Poet: Lucy English

The Smell of Mist by Lucy English

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A wonderfully multilayered poetry film by Stevie Ronnie for Lucy English‘s Book of Hours. His process notes on Vimeo are worth quoting in full:

This is the second of two films that I have made in collaboration with the poet Lucy English as part of her Book of Hours poetry film project (thebookofhours.org). As in our first collaboration, this poetry film began as a colour palette that I generated and sent to Lucy. Lucy wrote in response to the palette and sent me back the text and a voice recording of the poem.

I had some footage sitting waiting, so I got to work straight away. I wasn’t happy with the way the words and the film were rubbing against each other so I cleared the decks and went back to the poem. I listened to the recording over several months, trying to slip under the surface of the words. The poem began to play over and over in my head.

One morning over the summer I lay in bed listening to Odette, my eldest daughter, practicing the piano. As she played, the poem was also playing in my head and I was taken by how the two seemed to fit together. I recorded Odette and combined that recording with Lucy’s voice. This audio track then provided the spark of an idea, which in turn led to new raw footage. By the time I sat down to draw the images and the audio track together it felt as if I knew exactly what I had to do.

The most fruitful collaborations always seem to involve an element of serendipity, don’t they?

The Shadow by Lucy English

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A meditation on belonging and place from filmmakers Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg of Outlier Moving Pictures and poet Lucy English — the February afternoon film for her Book of Hours Project.

Solstice Sol Invictus by Lucy English and Sarah Tremlett

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Hush. Even in the dark days, there is hope.
Think beyond the light failing on this grubby afternoon…

A film directed by Sarah Tremlett and edited by James Symonds for Lucy English‘s massive, multi-filmmaker collabortive project The Book of Hours. Sarah co-authored the text, writing the first four verses, with Lucy writing the second four. Voices include Helmie Stil in addition to both poets. The music is “Song for Athene” from Flights of Angels, Prior Park College Chapel Choir, Quest Music UK, 1998. The video footage was re-edited from a Creative Commons-licensed video by Christopher Huppertz.

Subsequent to the original publication of this poet, Sarah sent along some additional information, including the following process notes:

When I talked to Lucy about making films for The Book of Hours I was immediately interested in how to convey the winter and summer solstices, as I was developing a project on time and light. In terms of winter solstice, I read quite a bit about its historic significance. I was interested in the ritual power of the sun, and the ancient ceremony of ‘Sol Invictus’ which I wanted as the title. I also knew I wanted to experiment with vertical movement, creating a rising and falling, perhaps quite abstractly, with something like the sun – a ball maybe – and tried to do this at first through filming a yellow ball. I also liked the idea of the shadows created on the ball to show it turning. I made footage of this, in bright sun on holiday, but this didn’t really go anywhere.

I then found the glitch video tape visuals, which included orbic Christmas decoration shapes, and also give a sense of the vibration of light, and decided that these could be edited to work with seasonal change. The choice of this old footage was partly influenced, I see now, by my interest in early surrealist images of nature: Black Sun 1927–8 by German artist Max Ernst (1891–1976), is one that stands out, or Ambassador of Autumn (1922) by Swiss- German artist Paul Klee (1879–1940). I also wanted to write the first four verses myself, and then gave it to Lucy who wrote the second four. I wanted to include Helmie Stil’s distinctive voice, alongside Lucy and myself; with my intention of combining three voices that would suit the changing seasons. Helmie’s I saw as representing the spring sun, bright but gentle, delicate and inspired in tone; whilst Lucy’s came next, more summer, developed, but still holding strong; but ultimately, rather than the fading of autumn warmth and my somehow less musical tones, I became a chorus for their atmospheric voices.

I had in mind music that would evoke the sombre, stillness of winter, but also the slow and weighty majesty of the sun coming back to life; becoming magnificent again through the seasons. I also wanted to try to convey how ancient people might have felt about the darkness of winter, with its mystery and portentousness, and the jubilation of intensely brilliant summer. I was also fortunate to have been given a collection of sublime choral music, and had already earmarked this particularly moving and atmospheric ‘Song for Athene’ as the perfect anthem for the regeneration of the solar year.

Still There by Lucy English

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A recent addition to Lucy English‘s collaborative, online poetry-film anthology The Book of Hours by the Indiana-based multimedia poet Matt Mullins.

Saturday by Lucy English

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A video remix by Othniel Smith for Lucy English’s Book of Hours project, with her reading as the only soundtrack. Smith notes in the description that he sourced the imagery from a 1961 film produced by General Motors called A Touch of Magic. Intrigued, I found a Wikipedia page for it. It included the immortal lines:

This dream house you and I will share
Was planned for us by Frigidaire.

