~ Animation ~
Crossing to Ireland by Jean Maskell
I always tend to feel that poetry animations are best at their most abstract and minimalistic—depending on the poem, of course. This animation by Rachel McMahon AKA RaeRae won the audience award at the Liverpool Celtic Animation Festival. It’s a collaboration with Jean Maskell, “a multi-disciplinary artist and writer inspired by contemporary and historic social issues and the natural world,” who provided the voiceover and text: a poem “about the conflicting emotions of feeling a part of two countries.” Perhaps it is that sense of a provisional existence that makes the kind of tentative approach to the animation—lines drawn and undrawn on white space with a paper grain—such a good fit.
Gethsemane by Toby Martinez de las Rivas
Gethsemane is one in an ongoing series of films from Jane Glennie, made in collaboration with fellow UK poet Toby Martinez de las Rivas, and Bulgarian sound artist Neda Milenova Mirova. This poem is from the collection Floodmeadow, published earlier in 2023 by Faber.
All films in the series take an experimental approach, including layered and truncated voices, gritty sound and music, and still images animated in darkly expressive ways. The three collaborators seem artistically well-matched, the writing, sound and film-making coherently meeting. Another highlight from the series is Psalm-for-the Sea, Little Sea-Psalm.
Jane Glennie currently has a solo exhibition happening over August and September in the Art at the ARB program of University of Cambridge. Gethsemane and the other films in the series form part of the exhibition, along with her award-winning Because Goddess is Never Enough.
We have previously featured several other of her films here. In addition, Jane regularly posts about film festivals and more at Moving Poems Magazine.
Life Sentence by Sissy Doutsiou
Moving Poems‘ own Jane Glennie, an award-winning film-maker in the UK, teams up with Greek poet and performer Sissy Doutsiou for this urgent, angry protest video titled Life Sentence.
The music by Rolvd is a key part of the piece, which in some ways resembles music video. Recording, mixing and mastering are credited to Incognito M and Pipeline Music Lab. Doutsiou’s spoken-word performance of the text is powerful in the mix.
Jane Glennie brings her signature kinetic animation style to the video. Well-chosen images and visual textures flicker in a rapid stream, meeting well with the voice and music.
Aside from her writing and performance work, Sissy Doutsiou has over the past decade been director of the International Video Poetry Festival in Athens, and editor of the more recent Film Poetry website.
Hypnic Jerk by Alan Peat
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
An homage to Henri Rousseau by Austin-based collaborative filmmakers Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran. The password is Hypn!c
British poet Alan Peat has won top awards in the Golden Haiku Contest, the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, the Otoroshi Rengay Contest, the BHS Ken and Norah Jones Haibun Award, the San Francisco International Haibun Contest, the Sanford Goldstein International Tanka Contest, the Heliosparrow Semagram Contest, and the Time Haiku ekphrastic haibun contest—all since 2021. He was one of three winners in the Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun competition (2022). He is clearly on a roll.
Judges’ statement: “We loved this one in the way that one loves a children’s book even as an adult and can’t wait to share it with one’s own kids. It has a warm and playful feeling of familiarity, excitement, fun and fast-paced adventure. The idea of the moving layers of jungle and animations within, and the cuts to the paintings in a gallery are fabulous. Can poetry be a lighthearted and fun action movie? Yes, it can!”
Directors’ statement:
Hooked by the mention of Rosseau’s jungle in the first line of Allen Peat’s evocative and mysterious Haibun, “Hypnic Jerk,” we wondered if we could create a wholly imaginary world cut from the cloth of Rousseau’s fantastical paintings and the dream illogic of Peat’s brilliantly fragmented, hypnic poetic strategy. We had previously tried something with a similar kind of logic, when making a film based on Wallace Stevens’ out-of-copyright “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” another anything-goes kind of videopoetry project, where our method was to capture the startling images his words evoked for us using whatever crazy means necessary, and to manipulate those images in unexpected and visually poetic ways. Very early in the pre-production stages, we thought we might need to supplement Rousseau’s painted imagery with video of jungle plants shot in public conservatories and gardens in Illinois and Texas, which could be collaged to create a virtual jungle backdrop for the poem’s action. Then we we reviewed Rousseau’s body of paintings, which included a substantial number that we hadn’t seen before, and we realized we could go whole hog and construct an entirely imaginary Rousseau world by animating and collaging his painted imagery, coupled with an evocative soundscape score composed almost entirely from natural sounds.
Weighing In by Rhina Espaillat
An uplifting animation about age, gravity and being human, Weighing In is from a poem by Dominican-American writer Rhina Espaillat. The film was directed by Casey McIntyre for MPC Creative in Los Angeles in partnership with Motionpoems. It was especially designed as a film for children. The poem can be read on the page here.
