Posts By Dave Bonta
Vimeo unveils video school
The freemium video sharing site Vimeo, source of the majority of videos featured at Moving Poems, has just unveiled what it calls Vimeo Video School, “a one-stop shop for Vimeo Lessons and user-made video tutorials about a variety of video-making topics.” For those of us who didn’t go to film school, this looks like a great way to get up to speed on professional filmmaking techniques.
Nicholas Was… by Neil Gaiman
A prose-poem from Gaiman’s collection Smoke and Mirrors animated by the Beijing motion graphics studio 39 Degrees North to serve as a video Christmas card. Gaiman himself was enthusiastic, and encouraged people to make and post more video adaptations of the poem to be featured on his blog on Christmas day.
Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
A wonderfully dystopian interpretation by student animator Aleksandra Korecka.
Heather Haley reports on Visible Verse festival
The organizer and instigator of Visible Verse blogs about this year’s special restropective of the first ten years of what has become the premiere videopoetry event in North America. A sample:
Friday night’s Vancouver Videopoem Festival 1999-2002 retrospective screening was the biggest challenge as we had to mediate the clunkiest and oldest formats: ¾ inch tape and beta. I rolled up my sleeves and got down to business around 9 AM. At 6, PC Art Director Steve Chow expressed shock that I was still there. “Real time, my man!” I said. “No way around it. And remind me never to do this ever again.” It was nerve wracking!
There Were Two Girls Who Looked A Lot The Same by Ellyn Maybe
Veronika Bauer directs, and the music is by Harlan Steinberger and Tommy Jordan. The audio track as a whole was created for the album Rodeo for the Sheepish from Hen House Studios. Ellen Maybe was named one of ten poets to watch in the new millennium by Writer’s Digest, and Henry Rollins has described her as “an irresistible force.”
Jupiter by Diana Syder
Sally Fryer animates a poem by Diana Syder for the Version Film Festival in Manchester. The poem is from the recent Comma Press title Planet Box, a collaboration between Syder and artist Laura Daly.
Konyves on mediocrity in videopoetry
Tom Konyves has a new comment in the thread to his “Brief Summary of Videopoetry,” in response to a question of mine: As videopoetry goes mainstream, what does that mean for the more avant-garde pioneers of the genre such as yourself? Do you worry about more serious work being drowned in a sea of mediocrity? Here’s his response.
The White Room by Charles Simic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOF7hUJ29vY
An exceptionally interesting videopoem: “1 min photocopimation based on a poem by Charles Simic called The White Room. By Noush Anand, 2007,” says the note at YouTube. This is Anand’s only upload to YouTube. It’s been viewed all of 63 times — a travesty.
The video animates just the first two stanzas of Simic’s ten-stanza poem; read it in full at Poets.org.
Soxy by Sadie Fisher
A collaboration between Glenn-emlyn Richards and Sadie Fisher for the Comma Press Poetry Film Festival 2010. Fisher describes herself as
a writer of short fictions;
an actress of clear convictions;
an image maker & photoshop breaker;
a producer of films & inconstant lover of sox.
