Posts in Category: Animation

We Are The War by T&DA

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A fascinating experiment in AI-generated videopoetry from an artists’ collective in Sydney, written and directed by Tyrone Estephan.

We Are The War | CLIP-Guided Storytelling & Speech Synthesis

At T&DA we have explored leveraging the latest technologies to create ‘We Are The War’, an animated graphic novella poem, where both the images and narration were generated through visual and audio synthesis.

Created using prompts inspired by children’s book illustrations and the lines of our poem, images were generated using Midjourney. The narrator was generated through speech synthesis software that only needed 15 minute sample of talking.

To add parallax and depth to the scenes we used neural Z depth extraction.

Using these tools we tell the story of children’s metaversal shenanigans as realities of recent years bleed into their locked down lives. We can think of this technology almost as if it’s a 10 year old expressing itself, which felt like the perfect means to convey the sentiments of the poem.

Tyrone Estephan – Written & Directed
Sean Simon – Visuals & Post
Josh Kell – Online Editor

Because Goddess is Never Enough by Rosie Garland

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Because Goddess is Never Enough draws its inspiration from the life of Austrian-born dancer, choreographer, actor and painter, Tilly Losch (1903-1975). The film is a collaboration between film-maker Jane Glennie and writer/performer Rosie Garland, both award-winning artists in the UK. The subject is the representation of women artists in history, especially the ways their stories have been footnoted in relation to famous men. One of the film’s lines about Tilly’s place in history: “blink and you’ll miss her”.

From the web page for the film:

Tilly Losch was an Austrian dancer who worked with prominent, and cutting-edge, choreographers and artists in the UK and the US, from the West End to Hollywood. She was also a choreographer in her own right, who later turned to painting.

Through moving images and poetry Glennie and Garland investigate the elusive and fragmentary nature of Tilly’s life, evoking the spirit of the 1920s–40s when she was at the peak of her fame.

The film is about self-worth, the authentic self, and the credibility of creative women – Losch was someone who was at times exploited yet determined to maintain a path of her own making despite the obstacles that were very much present in her era… highlighting how far women have come in 90 years, and yet how far they still have to go to get recognition and true independence.

Jane Glennie’s film-making most often involves rapid animation of still images, creating a highly dynamic sense of cinematic motion. At ten minutes duration, this is her most ambitious film to date, involving thousands of her own photographs, meticulously layered with contrasting rhythms that underscore voice and text.

Rosie Garland’s expressive narration of her own poem is highly effective. Her voice alternates with that of Alison Glennie, equally as effective in the first-person sections that evoke Tilly speaking for herself. The overall soundtrack is mainly just the two voices accompanied by textural sound effects. This minimal approach proves an excellent stylistic choice.

All the different elements of the film combine organically and assuredly, suggesting a great collaboration between the artists involved. Because Goddess is Never Enough is a unique evocation of one woman’s creative life and by extension the lives of so many creative women throughout time.

Requiem for a spoken word by Marc Zegans

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In Requiem for a spoken word, a short poem by Marc Zegans comes into play with experimental computer animation by Jim Hall. Both artists approach their work with a jazzy, improvisational openness that makes for a quirky videopoem about a single word.

A number of Marc’s collaborations with different film-makers have been shared before here at Moving Poems, as well as an interview with him by Dave Bonta.

This video came to my attention while scrolling the list of finalists at the 2021 Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition in Ireland. It is also published on the website of +Institute for Experimental Arts in Athens, which runs the video poetry festival there each year.

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

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Lewis Carroll‘s famous nonsense poem Jabberwocky has been adapted to the screen many times. This version from 2020 by Dutch artist Sjaak Rood was produced for TED-Ed as part of a series of collaborations between educators and film animators. Music is by Mark Nieuwenhuis with narration by Jack Cutmore-Scott. It was a 2021 finalist in the Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Competition in Ireland.

Moving Poems has previously shared two other film versions of Jabberwocky as well as an adaptation of Carroll’s The Mad Gardener’s Song.

Üç Selvi / Three Cypresses by Nâzım Hikmet

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An animation by artist Zeynep Sıla Demircioğlu for a piece by Turkey’s greatest 20th-century poet, Nâzım Hikmet. The bleakness of the content is counter-balanced by the richness of the recitation by Geneo Erkal—all those lovely Turkish consonants. As a tree-lover there’s no way I couldn’t post this as soon as I saw it. Here’s Demircioğlu’s statement, on Vimeo and her website:

Communist poet and writer Nâzım Hikmet Ran’s poem “Üç Selvi” is about three cypress trees. In his metaphoric narrative, at first, trees live in harmony with nature. After their destruction joy of life is gone and the world is deprived of the sound of cypress leaves. Although Hikmet wrote this mournful poem in 1933, readers can find different meanings and enemies when they look at the dark side of Turkish collective memory.

Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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Amanda Palmer reads Edna St. Vincent Millay in this animation by the award-winning children’s book author and artist Sophie Blackall, with music by Tom McRae. It’s last month’s installment for the wonderful Universe in Verse series, which we’ve been kind of sleeping on here. Maria Popova notes in her introduction to the series on her website that

The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry — part resistance (to the assault on science and the natural world in an atmosphere of “alternative facts” and vanishing ecological protections) and part persistence (in sustaining the felicitous expression of nature in human nature, with our capacity for music and mathematics, for art and hope.)

