~ Animation ~
A fora (Outside) by Albert Balasch
Moving Poems’ first piece by a Catalan poet is one of the competition films in the upcoming 6th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, nominated in the category “Best Debut.” The collaborative process by which it came into being sounds fascinating—part accident, part ekphrasis:
A fora(Outside), is a text by the poet Albert Balasch. A few years ago, Balasch began a series of collaborations with the painter Tià Zanoguera. It was from this collaboration that the idea of adapting the text to comic form arose. Zanoguera then created a long series of paintings and drawings that gave birth to the project. In the end, the project did not come to fruition, but the filmmaker and editor Marc Capdevila thought about the possibility of animating the pages and paintings that had been produced. And in this way they constructed a short-film combining poetry, painting and 2D animation.
The challenge in doing the project was to bring the paintings to life and create a stimulating rather than a narrative universe. How can a painting be brought to life? How can you give life to an individual line or to that essence of a picture that cannot be reproduced? And how can you go beyond a literal illustration of the text?
Zanoguera and Capdevila took photographs of the painting and worked on them with animation software. Then Balasch reduced the text to a script in search of ellipsis.
The result of all this process is a short-film that aims to maintain the texture of the original paintings, the expressivity of the brush strokes and the vitality of the range of colours.
In short, the result is A fora(Outside), a brief journey.
There’s also a version on Vimeo without the subtitles.
The Pilgrim is Bridled and Bespectacled by Bridget Lowe
The September offering from Motionpoems is an animation by the co-director herself, Angella Kassube. Visit their website for the text. This is another selction from Best American Poetry 2011. Bridget Lowe is a young poet from Kansas City with a first book due out next year from Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Motionpoems’ free email newsletter quoted Kassube on the making of the film:
“From the beginning I knew I had to use the correct face and the correct eyes. But the line ‘World, there are two baskets / on my back’ – I didn’t know what to do with that. I built the section several times. I knew I didn’t want to use images of two baskets and fill them with something. I had already thought about how many definitions there are for the word ‘WORLD,’ and I had decided that World should be inside her head. There are the city and other images that represent outside influences on her world, but it is how she reacts to those things that creates her World. I realized she could look in two different directions and that could be a way to interpret the two baskets.”
The use of those eyes also stood out to Bridget: “The beautiful illustrations Angella used to tell the story (the eyes–so perfect!) balance explanation and mystery impeccably. Her timing as a director is likewise inarguably impeccable. Angella’s vision has compelled me to rethink how I read, and therefore present, my own work. What a gift.”
Here at Motionpoems, we’re always excited when we learn one of our films has inspired a poet to consider her work in a new light. Bridget continued, “The thing that most surprised and excited me about Angella’s interpretation was her ability to illuminate a playfulness in the poem that I hadn’t previously noticed fully. I knew the poem was one of pleading and desperation, but Angella’s version cut through some of that heaviness and landed in a place more like wondrous awe, which is what the poem announces itself to be from the beginning. I thought that was brilliant.”
Idioticon by Peter Wullen
Animator Kris J. Yves Verdonck performs a kind of open-heart surgery on Peter Wullen’s text (or an English translation of it). The author’s reaction on his blog is worth quoting in full:
With the videopoem ‘Idioticon’ Kris J. Yves Verdonck created something really special. Together with Ian Kubra and Marc Neys this is exactly what I had in mind when I started this. Poets are egotistical and selfish creatures. They don’t like others to play with their words. But in these videopoems the ego is finally abolished. The words stay visible and primary but somehow they disappear inside the videopoem. The viewer or reader has to look very carefully to find them. The meaning of the videopoem is the perfect integration of word, sound and image.
And Sometimes by Christian Bök
The London-based graphic/digital/motion designer Tom Martin says,
MA project looking at visualising the spoken word using kinetic typography. I chose the poem ‘And Sometimes’, which itemises every English word that contains only consonants, as hearing it spoken is an entirely different experience to reading it.
It was published in the book ‘Eunoia’, designed by its author – so in order to best capture his voice I based the video on his design. To capture the rhythm of the poem, I redesigned the type based on the wave pattern of the audio.
As the object of this exercise was to recreate the spoken word, I then distorted the audio so it does not clearly repeat the visuals, yet still enhances the unusual atmosphere of the piece.
Christian Bök is a contemporary Canadian poet, whose book Eunoia “won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, and which has been said to be ‘Canada’s best-selling poetry book ever,'” according to the Wikipedia, which also includes this charming detail: “He was born ‘Christian Book’, but changed his last name ‘to avoid unseemly confusion with the Bible.'” There’s a Flash version of Chapter e from Eunoia at Ubuweb.
Steak Night by Melissa Broder
A fun animation and text from filmmaker Daniel Lichtenberg and poet Melissa Broder. “Steak Night” appears in her widely reviewed new book, Meat Heart. The soundtrack includes original music by Diana Salier and Rob Justesen, and the poem is read by Edward Carden. Both music and animation were produced at Photon SF.
“Steak Night” originally appeared online at The Awl.
Wax Ear by Alice Lyons
A short poem by Alice Lyons made into a film by Orla Mc Hardy. As with The Polish Language, this appears to have been a collaboration: Lyons is credited with 2-D animation, and Mc Hardy with photography, compositing, computer animation and sound.
