~ Animation ~
Haiku (This cold winter night…) by Yosa Buson
Amusing little animation by Paul Watts, who seems to have remembered what so many Western haiku-appreciators do not: that irreverence is central to the form (it was a reaction against more serious renga poetry).
we hear them cutting by T. L. Kelly
According to the author’s resume, this was
a poetry film collaboration with poetry by T. L. Kelly and film by Guilherme Marcondes and Andrezza Valentin and sound by Paulo Beto, in Born Magazine, October 2003. Screened in 2004 at Resfest Brazil and Anima Mundi, both in Brazil; and Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin (where the film won a special mention).
Born Magazine has been around in one form or another since 1996, and is now probably the best-known web journal for literary animation, as well as a standard-bearer for artistic collaboration in general.
The magazine launched on the Web in 1997 with a focus on editorial design and traditional editorial topics, including essays, film and music reviews, and topical articles. As Web technology continued to evolve, contributing artists began focusing on the connections between literature and visual arts, and experimented with the dynamic relationship between text, cinema, audio, and interactivity. In response, Born redefined its mission in 1998, focusing on collaboration and media-rich interpretations of poetry, short fiction and creative non-fiction, and eventually arrived at its present incarnation.
Shelby the Dog by Robert Sward
A wise and funny poem by Robert Sward from Blue’s Cruzio Cafe, an online space for poetry animations that’s been in operation since 2004. The animations are by Beau Blue, but authors collaborate by providing readings, photos, ideas for storyboards, and other sugggestions, according to the About page.
Dave, this is a very user-friendly platform for discussion. Good find.
I have a question. I really like Ren’s animated collages, and I like to make collages. Does anyone have any ideas about what software I need to learn to make parts of my collage move? I’m thinking of collaborating with my teenage son, who studies drawing and painting.
The electric kool-aid Collins test
This is a test of the auto-embed video posting feature from the front page of the blog. I’m simply posting the URL of a video on YouTube to its own line, separated by spaces before and after, as detailed in the WordPress codex. (I think this will work in all browsers, with the possible exception of mobile devices. Please leave a comment if you are only seeing links and not the videos themselves.)
Sometimes I feel as if Billy Collins is looking down on me, and he’s not even dead yet!
That was the authorized video, an animation by Juan Delcan, part of a series of animated poems produced by JWT New York. It has been viewed 756,604 times on YouTube. But I much preferred the following unauthorized video montage by Lauren Adolfsen:
The Delcan animation is a very fine illustration of the poem, but with Adolfsen’s video, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s not merely a poem video; it’s a videopoem.
Which do you you prefer?
Hunter’s Green by Lauren Eddy
Though I’ve seen online documentaries about erasure poetry, this is the first videopoem I’ve seen that actually uses the technique as part of a stop-motion animation. It’s the result of a collaboration between the poet, Lauren Eddy and the animator and sound editor, Anne Duquennois, which Eddy clarified via email:
We came up with the concept and various visual aspects of the film together, and the animation was a collaborative process, so we credited the film with both of us as “co-creators.” The idea was to use film as a medium for commentary on the processual nature of erasure poetry and collage. We were inspired by the ways that one medium can re-interpret and re-invent another.
Anne’s production company is Broken Bike Productions — no website yet, but the address is brokenbikeproductions [at] gmail [dot] com.
Old Astronauts by Tim Nolan
Emma Burghardt is the animator; the voice is the poet’s. Another fine production from MotionPoems.com.
The Threatened One, by Jorge Luis Borges
A nicely non-literal animation of the poem by Latvian filmaker Signe Baumane, from 1999. It won Silver at Worldfest – Houston Film Festival 2000, the Robbie Burns Award at Cin(e) Poetry Festival 2000, and a Jury Award at the 34th New York Exposition of Short Film and Video 2000, according to Baumane’s website. Here’s the Spanish text.
Poem (As the cat) by William Carlos Williams
Gotta love film students for keeping the medium irreverent. This is by Kurt Snyder. Here’s the text of the poem:
As the cat
climbed over
the top ofthe jamcloset
first the right
forefootcarefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot
A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body by Andrew Marvell
A delightful experiment in machine translation by Michelle Phillips.
A conversation between two computers. One read a verse aloud and the other transcribed it through voice recognition and vice versa. The process was repeated until Andrew Marvell’s poem “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body” had been completely re-written.
I am thinking we could dub the result a meta-metaphysical poem.
e.e. cummings in an ad for Sonic audiobooks
If there’s a non-controversial way to use a classic poem in a commercial, this might be it. The line from cummings (a fragment of #35 from 100 Selected Poems) is read and “un-read” by four very different voices in a way meant to dramatize the variations in a reading voice, unlining the audiobook publisher’s slogan: “Giving literature a personality.” My immediate reaction is, “Wow. There’s a market for audio books of poetry!?” Since the product being advertised here is so close to the poet’s own characteristic production, the use of his words seems entirely appropriate. And freed from the kind of angst evoked by the Levi’s Whitman ads, we can see that in fact the ingredients of a successful short videopoem — simplicity, quirk, surprise — are not too different from the ingredients of a successful television spot.
Migration by Major Jackson
A whiteboard animation — the first example of this I’ve seen in a videopoem — by Bryan Hartzell. Here’s Major Jackson’s website.