For four seasons (below, in reverse chronology), it remained a live gathering — thousands of embodied universes of thought and feeling, huddled together in a finite space built in a faraway time when Whitman’s living atoms walked the streets outside.

In this interlude between gatherings, as we face the biological and ecological realities of life with widened eyes, I have entwined visions with my friends at On Being to reimagine the spirit of The Universe in Verse in a different incarnation, a year in the making: a season of stories about epoch-making events, discoveries, and unsung heroes from the history of science — this common record of our search for truth and the native beauty of reality — each illustrated in poetry’s lovely abstract language, with an animated poem.

Be sure to read the rest and check out all the films. We’ll share more of them here as time permits. I also strongly recommend Popova’s essay introducing “Dirge Without Music,” which for its “unsung hero” presents an engaging account of mathematician Emmy Noether (1882–1935). A stanza from Millay’s poem was read at her funeral.

Bullets by Brayden

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For World Poetry Day, here’s an Ohio preschooler’s poem animated by Ukrainian artist Stas Santimov. It’s from a project called Preschool Poets:

Old snakes, loose teeth, hot tubs, and ugly people in your face.
This is the world when you are four.

For nearly a decade, resident artist Nancy Kangas led a poetry program for preschool-aged children at Columbus Early Learning Centers on the near east side of Columbus. She was struck with how clearly her kids wrote about what they loved and feared. They want bullets to relax, lions to roar, and kids to climb up to the sun.

Nancy and documentary filmmaker Josh Kun asked award-winning international artists to animate these poems, and the resulting hand-crafted animations show a depth and complexity of expression we don’t expect from four-year olds. The films are fueled by the children’s untethered imaginations, but they open a portal to the real world of growing up in the inner city.

Thanks to Maria Popova for highlighting this. You can read the text of the poem there, or at the project site.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe by Elizabeth Alexander

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The On Being Project — a 15-year-old American Public Media radio show/podcast that’s spawned a whole web empire — has recently started producing poetry films, each an animation with a different director. Here’s one of my favorites. It’s by the London-based animator Jocie Juritz, with sound by Galina Juritz. The YouTube description notes that “This poem was originally read in the On Being episode with Elizabeth Alexander, Words That Shimmer,” which aired on January 6, 2011.

Juritz posted some process notes on her website:

I was struck by the line “emptying the proverbial pocketbook” which sparked imagery of my own creative process – scribbling into sketchbooks, accumulating paper and mementos. As a sort of homage to the pen and paper (and reference to the ideas making process) I decided to animate the frames of this film directly into the pages of Elizabeth Alexander’s book ‘Crave Radiance’ which contains “I Believe”. Kindly, she gave me the go ahead to do whatever I liked with the book!

I animated each frame in Photoshop first, to make sure I had a perfect reference to trace. Those frames were then printed out. Using a lightbox I hand painted each frame in gouache paint, directly onto the pages of the book. Once they were all coloured I scanned each page, then placed each frame in position in After Effects.

People may remember Alexander as President Obama’s first inaugural poet, but she’s much more than that. Here’s her page at the Poetry Foundation.

A Better Place is Hard to Find: two poems by Aaron Fagan

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We’re always keen to showcase book trailers that take the form of videopoems. Here are two very different but equally compelling, brief animations by multidisciplinary artist Camilla Ha for poems in Aaron Fagan’s new collection, A Better Place Is Hard to Find (The Song Cave, 2020): “The Good Light” and “Quietus.”

Aaron Fagan has been an active proponent of videopoetry for as long as I’ve been publishing Moving Poems—nearly 12 years now—sometimes collaborating with filmmakers, sometimes making videos himself. So it’s no surprise that he would have not one, but two films for his first full-length poetry collection since 2010.

Descent by Janet Lees

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Just as the third Thursday in November is American Thanksgiving, the first Thursday in October is British National Poetry Day (albeit with less carb-loading, and poetry readings instead of American football). Given that live events have been severely curtailed by the pandemic, I thought we’d better help out by sharing something from one of our favorite British videopoets, Janet Lees. (Janet is Manx, so British but not UK. I checked, and yes, they do celebrate National Poetry Day there.)

Janet uploaded this film back in July, noting:

Poem, photography and animation by Janet Lees. Poem made from perfume brand names.
Music by Scott Buckley scottbuckley.com.au

Wonderful stuff. So many advertisements have appropriated poetry in recent years, it’s fascinating to see how successfully Janet has turned that around and re-purposed consumerist language for a found poem. It feels as if, in a small but significant way, poetry and truth-telling are reasserting their primacy. Decontextualized desires and impulses shape a Neverland of mutable landscapes, unreliable weather and continually shifting baselines. (Which is one way to characterize the entire Anthropocene.)

Among other things, this really demonstrates the importance of poets learning to make their own films. It’s hard to see how a videopoem like this would be made otherwise.