~ Animation ~
The Royal Oak by Benedict Newbery
An award-winning watercolor animation by Sandra Salter, with additional animation by Meg Bisineer, for a poem by Benedict Newbery (read here by Tony Fish). For additional credits, see Vimeo, which includes this description:
A local pub, despite it’s refit continues to be a bolt-hole, refuge and home to its regulars. An animated poetry film.
Channel 4 commissioned Sandra Salter and Benedict Newbery to make a film for its first Random Acts Season. The film was broadcast on Channel 4 in October 2012. The animation is based on the poem The Royal Oak which was published in Magma, and this film sees a further evolution of Newbery and Salter’s poetry film style using watercolour and transitions.
The Royal Oak won the Best Animation Audience Choice Award at the Purbeck Shorts competition at the Purbeck Film Festival held on 18 October 2013. It was described by the Festival as ‘a beautifully observed, watercolour, animated poem.’
The film was also exhibited in the 2013 Ludlow Open Rural Contemporary Art Showcase, and chosen as the opening film for the Filmpoem Festival in Dunbar, Scotland, in August 2013.
Meek by Harry Martinson
A poem by the 20th-century Swedish poet Harry Martinson, one of three recently animated by Ana Perez Lopez, who writes:
Olofström is nature: tall trees, infinite lakes and the echoing voice of Harry Martinson. But Olofström grew with a factory, a building where everything from pots, bullets and cars can be made.
After spending a month as an art resident in Nabbeboda Skola I tried to combine this three elements in one project. I interview Johnny Carlson and wondered around the town. I stuck my nose into Harry Martinson’s poems and left pen be taken by his imagination.
I illustrated three of his poems and brought them to life with animation. I hope you enjoy these bits of Olofström through the penetrating voice of Johnny Carlson.
Discharged into Clouds by Dean Young
The November selection from Motionpoems is by their co-founder Angella Kassube, and I think it’s one of the best they’ve ever made. The minimalism here really works for me, in part perhaps because I like Dean Young‘s poem so much. The soundtrack (by Carly Zuckweiler) is a perfect match to Tim Nolan’s reading.
Kassube’s process notes are worth a read (scroll down past the poem text). The poem is from Young’s new book, Bender.
Good to see a major player in American poetry film use a reading from someone other than the author. It’s kind of surprising to me that poetry film makers rely so heavily on poets’ own readings, given that all too often we are the least inspired oral interpreters of our own words.
Psalm 42 by Jina Davidovich
From G-dcast:
G-dcast held a competition, The Psalms Project, inviting Jewish artists and poets to reinterpret a Psalm of their choice. We picked four winners from all of the brilliant entries. This piece was written and performed by Jina Davidovich and animated by Jeremy Shuback. It looks into Psalm 42, which poses the question ‘Where is your G-d?’. This was made possible with the generous support of The Koret Foundation, as part of an initiative to cultivate Jewish peoplehood.
Via Velveteen Rabbi.
Mesostic (“Dancer/Suc/Hands…”) by John Cage
A compelling animation of a visual poem, one of John Cages’s mesostics, by Federica Cristiani. She writes:
In this video I try to create a perfect balance between music and video. The letters appear following the beat of the music. My purpose is to create a perfect synesthesia within sound and typography.
This particular text was also included in a musical composition for solo voice, Sixty-Two Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham.
Four Years From Now, Walking With My Daughter by Stevie Ronnie
This animated film by Liam Owen for a poem by Stevie Ronnie has been shortlisted in the 2013 DepicT! award at Encounters Short Film Festival in Bristol.
[meine heimat] by Ulrike Almut Sandig (2)
For the 2012 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, filmmakers were challenged to make a film using a text and reading by the German poet Ulrike Almut Sandig: “[meine heimat]” (“[my home/homeland/native land]”). In all, they received 33 films from 13 countries. Some of them are up on the web, but to date I’ve only shared one, the entry by Belgian filmmaker Swoon (Marc Neys). This week I’ll be posting a few others I like. (Some are fairly long, so it didn’t make sense to cram them all into one post as I did for “A Westray Prayer.”) The animation above is by the always wonderful Susanne Wiegner, who notes:
[meine heimat] is a poem by Ulrike Almut Sandig, that describes a space of memories or a landscape, that is not clearly defined.
“Heimat” is a very special German word, that can’t be translated into other languages, because it means as well a specific place, as a certain landscape or an abstract feeling. During the Third Reich in Germany, the word “Heimat” was barbarously and fanatically glorified and misused with the result that many people lost their “Heimat” and their lives.
In the video a picture of a concentration camp is projected on the letters of the words [meine heimat] blended with a train ride through my own homeland that reminds also of the terrible deportations to show the ambiguity, that you feel as a German when you think about your “Heimat”.
History of a future by Renee Reynolds
This was the grand prize winner of the 2012 Shanghai Tunnels Project International Video Festival. According to the festival page on the Unshod Quills website,
Renee Reynolds is a freelance writer from Chicago living and working in Shanghai since 2007. Olivier Wyart is a freelance designer from Paris living and working in Shanghai since 2009. The poem was compiled over the course of five years in China by an American expatriate scribbling in the subways of Shanghai. The video ventures to visually straddle the mishmash of East, West, history and future colliding in the text.
Motionpoems featured in the Georgia Review Online
The latest online column from Georgia Review assistant editor David Ingle focuses on Motionpoems, with mentions of other poetry-film projects (including this one). It’s great to see major literary journals such as GR beginning to pay attention to the genre. I also happen to like Ingle’s selection of recommended videos, and agree with his conclusion that the variety of approaches taken by the different filmmakers at Motionpoems adds greatly to the site’s charm. Go read.
Producer wanted at Motionpoems
The folks at Motionpoems, the Minnesota-based arts organization responsible for so many stunning poetry films in the last several years, are hiring a producer.
Motionpoems is seeking an ambitious, self-starting Producer to bring artist relations, project coordination, and production skills to a 12-month project, July 2013-June 2014. The Producer will manage production of a dozen new Motionpoems shorts and organize a public screening and online distribution of the films.
Click through for the full description.
