~ News and Views ~
Program announced for Visible Verse videopoetry festival
Heather Haley has posted the program for the Visible Verse videopoetry festival, which will be in Vancouver, BC on Friday, Nov. 4 and Saturday, Nov. 5 at the Pacific Cinematheque. A few of the filmmakers’ names were familiar to me from curating Moving Poems (Swoon Bildos, Alastair Cook, Kathy McTavish), but the majority were not, which is exciting: it suggests that my online anthology, extensive as it is becoming, is really only the tip of the iceberg. Not only do I miss a lot of good stuff, but many people never upload their films to a video-sharing site, especially those who are more focused on getting into festivals.
This year’s festival will also include an artist talk/Q&A with Tom Konyves, focusing on his recent Videopoetry: A Manifesto, and a live reading by a vsisiting videopoet, Rich Ferguson.
Incidentally, the Facebook group page for the Visible Verse Festival, source of this information, is a good place to find links to new work, since anyone can join and post to it.
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.
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.
Videopoetry: A Manifesto
I can’t remember what brought it on. Writing all the chapters of an introduction to videopoetry was going to be way too much, even from April 30 until tomorrow — for the first time I had all 4 months off. SO I wrote a MANIFESTO. (It’s very popular these days, have you noticed?)
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.
Call for submissions or your poems are dying to be a videopoem triptych
Whale Sound, Cello Dreams and Swoon are looking for poems with which to create a videopoem triptych.
Do you have a group of three poems you’d like to have published as videopoems? They could be three of your own poems, a set of three separate-but-related poems by you and two other poets, or a set of three poems written collaboratively by two or more poets.
We are a trio of artists — Nic S., poet/reader; Kathy McTavish, musician; and Swoon, film-maker — who have come together to pioneer this novel method of poetry publication.
Flight, a videopoem based on a poem by Helen Vitoria, is an example of our collaboration.
To get a sense of how your videopoem triptych would look and sound after publication, visit Night Vision.
Send 3 to 5 poems in the body of an email to Nic at nic_sebastian at hotmail dot com or Swoon at swoonbildos at gmail dot com.
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.
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.
Young David by Yehuda Amichai (with discussion by Edward Hirsch)
http://vimeo.com/24221256
Avi Dabach’s marvelous film interpretation of Amichai’s “Young David” (translated by Abraham Birman) is wrapped within a video introduction and post-film discussion by Bob Holman and Edward Hirsh at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. Hirsch describes his own, elliptical approach to politics in poetry, and says that Amichai was his major influence and model in this regard.
“Howl” now available on Hulu
The new feature-length film-poem HOWL, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, can now be seen for free on Hulu. I thought about posting it to the main site — Hulu films are embeddable — but apparently it can’t be seen overseas. I’m also told it’s available for no extra charge to anyone with a Netflix subscription. And of course the DVD is for sale.
I watched it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it, conditioned as I was by more than two years of curating Moving Poems: a brilliant melange of animation, drama, interview and flashback, I thought. I posted a review of sorts at Via Negativa.
Visible Verse Festival 2011 call for submissions
Submissions to the Visible Verse Festival in Vancouver are due by September 1. Don’t miss your chance to be part of North America’s premiere videopoetry festival.
2011 VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL
Call for Entries and Official Guidelines:
- VVF seeks videopoems, with a 15 minutes maximum duration.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required. Videos may originate in any part of the world.
- Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit. The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
- Please, do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
- Videopoem producers should provide a brief bio, full name, and contact information in a cover letter. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
DEADLINE: Sept. 1, 2011
- Send, at your own risk, videopoems and poetry films/preview copies (which cannot be returned) in DVD NTSC format to: VISIBLE VERSE c/o Pacific Cinémathèque, 200-1131 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2L7, Canada. Selected artists will be notified and receive a standard screening fee. For more information contact Heather Haley at: hshaley@emspace.com