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
From the brief and powerful poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), this animated version of his Ozymandias is directed by Alvaro Lamarche-Toloza in France.
The soundtrack features the richly dramatic voice of Bryan Cranston reciting the poem in a 2013 trailer for Breaking Bad. The compelling voice is accompanied only by a thrilling heavy heartbeat, also from the original soundtrack.
Wash drawings in the animation are by Estelle Chauvard. More about the project can be read in the notes beneath the player at Vimeo.
This is another strong piece to be found in a Top Ten of films from classic poems selected for Moving Poems by Paul Casey and Colm Scully.
Interview with Edalia Day: poet, performer, filmmaker and much more
Edalia Day is the creator of a beautiful animated poetry film Duvet Days, made in collaboration with Kat Lyons, which some may be familiar with because it was selected for Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.
Duvet Days from Kat Lyons on Vimeo.
And great fun is the presentation of The World’s First Animated Poetry Slam, a 25 minute animated project created during pandemic lockdown when in-person poetry slams had to be abandoned.
But most exciting and innovative are the shows Edalia Day creates with projection mapping. I first encountered Edalia describing her work in the context of an online talk about interactive projection mapping. I was hoping for inspiration for the possibilities of the technology, but totally unprepared to be quite so blown away by the multi-disciplinary nature of a body of work which moves so comfortably between spoken word, poetry, drawn animation, stop-motion animation, physical theatre, music, comedy, and probably a few more aspects that I haven’t yet named or put my finger on.
Not new as a process in the context of massive budget theatre and music venues, but Edalia’s projection mapping work is made in the spirit of much poetry film – small scale, small budget and created with great skill and passion, and as such, hugely pushing the boundaries of what can achieved at this scale.
I am delighted to say that Edalia agreed to answer some questions for me …
Jane: With so many skills and talents to draw on – from acting to mime to animation – do you consciously decide which to use when in a show or a piece of work, or do you just go with the flow?
Edalia: When it’s my own work I start with the aim of telling the story first and foremost and it could use none of my skills for all I know. I only use what’s necessary at first, but then I have all of these different skills to play with and inevitably I end up having a lot of fun playing with all sorts of them and finish with an eclectic mix.
Jane: When did you discover projection mapping?
Edalia: I’ve worked as an actor for 15 years and had worked with projection several times before deciding to use it myself. Though all of those times it had been in various ways disastrous so I pledged to myself that I’d never use projection in my own work. The first time was in 2008, playing the lead in a rock musical version of Hamlet that toured Italy. I had to hold a skull that was projected onto some gauze in front of me and in every venue the projection was in a slightly different position and i had no way of knowing if my hand was in the right place or not.
When I started making my own videogame inspired version of Hamlet though in 2016 I thought “if ever there’s a show in which I ought to try using projections it would be this.” I’ve animated for a hobby my whole life and if I hadn’t gone into acting would have done that, and when I got into projection, it opened all sorts of creative doors to me, and has ended up being a lot of fun.
Jane: Did you immediately see its potential for a hybrid medium that combined your visual creativity with your physical performances?
Edalia: It quickly became clear it could do that for me, yes. I did a 15 minute version of the show at the Cockpit in London which was very physical, and people said they thought projections would work well in it. I then did a rough 50 minute long version at Red Rose Chain’s theatre in Ipswich using simple pixel art animations such as me riding a kart in Mariokart and jumping from position to position in a character selection screen, and it became really fun finding creative ways to interact with the projections and move with them.
Jane: Super Hamlet 64 is a live theatre show but also exists as a poetry pamphlet with videos linked by QR codes. The show is broken down into films for each poem, song or scene, while the pamphlet is made in the style of a 90s video game instruction manual. I personally love Super Hamlet 64 because I love work that plays around with material taking it from one context or media and putting it into another and mimicking other forms. You have done that by putting Shakespeare into videogames into comedy and poetry, and into a poetry book. How does your work evolve into the different modes for you? Did you plan from the outset to have both the show and the pamphlet?
Edalia: No. To start with, it was just the show. It was the second show I’d made myself and I hadn’t really been satisfied with the first show, so to start with I just wanted to have fun making a good show. Also I’d never published anything before and didn’t know how to approach that. Once I’d done one tour of the show though, and could see it was working well, I came up with the idea for the videogame manual style pamphlet and it became a real delight to work on too.
Jane: What would you do with your incredible talents and creativity if budget were no object?
