A brilliant text animation of Plath’s 1961 poem with images from vintage print advertisements. It’s the work of the New Zealand-based designer Kylie May, née Kylie Hibbert — the name under which she made this film and another in 2005, part of a “postgraduate study exploring the visual language of poetry” she called the Belles Lettres project.
By transforming the written words of poetry into choreographed kinetic performance the project seeks to expand typographical conventions of traditional published poetry. The research project utilises the poetry of Emily Dickinson’s (1862) I died for beauty and Sylvia Plath’s (1961) Mirror, to explore the potential of paralinguistics and poetry as emotive narrative. These two poetic voices are fused by intimate revelations of anxiety, which have relevance in today’s society.
Both films were shortlisted for the 2006 Berlin ZEBRA Poetry Film Awards, Mirror attracting a finalist placing.
PLEASE NOTE: Music used under the AUT screenrights license. For academic research purposes only.
http://vimeo.com/31104514
O.K., this is something different for Moving Poems — a videopoem made to embody the mission of a university. Marquette University is a Jesuit school whose motto is “Be the Difference.” (Gotta love Jesuits!) The filmmaker is James P. O’Malley of Carnaval Pictures. Here’s what he says in the description at Vimeo:
Using Mary Oliver’s inspirational poem as a script, I created this Poem-Videoclip for the inauguration ceremony of Marquette University’s new president.
I shot all the images solo with my Canon 5D Mark2, using Nikkor and Canon lenses and available light. The sync sound day included John Egan, of Egan Audio Services, and Patrick O’Malley as assistant. Patrick composed, recorded and mastered the piano solo, and John Egan created the sound design and audio master.
The readers are Marquette University students, and all on-camera performers are “non-pro” or “real-people”.
I edited and mastered on FCP, except for the simple graphic call to action I exported from After Effects.
The result is lightly branded enough, I think, to engage Oliver fans unconnected with Marquette. I know I enjoyed it.
http://vimeo.com/29969928
Another text-only videopoem, but today with a soundtrack. I’m not crazy about the font-choice — for some reason, I have trouble seeing a Cummings poem in anything but a typewriter font — but otherwise this strikes me as a highly successful re-imagining of the text.
Nic S. blogged about “using text vs voice in videopoems” the other day, and it’s sparked an interesting discussion in the comments, with videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves weighing in.
http://vimeo.com/26089551
A visually arresting, silent watercolor animation by Lilli Carré. The poem has its own Wikipedia page. (Hat-tip: Hannah Stephenson)
http://vimeo.com/29124206
Another Swoon film for a poem by Howie Good — his seventh to date. The description at Vimeo characterizes this as “an edited, layered compilation of ‘simple’ camera-errors, to fit the jagged music and the title of the poem itself.”
http://www.vimeo.com/28799428
Making a videopoem for a poem that was written in response to a painting is always a challenge. Nic S. used footage of a California forest fire from 1914 in what strikes me as a fairly successful pairing.
In other Nic S.-related news, she has just launched a new venture that should be of interest to anyone making poetry videos — Pizzicati of Hosanna: dead poets’ poems read by Nic S. in English & other languages. According to a note in the sidebar, “These recordings may be used for any type of creative non-commercial project. No need to ask permission.” Poets recorded so far include Stevens, Baudelaire, Quasimodo and Neruda, all in the original languages.
German animator Susanne Wiegner made this film with audio from the late poet, who “did nothing to court publicity or expand his literary career or reputation,” according to the Wikipedia. A man after my own heart!
A motionpoem created by Michael Guncheon and Ben O’Brien.
And speaking of Motionpoems, if you can get to Minneapolis on October 25, they’re planning to screen a whole new season’s worth of films, which will include poems by Jane Hirshfield, Mark Strand, Richard Wilbur and others — a dozen in all, produced to accompany the Best American Poetry 2011 anthology From Scribner. See their website for details.