Posts By Dave Bonta
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.
Two poems (personality fragmented and notes from a taxi cab at 2 a.m.) by u.v. ray
U.K. photographer and musician gordon eightball made this wonderfully atmospheric film, with words and voice supplied by u.v. ray, whose website says he has been “a stalwart of the underground literary scene for 20 years.”
Three poems (Flute Boy, Marriage of Opposites and Half-caste) by John Agard
John Agard is joined on stage by the flautist Keith Waithe, a fellow Guyanan, in an extract from a film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce called John Agard Live!, which was included as a DVD along with Agard’s 2009 collection Alternative Anthem, from Bloodaxe Books. (There’s also video of Agard reading the title poem.)
New additions to the web resources page: video effects, videos from space, and Soundcloud
UPDATE (9/1): I’ve added close to a dozen more links in the past three days, courtesy of Nic.
- I’ve updated the list of Web resources for videopoem makers to add some new links. I discovered last month that SoundCloud, the online audio-sharing site for musicians (and sometimes spoken-word artists), encourages members to apply Creative Commons licenses to their works and make them available for download (though frustratingly, some do the former and neglect to do that latter). Adding to the site’s utility for remixers and filmmakers is a very useful advanced search function, even better than ccMixter, so if for example you want to find a piece of electronica with French horns that’s licensed CC non-commercial, you can do that. The site overall is very comparable to Jamendo, but I think may have even more users.
A couple weeks ago, Diane Lockward let me know about a whole new category of free resources: prekeyed footage, brief stock clips and other video effects. I have so far included just the two sites she recommended, Footage Crate and Movietools.info; others I looked at seemed pretty spammy.
The most recent addition comes from Nic S., who has just made her first videopoem after being so heavily exploited often called upon to provide audio for videos by me and Swoon. In addition to the Prelinger Archives, Nic got the bright idea of using footage from the NASA Video Gallery, which, as I say on the resource list, looks like the go-to site site for videos of the earth from space and other cool spacey stuff. The site’s very easy to navigate, and every video has a download link.
Thanks, Nic and Diane! And if anyone else has a discovery to share, please don’t be shy.
This Was Supposed to Be About Karl, But It Didn’t End Up That Way, by Sherry O’Keefe
A film called “Nightvision” by Swoon Bildos, which he blogged about (in Dutch) here. Fortunately for us English speakers, though — and for everyone who’s been following Swoon’s work — the poet, Sherry O’Keefe, blogged a conversation with him about the process of making this video, how he got into videopoetry and more.
The poem originally appeared in PANK, and was recorded by Nic S. for Whale Sound. The video includes some camera work by Kristoffer Jansson and Keith Marcel.
Interview with poetry-filmmaker Swoon
Montana-based poet Sherry O’Keefe has posted a great interview with the Belgian artist Swoon Bildos (Marc Neys) at her blog. Marc talks about his process, his background, and how he got into making videopoetry. It was gratifying to learn what a role Moving Poems has played in encouraging him. And Marc’s thoughts about what makes an effective videopoem are very much in line with my own:
I (most of the time) try not to use obvious images. For several of my videos I used ‘city-landscape and crowded places’ where the poem is more ‘rural’, It often surprised viewers, but they like it on a second note.
I catch myself thinking in the same way; for instance for ‘The Universe’ (my last video, Poem Neil Ellman) I thought about using Ice, Northern light,… I even tried it out…then said no and turned it around.
It’s that turning around that I’m not afraid of. Be prepared to turn your work around, inside out…but with a gut-feeling.
Happiness by Jorge Luis Borges
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xde4fp_jorge-luis-borges-happiness_creation
Today’s Google Doodle commemorates the birth of Borges:
“Wishing Jorge Luis Borges a happy 112th birthday!” Google tweeted early this morning, adding a well-known Borges quote: “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”
I shudder to think what this arch-conservative and biobliophile would’ve said about videopoetry, let alone digital texts. But thanks to a Facebook contact, I saw this video and thought it worth sharing. It appears to be a quite illegal upload (and re-branding) of a snippet from the documentary Art, Poetry and Particle Physics, narrated by John Berger and directed by Ken McMullen. However, the uploaders do at least acknowledge the theft, and also reproduce the text of the translation by Stephen Kessler used in the documentary. [The YouTube user account was terminated for copyright violations. I swapped in a DailyMotion version on 15 August 2014.] And it’s a very effective selection, I thought — it works well on its own as a videopoem, even with the apparent non sequitur by Berger at the end about Borges’ lack of interest in 20th-century science.
“Bound is a Boatless Woman”: tribute to Látra-Björg
Neither a filmpoem nor a bio pic in the conventional sense, this six-minute film by Lisa Castagner, an artist from Northern Ireland, invokes the life and spirit of a fierce, 18th-century Icelandic poet I’d not previously heard about. Google Translate isn’t much help in deciphering the Icelandic Wikipedia page, except to impart the information that her given name was Björg Einarsdóttir, and “Látra-Björg” means something like “Trees, Boulders.” Fortunately, Castager’s description at Vimeo is a bit more helpful:
The title originates from a Viking proverb ‘Bundinn er bátlaus maðu’, meaning ‘Bound is a boatless man’. Likewise, a woman without a boat is a prisoner.
Látra-Björg was an 18th Century outcast fisherwoman who wrote poems believed to cast spells on those who crossed her. Fisherwomen were required to wear their skirts regardless of practicality, so they often defied the law and removed them at sea. Látra-Björg lived and died a beggar in an isolated northern fjord of Iceland during the ‘Mist Famine’ which forced many to emigrate to Canada.
I made the piece as an imaginative interpretation of Látra-Björg’s poetry and story while I stayed in that part of Iceland; her most well-known poem is ‘Fagurt er i Fjörðum’ (‘Tis fair in the fjords), a verse describing the beauty of the fjords when the weather is fair, until the extreme hardships of the winter, ‘when man and beast must die’.
