~ Animation ~

It is an Intensely Private Experience by Danica Depenhart

On 22 July, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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This brilliant, author-made stop-motion animation is featured in the latest issue of TriQuarterly. “Found materials do the heavy lifting of visual argument to demonstrate how repurposed materials might reveal something about the person who finds them,” as TriQuarterly‘s video editor Sarah Minor puts it.

It’s good to see that the 152nd issue of this venerable American literary magazine continues in the pattern set since its move to the web several years ago, leading off with a short video section introduced by its own essay. The fact that they seem to have dropped the term “cinepoetry” and call everything a “video essay” now is puzzling, but may simply reflect a shift in fashion among the MFA-led American literary establishment, where it must’ve gotten a huge boost by the bestseller status of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which includes the transcripts of several video essays from the ongoing “Situations” series filmed in collaboration with John Lucas. The rise of creative nonfiction as a component of MFA programs may also have played a role. But even outside high literary culture, the video essay has certainly become a fashionable genre on both sides of the Atlantic, even if there appears to be little agreement on what it means (that sounds familiar).

At any rate, be sure to visit Triquarterly Issue 152 to watch the other two, er, non-narrative videos by Annelyese Gelman and Spring Ulmer. To learn more about video essay as a genre, this video about essay films by film critic Kevin B. Lee, from a recent opinion piece in Sight&Sound magazine, seems like a good place to start:

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Dark Place by Lucy English

On 19 July, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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As her ambitious Book of Hours has unfolded, it’s been fascinating to watch Lucy English‘s poetry evolve and adapt to the online video medium and to the exigencies of particular film-making styles. Here’s how Stevie Ronnie, her collaborator for this film (along with composer Jim Ronnie), describes their process at Vimeo:

Lucy and I wanted to try something different as a way of kick starting the collaborative process for Dark Place. It started from a desire to work on something that was going to become part of Lucy’s Book of Hours poetry film project. Poetry films often begin with the words or footage or sound but we decided to start from a colour palette. I created a palette and sent it to Lucy and she wrote the poem from the colours. Lucy then sent me a couple of drafts of the poem and, after spending some time digesting Lucy’s words, I decided to respond to it visually. Using the colours that I found in Lucy’s poem I rendered the poem as a painting, where each mark on the canvas represents a letter in the poem. I then captured this process as a series of still images which have been strung together into the film. The soundtrack, performed by my father Jim Ronnie, was composed and added during the video editing phase as a response to the poem’s images and the words.

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The Inexplicable Hardness of Things by Ian Gibbins

On 12 July, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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Ian Gibbins calls this “a poem about a train journey, with a video to match.” It was recently featured in the Canberra-based web journal Verity La — go there for the text of the poem, as well as a current bio of the poet-filmmaker.

The Leash by Ada Limón

On 16 June, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine….

Ada Limón‘s searing poem was animated by Rachel Visser using “After Effects, paper, paint, sand, clay, yarn, other found objects” and the poet’s own recitation.

Visser has also animated a poem by Czesław Miłosz.

I Ate Up the Whole Thing by Ilana Simons

On 14 June, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems, Documentary
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Psychologist, writer, and animator Ilana Simons describes her conflicted feelings about the seemingly endless creativity of a fellow artist, Noah Saterstrom, in this wonderful, quirky blend of videopoetry and documentary set to an up-tempo track from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

This upload was the April 17 release from the Visible Poetry Project (which, incidentally, just had a screening in Beijing last Thursday — the first U.S. poetry film festival to travel abroad in a number of years). Simons’ own upload of the video is accompanied by a note that “this is a short intro to a longer documentary I’m making about Noah Saterstrom, a painter”. She has previously made documentaries about Haruki Murakami and the literary critic William Empson.

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Time Rests, Exhausted, in Memory by Ayesha Raees

On 10 June, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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A new, author-made videopoem from Pakistani filmmaker, photographer and literature student Ayesha Raees, who told me last year that she was writing her thesis on videopoetry. The Vimeo description includes a bit about the creative process by way of an acknowledgement:

Special thanks to Sue Rees and Animation projects, my beautiful friends who I photographed unknowingly yet knowingly in the Vermont autumn of 2014 (which was a ghastly time for me), a house which became a home, an existence that unconsciously saved me, and again, to Sue, who gave me a platform to create what I wished to create.

Click through to read the poem.

Hell: why there is by Martha McCollough

On 31 May, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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I admit, I want there to be hell. I want to decide who goes there.

Martha McCollough’s latest videopoem makes a case for everyone’s least favorite afterlife destination. The video appears in Issue Seven of Datableed, one of the relatively few literary magazines that specifically mentions “visual or video poetry” as something they’re looking for.

Das Bild in dem Bild in dem Bild in dem Bild / The Picture in the Picture in the Picture in the Picture by Marlen Pelny

On 26 May, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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One of the two stand-out films, along with Die Angst des Wolfs vor dem Wolf, from Lab P‘s 2014 series, this stop-motion animation by Catalina Giraldo Vélez is based on a poem by German author and musician Marlen Pelny, who also supplied the voiceover and music. The Vimeo description reads:

Closing the window. Shutting up yourself. Observing your memories. Drawers open for storing of the memories, we are constantly looking for, removing or archiving again. We open a book that might be the book of our lives. The image in the image in the image in the image is a metaphor for memory and the nostalgia of forgotten times.

For more information about the film, see its webpage.

Kanten deiner Augen / Edges of your eyes by Yevgeniy Breyger

On 24 May, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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“Gaps in the fog allow a look inside: A foreign environment, observing trees and falling birds.” Melissa Harms (A.K.A. MelissaMariella) directs and animates a text by Ukrainian-German poet Yevgeniy Breyger in this film from the Lab P project’s 2014 series. (The films were kept off the web for a couple of years, which is why I’m only getting around to sharing them now.)

Words When Bored by Bob Holman

On 13 May, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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Marc Burnett animated this Bob Holman poem for the Visible Poetry Project.

Felis by Josh Jacobs

On 12 May, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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In some ways I feel it’s more difficult to make a super short videopoem than it is to make a long one, but animator Liah Honeycutt pulls it off. She notes that this is

The third installment in my visual poem collaboration with Josh Jacobs. This piece explores the themes of distance (in time and in physical space) and apathy, and attempts to capture the empty nostalgia that comes with looking back on bad memories after the pain has worn off. I decided on a very analog approach to the execution after being inspired by Josh’s original portfolio layout, opting to let the imperfections show through and stand as a metaphor for the human experience.

Programs used:
After Effects
Premiere Pro

Music:
Come Down by Sylvan Esso

Special thanks to Dean Velez.

Hate for Sale by Neil Gaiman

On 3 May, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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Buy my hate. You’ll come right back for more.
Hate for sale. Enough to start a war.
Hate the rich, the brown, the black, the poor.
Hate is clean. And hate will make you sure.

The Visible Poetry Project‘s final video for National Poetry Month was a real corker: a topical, satirical poem by the great Neil Gaiman recited by Peter Kenny in the soundtrack for a beautifully done stop-motion animation by Anna Eijsbouts.