Edalia: At the moment I’m making a series of YouTube animated sketch comedy pieces about trans “issues”. Each takes about 6 months+ and is about a couple of minutes long. With enough budget I’d love to hire a team of animators to bring it to life in style. I’ve set up a Patreon www.patreon.com/edaliaday to help me some day reach that goal. It would be great to hire people to do all of the producing and fund raising and technical implementation of ideas too so that I could just focus on writing, performing and video design for my shows.
Jane: Do you hunt for new technology or software to play around with and see what you could do with it, or do you find it as solutions to creative problems?
Edalia: I mostly look for software to solve creative problems. Sometimes I get invited to work with theatre companies trying out tech and it can be fun, but the possibilities with such tech are huge and often they’re more interested in just playing with tech rather than actually using it to create something, and I often find that actually the most clever looking things can be done in very simple ways.
Jane: Who or what are key influences on your work?
Edalia: I love physical theatre companies like Complicite and Kneehigh, as well as those that use a lot of clowns like the travelling troupe Footsbarn. I trained at Lecoq in Paris and love theatre that’s full of vibrant physicality. In terms of projection I haven’t seen anyone doing the kinds of things I like to do with projection, but I’m always inspired each time I see what other people are doing with it, even if they’re not like my own style.
Jane: Tell us about what you are excited to be working on now or next?
Edalia: Like I said I’m making these animated comedy trans pieces. I finished my first one a month ago, about a couple trying to get cancelled so they can sell more books, and now I’m making a much more ambitious one about a transphobe who tries to misgender a group of friends but accidentally gets their genders right with hilarious consequences. I’m also making a young adult novel about a trans girl surviving the apocalypse, written in the style of a teenage diary, full of doodles and poetry, and 1623 have commissioned me to make a trans version of Shakespeare’s Pericles. For that one I’ve been having a lot of fun placing cameras on the ceiling filming myself on the floor and projecting that along with various animations. That’s a fun project to explore.
Biography:
Edalia Day is a transgender spoken word artist, animator and theatre maker based in Norwich. Trained at Lecoq and Alra, her spoken word is full of energy and theatrical flair and her theatre combines comedy, live music and interactive projection mapping. She trained in classical acting at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts in London and in mime and physical theatre at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris.
After 10 years as an actor, she started writing and producing her own work in 2014 with In The Surface Of A Bubble, about a world of dreams, then Super Hamlet 64, a one person show about videogames and Shakespeare, and Too Pretty To Punch, about celebrating trans and non binary people.
Since lockdown started she trained as an animator and motion designer with School Of Motion and has produced several successful projects combining Animation and Poetry, working with the Young Vic, HOME, Harrogate Theatre, Theatre Royal Norwich and Lost in Translation Circus. Projects in development include: an animated online comedy series about trans people and Spectacular Spacebots: a play and a series of picture books for under 10s exploring neurodivergence, masculinity, and emotional well being.
Un/Write by Fiona Tinwei Lam
Vancouver-based poet and poetry filmmaker Fiona Tinwei Lam collaborated with animation students Lara Renaud and Quinn Kelly back in February on this videopoem “about revision, redaction, and renewal.” Lam told me in an email that
It originated in a published shaped or visual poem on the page about the editing and revising process. I quickly created and brainstormed a text block from which the poem would be carved out on screen.
But I realized there were other poems within the poem while utilizing further compression and fragmentation. Then I noticed there were a few interesting phrases in the discarded text from the text block I’d created for the initial poem, that could form the basis of a new poem about reclamation. So these “cut out” phrases could return on screen in a new way.
She added that she thought it could form the basis of a fun lesson plan for schools and community writing workshops, and I agree. One of the great things about erasure poetry is the way it reminds us that no creation is truly ex nihilo; there’s always an element of discovery. And often with such serendipity comes joy, flowering of its own accord, as the animation suggests. A wonderful start to Poetry Month. (And imagine my surprise just now, bringing up the Canadian National Poetry Month page, to find that this year’s theme is in fact joy!)
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
There is balm to be found in this poetry film from Wendell Berry‘s deep and enduring poem, The Peace of Wild Things. Berry has a close connection to rural Kentucky USA, where he was born in 1934 and has maintained a farm for over 40 years. It is his own voice in the soundtrack.
The animation is touchingly childlike, directed by UK artists Charlotte Ager and Katy Wang. The project was produced by The On Being Project, a non-profit initiative. Music and sound is credited to David Camp. In-depth process notes on the making of the film can be found here.
I found The Peace of Wild Things among a fine Top Ten of films from classic poems published recently on the magazine side of our site. These films were selected by Paul Casey and Colm Scully, organisers and judges of the Ó Bhéal Winter Warmer poetry festival and poetry film competition in Ireland.
