~ Animation ~
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Millionaire”
Millionaire
Poem by Mab Jones
Animation by Lauren Orme and Jordan Brookes
Dedicated to (about) the poet Johnny Giles
2015
A love poem in every sense of the word, Millionaire is uncomplicated and embraces the value of being in love. This video poem is wonderful and exquisitely charming. Unpretentious and lovely, it gets the point across without being sappy or corny.
I love the simple frame-by-frame line animation. The motion aspect is wonderful, but when I close my eyes and just listen to the audio, the poem still works. Every aspect of this video poem can stand alone, but all together, it is a very special treat.
There is nothing complicated about this piece and that’s why it works. No kitchen sink, just plain and uncomplicated. Millionaire follows the theory and quote by Mies van der Rohe: less is more. So many times, we as artists fall in love with our work and want to incorporate every detail. This is not always necessary in order to get one’s point across.
Millionaire is a true love poem. It is stunning in its plainness and doesn’t waver. There is not much else to say, just a beautiful piece.
Testimonial by Rita Dove
An animated poem from the Traveling Stanzas public poetry project at Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center, in which illustrated poetry broadsheets are also given a video form. In this case, the art was the work of Christopher Darling, and the animator was The New Fuel studio. Rita Dove probably needs no introduction.
the light – the shade by Robert Lax
Susanne Wiegner‘s most recent 3D animation of a poem by Robert Lax is among the films scheduled for screening this Saturday, October 17, at Visible Verse in Vancouver, North America’s longest-running videopoetry festival.
To me, this is an excellent example of how a good videopoem can open up a difficult or hermetic text. If I’d encountered Lax’s poem on the page, I doubt I would’ve given it more than ten seconds of my attention before becoming irritated or exasperated, but Wiegner’s animation is so compelling and so full of surprises, its seven minutes went by all too quickly. Here’s what she wrote in the Vimeo description:
“the light – the shade” is a poem by Robert Lax that plays with the contrasts and opposites light and shade, with bright and dark, black and white, red and blue. The film begins with a nighttime scenery in a city, moves into a room and starts watching the movement of the shadows on the wall. Finally the camera enters the screen of a laptop and goes deeper and deeper into the poem. The film becomes a journey through the realm of imagination, through spaces and pictures, through letters and words. In that way the minimal language of the poem is unfolded into unexpected pictures.
Millionaire by Mab Jones
This animation by Lauren Orme and Jordan Brookes is described by the poet, Mab Jones, as
A poem about love, in the form of a list.
Dedicated to (about) the poet Johnny Giles.
The film has just taken top honors at the 2015 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, winning for Best Animation, Best Valentine, and Best Overall Production. It was also shortlisted in the Southbank Centre’s Shot Through The Heart poetry film competition in 2014.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91”
Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91
Poem by L. S. Klatt
Film by Tom Jacobsen
Motionpoems 2012
This delightful videopoem glides along on a journey that inescapably comes to an end with the death of the great artist, Andrew Wyeth.
Visually this film is a real treat for me. I work with the same program Tom Jacobsen uses, Adobe After Effects. Jacobsen succeeds beautifully at weaving in the software while allowing the imagery to follow the words. The images reveal aspects of Wyeth’s work, creating an exquisite statement.
Continuity is a huge issue for me. Jacobsen’s use of two very different art forms, drawing and photography, is successful: the two seamlessly overlap without distracting the viewer. There are times when an artist will throw in a photo for whatever reason, and it doesn’t always work. But in this film it helps to create a painterly rhythm. The use of abstract forms such as ink drops also adds to the flow, assisting the foreground images as they reveal the spoken words.
I love the music, and I think it’s a good fit. But however slight a criticism it may be, I could do without the sound effects. Why throw in the kitchen sink when the piece is so pleasing and pure?
Map of the Underground by Ifor ap Glyn
A terrific animated film from 2005 directed by Hywel Griffith of Griffilms Animation Studio, featuring a poem by Ifor ap Glyn, two-time winner of the National Eisteddfod of Wales. Music and dub are by Meilyr Tomos.
A Kite is a Victim by Leonard Cohen
Elizabeth Lewis directed and animated this film based on a Leonard Cohen poem, using a reading by Paul Hecht. It’s actually an excerpt from a longer film produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1977: Poets on Film No. 1, which “brings together animated interpretations of four poems by great Canadian wordsmiths” by four different animator-directors.
(Hat-tip: Anik Rosenblum at the Poetry in Animation Facebook group.)
Undersong by Stacey Lynn Brown
Motionpoems’ latest, a Vimeo Staff Pick, is a pencil animation by Matt Smithson A.K.A. man vs magnet of a poem by Stacey Lynn Brown. Yaa Asantewa provided the voiceover and Joshua Smoak composed the music.
“Citizen journalist” Jeannie E. Roberts conducted interviews for Motionpoems with both the poet and the filmmaker—check them out. Brown says, in part:
“Undersong” is both an elegy and an ode to the poet Jake Adam York, who died at the age of 40 in December 2012. Jake was a poet of extraordinary depth, courage, wisdom, and empathy. His life’s work, a project entitled “Inscriptions for Air,” was an excavation of race and involved writing an elegy for every single man, woman, and child who were martyred in the Civil Rights Movement. He was a white man from Alabama who confronted the challenges and implications and devastation of racism head on, and the literary world is so much richer for his work—and so much more bereft for the work that will not follow.
Poetry is, in many ways, the only language I have at my disposal to say certain things, and this poem is an example of that. As a poet from the South, I wanted to pay homage to the visual landscape that connected us, to evoke the places we’re both from in an effort to encapsulate origin while memorializing just how far from there we journeyed in our thoughts and actions and words.
And Smithson’s description of his process is extremely impressive:
The process of creating the Motionpoem for “Undersong” was two-fold. Once I had decided on a direction and concept, I spent quite a bit of time researching specific locations that I felt best captured the visual quality described in the poem. Traveling through the South, through rural Virginia, North and South Carolina, West Virginia, and Kentucky, I filmed a variety of places, people, and details that I planned to use in the creation of this Motionpoem. Not every piece of footage was used, but this process helped further connect me to many of the places Stacey Lynn Brown describes, places echoing with a storied past.
The process I used to create the visual style of this Motionpoem involved the labor intensive process of tracing each image by hand to give the piece a handmade quality. Using the filmed footage as a starting point for most of the scenes, I merged the reality with my stylized interpretation, taking creative liberty in the development of each moment.
This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin
https://vimeo.com/133776107
Larkin’s own reading of his most famous poem is brought to life in this student film, a simple but effective text animation by Caroline Marks, who notes that it was “Created using After Effects, June 2015.”
