Katie's Tea Rooms

Sandra's Hookers exercise was to write a piece about Katie's tea rooms - a place where something unusual occurs. Apparently it's a real place!

King of the Castle

This was from Sally's hookers exercise: A boy, on holiday with his mother, wanders off.
Another attempt at using Flash. I'm gradually getting the hang of the tools in flash, but finding it difficult to create a narrative in pictures. So used to doing it in words! Again, not poetic or very good, and when I have shown it to people they are not sure what's happening! Oh well! Note the way the mother's arms come off as she's running out of the sand dunes!

O what's apurring?

Another attempt at Flash animation! Not very poetic but it was fun to make! This time from Beth's hookers exercise which was to write a piece about a pet going missing, and someone seeing it being bundled into an army vehicle. 

Dinner's Ready

I decided to leave Newport and teach myself animation at home. After all, so much of it is about practice, and I wasn't having any time to actually do much animation. So since January I've been stuck in to manuals and creating short animations.

I belong to a writers' group called Hookers' Pen, and each fortnight, a hooker gives out a writing exercise. This short Flash animation is from Hillary's Hookers' exercise which was to write a piece about a nun walking down a long corridor; the only condition was that there should be no adjectives or adverbs in the piece.

Metamorphosis

I love metamorphosis. This is one of the best things about animation for me. And it complements poetry well.
Here's an attempt at metamorphosis that I did in Newport.

Good Poetry Animation links

Billy Collins Action Poetry:  I especially like Forgetfulness and The Dead
http://www.bcactionpoet.org/

A website devoted to moving poetry - lots of great animations on here:
http://movingpoems.com

I've been reading up on avant-garde film. These I really like:
Len Lye - great mix of music and abstract images
Free Radical:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGyVYDseGc4
Trade Tattoo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjjHqf34Qd0
Colour Box: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3y1offmJ4Y
Oskar Fischinger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrZxw1Jb9vA


Charles Bukowski's The Genius of the Crowd. -

Notes on poetry animations

I’ve been making notes on some of the poetry animations I’ve seen – noting what I like/seems to work for me etc.

I like it when the animation takes metaphors from the poem and explores these ideas with lots of metamorphoses and transformations. For example in Billy Collins’ ‘Forgetfulness’, there is a mix of live action and animation playing with the concept of things disappearing – eg birds flying away, images being rubbed out, the map being folded up, a person shrinking to a dot, boats floating away. They are all illustrations of what’s in the actual poem but the way they merge into each other is satisfying. They complement each other very well, so that it doesn’t feel that the poem takes over or the animation takes over.

This is not the case with ‘Hunger’ where the images seem to reflect the mood of the poem rather than the words of the poem. In ‘Hunger’ the words are written on walls in stark concrete carparks and bleak modern faceless places. I found myself concentrating on the words – looking at the way they appeared (beautifully) on the screen. I found the meaning of the words very far removed from the visual representation. Not such a bad thing as it left me searching for meaning, but it was less satisfying for some reason.

Suggestions from Ginny Head:

‘Ah Pook is Here’ narrated by William Burroughs (not strictly poetry but well worth a look)
‘The Raven’ by Edgar Alan Poe (on Youtube)
‘The Cat Piano’ narrated by Nick Cave
‘I would like to be a dot in a painting by Miro’ by Moniza Alvi
Flanders Animation – 15 animated shorts based on Flemish poems