directed by Alvaro Lamarche-Toloza in France.

The soundtrack features the richly dramatic voice of Bryan Cranston reciting the poem in a 2013 trailer for Breaking Bad. The compelling voice is accompanied only by a thrilling heavy heartbeat, also from the original soundtrack.

Wash drawings in the animation are by Estelle Chauvard. More about the project can be read in the notes beneath the player at Vimeo.

This is another strong piece to be found in a Top Ten of films from classic poems selected for Moving Poems by Paul Casey and Colm Scully.

To John by Inua Ellams

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A video animated and edited by Jamie Macdonald AKA Airship23 for the Financial Times:

FT Weekend Festival 2021 commissioned Inua Ellams to write a response to Keats’s classic work ‘To Autumn’ marking his 200th anniversary. The animated poem ‘To John’ exposes the impact of humans on nature over those 200 years.
Financial Times website

For more on Ellams, who’s something of a Renaissance man, do visit his website. He teamed up with Macdonald back in 2020 for the trailer for his book The Actual/Fuck.

Hat-tip to poet Josephine Corcoran for blogging the link.

Un/Write by Fiona Tinwei Lam

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Vancouver-based poet and poetry filmmaker Fiona Tinwei Lam collaborated with animation students Lara Renaud and Quinn Kelly back in February on this videopoem “about revision, redaction, and renewal.” Lam told me in an email that

It originated in a published shaped or visual poem on the page about the editing and revising process. I quickly created and brainstormed a text block from which the poem would be carved out on screen.

But I realized there were other poems within the poem while utilizing further compression and fragmentation. Then I noticed there were a few interesting phrases in the discarded text from the text block I’d created for the initial poem, that could form the basis of a new poem about reclamation. So these “cut out” phrases could return on screen in a new way.

She added that she thought it could form the basis of a fun lesson plan for schools and community writing workshops, and I agree. One of the great things about erasure poetry is the way it reminds us that no creation is truly ex nihilo; there’s always an element of discovery. And often with such serendipity comes joy, flowering of its own accord, as the animation suggests. A wonderful start to Poetry Month. (And imagine my surprise just now, bringing up the Canadian National Poetry Month page, to find that this year’s theme is in fact joy!)

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

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There is balm to be found in this poetry film from Wendell Berry‘s deep and enduring poem, The Peace of Wild Things. Berry has a close connection to rural Kentucky USA, where he was born in 1934 and has maintained a farm for over 40 years. It is his own voice in the soundtrack.

The animation is touchingly childlike, directed by UK artists Charlotte Ager and Katy Wang. The project was produced by The On Being Project, a non-profit initiative. Music and sound is credited to David Camp. In-depth process notes on the making of the film can be found here.

I found The Peace of Wild Things among a fine Top Ten of films from classic poems published recently on the magazine side of our site. These films were selected by Paul Casey and Colm Scully, organisers and judges of the Ó Bhéal Winter Warmer poetry festival and poetry film competition in Ireland.

Writing Advice by Brian Mackenwells

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Humour and silliness are not commonly found in poetry films. I rejoice when I stumble upon a piece that tickles my funny bone. Writing Advice by Brian Mackenwells is one such rarity. The synopsis:

A pencil-powered matchbox theatre outlines the risk of using sub-par pencils.

This is a one-man show, with Mackenwells as writer, narrator and film-maker. The video animation is amusingly home-spun and original. A bio:

Brian Mackenwells is an Irish writer living in Oxford. Despite being quite tired, he has written for the BBC about pencils, told stories on stage about not getting sick in zero gravity, performed standup about strange superheroes, and co-wrote an audio drama every month for five years.

I found Writing Advice among the finalist films in the 2022 Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition in Ireland.

The Future is Ours by Andrew Roberts

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A stop-motion videopoem by Brooklyn-based animator Andrew/Drew Roberts, uploaded to Vimeo nine years ago when he was making a whole series of poetic shorts under the banner Stop Motion Haiku, apparently once featured on a dedicated website that no longer exists, though several may be viewed on his own website (scroll down) and on Vimeo.

Moving Poems turned 14 on Thursday, so I wanted to find someone I’d overlooked just to remind ourselves how much good work is still out there. I’m sorry I missed Roberts’s work when it first appeared but happy to have found it in the end.

HairBrush by Kate Sweeney

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A gentle and personal piece reflecting on motherhood, HairBrush is a hand-drawn animation from UK artist, film-maker and writer Kate Sweeney, whose work has featured a number of times before here at Moving Poems. From the synopsis at Vimeo:

After adopting our son during lockdown… I wanted to explore my journey towards becoming a mother.

HairBrush is a meditative reflection upon an everyday activity – a haircut. It documents the laboured process of making a paintbrush out of a golden curl from my son’s head. The brush then being used to paint each frame of the film.

Watercolour, instead of blood or DNA, becomes the metaphor and material for describing how we imagine and manifest our selves through each other.

The film was one of a series of microproject commissions at Star and Shadow Cinema, a co-operative in the north east of the UK.