A half-century from now, will our contemporary techno-utopian fantasies seem as corn-ball and melancholy as this does now? Nothing ages as poorly as modernism — or is better suited for recycling into poems, especially one as wistful and gently ironic as this.

Stone Life by Lucy English

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Words and voice are by Lucy English; film, grading, editing and music by Marc Neys AKA Swoon — his most recent contribution to The Book of Hours project. It features orphaned home movie footage from IICADOM (The International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories).

Mr. Sky by Lucy English

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From dawn to nightfall, the sky reflects a couple’s relationship.

(don’t forget to look for the face in the clouds)

A recent addition to Lucy English‘s Book of Hours project, this time by her collaborator at Liberated Words, Sarah Tremlett, who’s credited as photographer and director, with James Symonds as editor and music by Kevin MacLeod.

Update (30 March 2018)
Sarah sent along these process notes:

Lucy and I had two separate ideas in parallel. In terms of the visuals – I get up early and noticed the dramatic colours playing out in the winter sky. Actually a mystical orange glow appeared through the window one morning! I wanted to capture the sky at brief intervals from dawn to dusk (with a history as a painter always fascinated by changing patterns of light) and spent a day doing so. Lucy then mentioned she had a new poem – Mr Sky – which was one of those wonderful coincidences. I like to work from nature or live footage where possible and you can wait a long time for the right image to turn up, or just be too preoccupied to see it … and then you need just the right poem and soundscape!

Quiet Sounds by Lucy English

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The second collaboration between Marie Craven and Lucy English for The Book of Hours. Marie recently blogged some process notes:

‘Quiet Sounds’ is my second video collaboration with the marvelous UK poet and performer, Lucy English. Both have been made as part of her great, multi-artist project, ‘The Book of Hours‘. The earlier video, ‘The Last Days‘, started with images. This one started with the poem and sound. The soundscape is comprised entirely of Lucy’s voice and small noises in the environment. I wanted the ‘bed’ of the soundscape to be quietly musical and constructed it from a collection of sounds recorded by various artists, and found on Creative Commons licences at Freesound. The central element is the metronomic sound of a clock ticking. I edited Lucy’s voice in loose rhythm with the clock, elongating the pace of her reading and leaving spaces for the various other sounds to have their ‘solo’ moments: a pheasant and a wood pigeon, a sheep, a cow, an old fridge, air traffic. I carefully built up the soundtrack piece by piece until I had a complete first draft. Then I looked for images that might add further to the audiovisual experience of the poem. The poem describes a moment of solitude, a hush when a woman becomes aware of the little sounds in her environment. It is implied she is inside a domestic space at the time. In my net wanderings, I found a marvelous series of interior shots by Carol Blyberg (aka Smilla4 on Flickr), also available on a Creative Commons licence. I worked with the images using zooms and slow dissolves that changed in rhythm with Lucy’s voice. For such an apparently simple piece, it was time-intensive to make, especially in the refining process that saw both sound and image go through many drafts. I gave a lot of attention to subtle details, in a meditative way. Maureen Doallas has since featured ‘Quiet Sounds’ on her wonderful blog, Writing Without Paper.

See Vimeo for the text of the poem, as well as links to all the soundtrack sources.

Dark Place by Lucy English

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As her ambitious Book of Hours has unfolded, it’s been fascinating to watch Lucy English‘s poetry evolve and adapt to the online video medium and to the exigencies of particular film-making styles. Here’s how Stevie Ronnie, her collaborator for this film (along with composer Jim Ronnie), describes their process at Vimeo:

Lucy and I wanted to try something different as a way of kick starting the collaborative process for Dark Place. It started from a desire to work on something that was going to become part of Lucy’s Book of Hours poetry film project. Poetry films often begin with the words or footage or sound but we decided to start from a colour palette. I created a palette and sent it to Lucy and she wrote the poem from the colours. Lucy then sent me a couple of drafts of the poem and, after spending some time digesting Lucy’s words, I decided to respond to it visually. Using the colours that I found in Lucy’s poem I rendered the poem as a painting, where each mark on the canvas represents a letter in the poem. I then captured this process as a series of still images which have been strung together into the film. The soundtrack, performed by my father Jim Ronnie, was composed and added during the video editing phase as a response to the poem’s images and the words.

The Last Days by Lucy English

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The latest addition to the Book of Hours, Lucy English’s multi-filmmaker collaborative poetry film project, is by Marie Craven, who used footage from the 1942 documentary A Child Went Forth and music by Kevin MacLeod. The close fit of text to images paves the way for an especially affecting zinger of a last line.

Incidentally, I gather from Facebook that Lucy is still looking for collaborators. Get in touch with her if you’re interested.