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Brazilian poet Fernando Tavares Pereira made these fascinating animated text videos with the help of Rafael Veggi (computer graphics, sound). For those of us who don’t know Portuguese, he was kind enough to email a translation of each as well as an explanation of the project:

The videographic poem is the record of the birth of a word. Through the experience of emotions, associations, forms, memories, everything that contributes to the formation and understanding. It’s the word behind the word.

Secret – Secreto

Portrait – Retrato

Sun – Sol – As the letter sun in Portuguese, s-o-l, as the key of sol, as a sun shining, as the sol note at the end

One – Um – The ONE is the element one and at the same time the multiplicity in time. This back and forth movement means your birth as a word.

I asked about their composition process, and Fernando replied:

The poem is born as a graphic on paper. Then I wrote a project, a script to follow, to turn the poem into movement. And so Rafael is free to create solutions on top of what I present, and many times I have counted on his talent to improve the quality of the job. I’m the pen and he’s the byte. We are a partnership to works in the same sense to create beauty and, I usually say, entertainment. In fact I see poetry as entertainment, image, cinema, more than anything else. I believe that with this poetry does not lose anything of its flavor.

The poems are numbered as an untitled movie, because they are born and nominated by themselves. They are the subject of reading and we are the observing object. The logical layout has changed and reinvented itself.

Rafael added:

The sound was arranged by me following Fernando’s guidelines.
All samples come from open source databases around the internet and then edited in Audacity software.

Poems 01 and 02 animations were made on Blender, poems 03 and 04 were made in SVG/HTML/Javascript/CSS. I’ve had a great time working on them!

The fourth poem represents a deconstructed word ‘um’, which means ‘one’ in portuguese, as well as the number 1 itself.

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Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.

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