Posts By Dave Bonta
Two new festivals are looking for poetry films
Two new peripatetic film festivals are currently accepting submissions of videopoetry and other poetry-related films. South African videopoet Kai Lossgott is organizing Letters from the Sky: experimental films on climate change, which seeks “experimental film, artist’s film, video art, microcinema, animation, screen dance, video poetry” which address the question:
How does climate change affect your habitat? Participating artists should respond to the brief and the theme of evidence of climate change. In researching a personal but informed response to the topic, dialogue/collaboration with scientists is encouraged. Using film as a medium, the complex issues at hand should be transformed into dynamic but simple audiovisual experiences with both popular and critical merit. The work may not be longer than 4 minutes. Brevity is strongly encouraged.
The original screening will be part of the COP 17 global climate summit in Durban, South Africa, 28 November – 9 December 2011, “as well as Johannesburg and Cape Town. Thereafter, selections of the programme will travel to international film festivals.” The deadline is coming up soon — September 20. See the Open Call for Films and Proposals for more information.
The International Literary Film Festival is scheduled to kick off in Brooklyn, New York in November, and thereafter to travel to Berlin, Leiden, and Cha-am, Thailand over the following 14 months. The organizer, Lee Bob Black, is looking for films in four categories: feature literary film (longer than 60 minutes), short literary film (shorter than 60 minutes), documentary film about literature (longer than 60 minutes), and documentary short film about literature (shorter than 60 minutes). The deadline is October 14. See the website for a submission form and additional details.
How to make subtitles for videos with YouTube captioning — new tutorial
Brenda Clews — sometime contributor to this forum and author of several videopoems on the main site — has knuckled down and figured out how to add subtitles to her YouTube videos using CaptionTube. Needless to say, captioning is an extremely valuable addition to videos not only for accessibility, but also to offer English translations of videopoems in other languages that can be turned off by those who know the languages. And YouTube captions in any of Google Translate’s languages can be machine-translated with a click of a button into any other. Brenda shares what she’s learned so far in a post at her blog.
The Sights and Sounds of Arctic Birds by Helen Vitoria
A film called Flight, showcasing the collaborative efforts of Swoon (video editing, production, etc.), Nic S. of Whale Sound (voice), and Kathy McTavish of Cello Dreams (music). This was the dry run for their new collaborative videopoem project announced in a call for submissions last week (which was soon answered).
Pennsylvania poet Helen Vitoria is the editor of THRUSH Poetry Journal. The text of “The Sights and Sounds of Arctic Birds” is available as a PDF from Gold Mark Press.
The video features footage of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial by Ira Mowen. Swoon states in the description at Vimeo that it is “dedicated to Vladek & Anja Spiegelman, the main characters in Maus by Art Spiegelman.”
I’ve just installed a caching plugin at the main Moving Poems site to try to reduce CPU spikes at the server (we’re on a typical, cheap shared webhost). Please let me know if you run into any problems viewing or using the site.
The Last Brave Ship by Dale Favier
Portland, Oregon-based poet Dale Favier has been blogging at mole since 2003. His first collection of poems, Opening the World, is due out this month just out from Pindrop Press, and I recently had the pleasure of reading it in manuscript. A subsequent sighting of a mole in the yard resulted in this video. (See Via Negativa for a more detailed description of the process.)
In Extremis by Marly Youmans
Marly Youmans reads another poem from The Throne of Psyche, out earlier this year from Mercer University Press. Film and music once again are by Paul Digby. In her description at YouTube, Marly writes:
This poem is about a visionary experience that flooded in during a harrowing passage in my life. The timing was a bit difficult; I had given birth to a third child and then immediately moved to South Carolina. Not long after we arrived, our eldest, a little boy of 8, was struck with meningitis. The short blank verse poem begins at a point where he had been immobile for a week: still and unresponsive, and was about to be moved from St. Francis Children’s Hospital to a larger hospital with an Infectious Diseases specialist.
Free stock footage on Vimeo
Thanks once again to Nic S. for one of the latest additions to our growing list of resources for videopoem makers: a Vimeo group dedicated to sharing free HD stock footage. It’s the work of Phil Fried from Austria, and imposes only the condition that users not sell or redistribute the clips elsewhere. There are currently 149 videos in the group. It’s particularly good for nature imagery: flowers, sunsets, the beach, and animals.
Another user on Vimeo (found via the links in the aforementioned group) goes by the handle Free Stock Footage, and has so far uploaded 85 videos “free to use in non-commercial projects” (though donations are appreciated). The videographer appears to be a resident of Alberta, Canada, and includes some great sky, water and landscape footage, a few wildlife videos, and some random CGI stuff.
New Year’s Eve by Thomas Hardy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX746yXs96A
With all the videopoems that have been made with her readings or for her poems, it was probably inevitable that sooner or later Nic S. would have to try making one of her own. This is her maiden effort — and the first Hardy poem in the Moving Poems archive. She used some wonderfully creepy footage of cockroaches from the Prelinger Archives. She her blog post for more about her process.
“Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson
Moving Poems’ latest in-house production attempts to put Emily Dickinson’s famous poem in its historical context. I used clips from a public-domain educational film, “Civil War,” by Encyclopaedia Brittanica Films, 1954, from the Prelinger Archives, and found an excellent recording of a wood thrush at the equally invaluable freesound.org. But the most essential ingredient here, I think, was the reading by Nic S.. As Julie Martin put it in a comment on my blog post introducing the video,
Nic’s reading is masterful. Dickinson is so condensed and elliptical that her work seems impossible to read aloud, much like the unplayable late string quartets of Beethoven. But Nic invests each word with a different weight; she doesn’t play with expectations, but transcends them.
