~ Animation ~
Giant by Orianne Breakspear
A film by Luca Dicorato and Takanori Yoshiro. Dicorato notes:
Giant is a poem written and performed by 12 years old Orianne Breakspear.
We decided to animate this piece by employing a mixture of techniques, mainly cutout animation. We favoured images from old books and magazines as well as from the web in order to establish the vintage look.The music is from Kevin MacLeod
In 2011, Orianne Breakspear won the Brit Writers Award for poetry in the Under 16s category.
Poem About Big BIGMOUSE by Ludmila Ulanova
I’m spotlighting children’s poetry films and videos this week, a diverse collection of works by children as well as film-poems made by adults for children. This is an outstanding example of the latter. About BIGMOUSE (Про Мыху), animated by Constantin Arephyeff (or Arefiev, in a more standard Romanization) won the award of the children’s jury at the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2010. This is the English version narrated by Stephen Coates, who collaborated with the author and a couple of other people on the translation. There’s also a Russian version.
As in many Eastern European poetry animations, the text is used as a jumping-off point for a different, more elaborate story-line. However, this also feels very familiar in the context of children’s literature, where the artwork in illustrated books often does much more than just illustrate.
Writing Behaviour by Rosemary Norman
Stuart Pound describes this on Vimeo as
a poem set to images and sounds. The image foreground is made up of the lines, words and letters of the poem, floating and twisting in the light, as the incarcerated writer writes his escape.
Some very interesting kinetic text effects bordering on concrete poetry, especially with the light-hearted musical accompaniment provided by James Cordell and Frances Wright.
I feel a bit abashed at not having discovered Pound’s work until now. His Vimeo profile says,
Stuart Pound lives in London and has worked in film, digital video, sound and the visual arts since the early 1970’s. He hopes to return to painting. Since 1995 he has collaborated with the poet Rosemary Norman. Work has been screened regularly at international film and video festivals.
Rosemary Norman says on her page at poetry pf that she and Pound “began by using spoken poems and have experimented with digitally processed recordings and with putting text on screen.” There’s a website devoted to their collaboration at stuartpound.info with texts, stills and clips.
Orpheus’ Pony by Lisa Tuyula
Departing from the usual relationship between poetry and animation in which the latter illustrates the former, this animation may be said to exist in dynamic tension or conversation with the text and music. The director, Michael Fragstein of Büro Achter April, told me in an email that his animation came first, and the German-Congolese jazz singer Lisa Tuyula wrote her spoken-word composition in response, following which Marc Fragstein wrote the music that ties it all together.
While I think this was intended more as a music video than a poetry video, the ekphrastic approach is one that poets and animators ought to consider experimenting with.
Turbines in January by Colette Bryce
Another of the Dove Marine Lab poetry films from UK poet Colette Bryce and artist Kate Sweeney. (See “Ballasting the Ark” for more details on the project.) On her website, Sweeney notes:
Building upon some of the challenges I found with the earlier films, I wanted to almost ignore the text and sideline the structure of the recording. I put up a kind of mental block between me and the text and ‘drew’ the shapes of the sentences. These small drawings, or plans made the basic structures of the animated sequences.
Sweeney goes on to reflect on the project as a whole — the first venture into poetry film for either of them:
While working with Colette on visual responses to her poetry, I have increasingly realized that the three films are a response not just to the three poems, but more specifically, the recordings of the three poems. I am not only responding to the content and motifs contained in the poems (as one would if responding to a single word, an idea, or a title) but also directly to the length of the poem, the rhythm, spacing and sounds of the words as they are delivered in the recording.
The poems have been, to a greater or lesser extent, a script. We have found a lot of questions have arisen about how the task of making a film in this way is different to less time-based parameters of more abstract types of collaborations. It highlights the difference between spatial and time-based video and film work, and has sparked an interest for both of us in how this brief could work in reverse – a poet creating text to a finished film or video, for example. This collaboration feels like a starting point, and we would be keen to collaborate further in different contexts. In the present context, the response to the science was the poet’s, while in a future context, we would be interested to explore what happens when both the artist and the poet are responding to the science and somehow bringing the results together in a collaborative work.
Ballasting the Ark by Colette Bryce
A terrific videopoem addressing the invasive species epidemic. This is one of three Dove Marine Lab poetry films:
Three films made by artist Kate Sweeney and poet Colette Bryce in 2012 inspired by the poetry Colette produced as part of her Leverhulme residency at The Dove Marine Lab in Cullercoats, Tyne and Wear, UK.
On her website, Kate Sweeney describes her general approach to the project:
I am using photography, drawings, video and sound taken in and around the Dove Marine Laboratory to explore some of the motifs, rhythms, ideas and patterns that arise in Colette’s poems. In the poems, Colette to some extent celebrates the act of looking, for the poet and the scientist: the films take this visual thread forward into a new realm. I am trying to create a tension between the words and accentuate the rhythm and sounds of the spoken word through imagery without becoming distracting or merely illustrative.
“Ballasting the Ark,” she writes,
involves drawing, copying, inventing, imagining and re-imagining of some of the activity taking place in the poem. I wanted this film to begin as a sketch, or workings-out on paper; like a god sketching out an ‘Ark’; divine imagination, moving toward an opposing set of ideas – the science of observing ‘reality’, and of a scientist looking, counting, analysing, removing, deleting.
For more on Colette Bryce, see her Wikipedia page. And check out the Dove Marine Laboratory website.
[UPDATE] The three films were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize for new works in poetry in 2013.
Bones Will Crow: selections from ten Burmese poets
This tantalizing introduction to the contemporary Burmese poetry scene offers a rare (for Westerners) glimpse into the country’s intellectual life. Here are the details from Vimeo:
Images: Craig Ritchie.
Animations: Brett Biedscheid/State of State.
Animations Commissioned by English Pen.Images of Burmese poets taken in their writing spaces in Yangon, Burma during 2011/2012.
Poem excerpts from the anthology of Burmese Poetry, ‘Bones Will Crow’, by Arc Publications, 2012.
The excerpted poems include “The Sniper” by Pandora, “A Letter for Lovers and Haters” by Ma Ei, “Aung Cheimt Goes to the Cinema” by Aung Cheimt, “A Bunch of 52 Keys” by Maung Pyiyt Min, “Moonless Night” by Moe Zaw, “Slide Show” by Zeyar Lynn, “Redundant Sentences” by Thitsar Ni, “Gun and Cheese” by Khin Aung Aye, “The Heart Bearer” by Maung Thein Zaw, and “If You Need to Piss, Go to the Other Room” by Moe Way. Translators are ko ko thett, James Byrne and Maung Tha Noe.
What I Say When You Ask What I’m Up To by Diana Salier
San Francisco-based writer and musician Diana Salier collaborated with the animator and director, Daniel Lichtenberg, on
A paper cutout-style animated video adapted from Diana Salier’s poem WHAT I SAY WHEN YOU ASK WHAT I’M UP TO, from her new book LETTERS FROM ROBOTS.
Diana builds a couch fort to hide herself from a former lover.
LETTERS FROM ROBOTS is out now on Night Bomb Press.
Salier stars in the film (along with Leiandrea Layus), composed the music and did the voice-over. Additional credits include assistant animator Max Berry and gaffer Matt Rome. (One doesn’t see nearly enough poetry films crediting gaffers.) It was produced at Photon SF.
A Year Younger by Hal Sirowitz
Hal Sirowitz’ Mother Said was a bestseller in Noway, whence this film by Kajsa Næss, who notes,
The film is made using a mix of pixillation, cut out photographs and stop motion.
Shot on 16mm
