Filmmaker: Jamie MacDonald

Sonnet 66 by Luke Kennard

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Sonnet 66 is an animated film by Jamie MacDonald from a poem by Luke Kennard, commissioned by UK publishing and performance project Penned in the Margins.

The film was made to coincide with the launch of Kennard’s poetry collection Notes on the Sonnets, which went on to win the 2021 Forward Prize. A description of the collection:

Notes on the Sonnets… recasts Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party.

The writing in Sonnet 66 is witty and elusive, and the film animation is cleverly simple. The whole is amusing and compelling in its short duration.

Two other films by Jamie MacDonald have previously featured here at Moving Poems.

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.

The Actual / Fuck by Inua Ellams

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This animated typography film by Jamie MacDonald is a trailer for Inua Ellams‘ forthcoming collection. In a blog post yesterday, he wrote:

It gives me the greatest pleasure to share with you the trailer for The Actual / Fuck. This poem is made up of all the titles in the collection, essentially a list poem in its own right. It was put together by Jamie MacDonald (who created the trailer for An Evening With An Immigrant) and shows his incredible skills and attention to detail.

Don’t forget, you can pre-order the collection right now from Penned In The Margins.

And from that latter link, here’s the publisher’s description:

The Actual is a symphony of personal and political fury — sometimes probing delicately, sometimes burning with raw energy.

In 55 poems that swerve and crackle with a rare music, Inua Ellams unleashes a full-throated assault on empire and its legacies of racism, injustice and toxic masculinity. Written on the author’s phone, in transit, between meetings, before falling asleep and just after waking, this is poetry as polemic, as an act of resistance, but also as dream-vision. At its heart, this book confronts the absolutism and ‘foolish machismo’ of hero culture-from Perseus to Trump, from Batman to Boko Haram.

Through the thick gauze of history, these breathtaking poems look the world square in the face and ask, “What the actual—?”