Posts in Category: Author-made videopoems
I Will Make an Exquisite Corpse by Matt Mullins
A terrific new video from Matt Mullins. I’ll just quote his emailed description of how this came about:
This evolved from a video loop that is one facet of a piece of electronic/interactive literature currently under development (also titled “I Will Make an Exquisite Corpse”). This piece of e-lit will be the third installment in a triptych of pieces I’m creating for lit-digital.com. (The first two are already up there.) The poem and this particular video both play off the concept of the surrealist exquisite corpse [see the Wikipedia article —ed.]. As such, I’m working with the notion of three sections/elements that flow together while remaining singular/disconnected. The poem strives to do this on the page with three sections that stand alone while also flowing together to create a larger whole. Those who want to see the poem in its original form can find it here: http://killauthor.com/issueeight/matt-mullins-2/
The poem and video mean that title line in two ways (i.e., the speaker of the poem is about to create, before your eyes, the surrealist idea of an exquisite corpse; and, the speaker, treading the self-destructive path of the poem, is telling the reader “I know where I’m headed and I’m gonna look damn good dead”).
The motionpoem seeks to do the same through repetition/evolution of its primary elements and its three image specific sections. It’s all footage I shot myself, with the exception of two stills I found online (the anatomy mannequin and the doll’s leg). I did my visual and audio edits/effects/etc in iMovie and Garage Band.
In Praise of My Brother, the Painter by Michelle Bitting
Another film directed by Michelle Bitting for one of her own poems, with editing by Phil Abrams. Great use of found material, I thought, suggesting quite a bit more than the text itself says about the narrator’s brother.
Prison Hounds by Cynthia Cox
A new video for an old poem by Cynthia Cox, using found footage from the Prelinger Archives. Cynthia writes,
The footage is from an excruciatingly bad ‘scary’ film I found in the Prelinger Archives written by John Parker called “Daughter of Horror.” The howling hounds I downloaded from iTunes and ran through the iPhone VoiceChanger app, because on its own the howling sounded too low and kinda dopey. Honestly, there is a prison right behind my neighborhood, and when they run the dogs there’s a much higher, keening sort of sound that I couldn’t get VoiceChanger to duplicate, so I went with an effect called “Haunting.” Then I recorded my voice with VoiceChanger as well, using an echo effect mostly to try and disguise the pops I made on “prison” and “quiet” (didn’t really work, but I timed everything else about the reading out so well I chose not to re-record. I’m far from a perfectionist.)
Commands by Dana Heise
http://vimeo.com/17160224
In the description at Vimeo, multimedia artist and poet Dana Heise writes,
Commands is a performance video and sound poem that addresses desire and the boundaries of consensual relationships.
Trees by Michelle Bitting
The most recent of four “poem films” uploaded to Vimeo so far by Los Angeles poet Michelle Bitting. She succeeds where most filmmakers would fail in a fairly literal match of film image to poem, remaining just allusive enough to hold the viewer’s interest. (Also, as a tree lover, I admit the subject matter holds a special attraction for me.)
I found out about Bitting’s project thanks to a blog post by Robert Peake, “The Film-Poem.”
Under a Man Made Sun by R.W. Perkins
http://www.vimeo.com/28833244
In the video description at Vimeo, poet-filmmaker R.W. Perkins writes,
“Under A Man Made Sun” is the second video-poem installment of what I’m calling the “Vista Poems”, four poems examining how the the past and future collide and how in my opinion we are dealing with it. “Under A Man Made Sun” is a brief history of our digital past, honoring and criticizing our predecessors, while pointing out our own unwritten future is still very much up in the air.
I thought the use of text and old home-movie footage here were especially effective. (Tip to videopoets wanting to get work on Moving Poems: include banjo in the soundtrack! I do love me some banjo.)
Consumed by Cynthia Cox
Cynthia Cox used some public-domain footage from the Prelinger Archives, as she notes in a blog post:
The primary video appears to have been test shots for a dollar store commercial — I did not copy and repeat those zoom-out shots of the fishing lures, they were actually all filmed and strung together one after another in the original film, as were the numerous shots of the woman looking at — and this part made me fantastically happy — the exact same dress over & over. The party shots were worked in mostly to utilize the transitions provided by the movie clapboards, quite honestly; the incredibly phallic balloon-blowing contest was a bonus. But maybe that’s sharing too much.
Click through to read the rest of her notes, as well as the text of the poem.
Don’t miss a post
Categories
- Book trailers (39)
- Dance (75)
- Documentary (46)
- Interviews (32)
- Miscellaneous (19)
- Musical settings (55)
- Performance Poetry (191)
- Videopoems (2,006)
- Animation (371)
- Author-made videopoems (484)
- Concrete and visual poetry (33)
- Kinestasis (26)
