http://vimeo.com/43368324
Canadian artist and videopoet Valerie LeBlanc‘s latest video. Here’s how she describes it at Vimeo:
A summer parade opening the Calgary Stampede celebrations, 2001 is presented in triplicate. The visuals provide a focus for reflection on events that only weeks later marked changed levels of social innocence.
Missing Parade Notes was assembled and edited into a short video documenting highlights of the parade. Slow motion and colour treatment were added to age the footage. The result is reminiscent of archived film footage from an earlier time. The video was then assembled in triplicate as a base to carry the poetry text. Recently composed, the text message appears to have been added using analogue typewriter technology. Overall, the intention is to span the time disconnect and the reaction to past events. The audio component is a mixed cacophony of music and cheering rising up to the spectator.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42Irujr2nWI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R67JpJ76_04
Two excerpts from a 15-minute film called The Inventor’s Last Breath, which premiered at the 2011 CinePoetry Festival at the Henry Miller Library at Big Sur. The film, by J. Hope Stein, is based on her chapbook Talking Doll. Stein blogged this about the first excerpt, “Tiny Men”:
The audio and video are comprised of the some of the first wax cylinder and moving image recordings made by Thomas Edison in the late1880’s- early 1900’s including footage of an elephant Edison had publicly electrocuted as part of a scheme to drive one of his competitors out of business as well as the first kiss ever recorded in moving image.
As far as audio recordings, I used a recording of a man singing into his private phonogram which has a really personal quality, as if he is singing as he mows the lawn or in the shower. I also used an audio recording of Handel’s Israel in Egypt – labeled “ A choir of 4,000 voices over 100 yards away” which was recorded at the Crystal Palace in London in 1888 and has the eerie sound of a lost civilization trying to communicate specifically with us in this moment as their voices time travel through the distressed materials of the early phonograph cylinders.
And about the second excerpt, “The Insomniacs,” she wrote:
All of the music and moving image is sampled from early archived recordings by Thomas Edison. (Except for the song at the end by Broken Bells).
The footage in this clip is just slow motion of a windy city day at the foot of the Flatiron Building in New York City in 1903.
A new videopoem by Heather Haley, and her first produced in full collaboration with her son, Lucas Raycevick, as editor. Here’s the description at Vimeo:
Fierce, full of stiletto irony, verve–yet rife with sensitivity–“Whore In The Eddy’ explores a winding road of twisted fates. “There but for the grace of God go I.” Two women, one forsaken, the other spared. Two tales told though images of a lush, denuded forest littered with fallen giants, cut short like the lives of so many women.
Heather also blogged about the making of the film in some detail. An excerpt:
I tried to find found footage but matching it with ours didn’t work as my 17-year old son/editor pointed out. He’s been helping me on videopoems since age eight, but this is our first real collaboration, a challenge in and of itself but mostly highly gratifying. He kicks my butt! Will not allow shots that are too shaky or out of focus. So funny. I said, hey, I’m not trying to be Steven Spielberg. I will make choices you wouldn’t. We argue for a bit and he wins. ‘Cause he’s right. We have standards. That’s my boy. He amazes me; taught himself to edit video at age ten, began producing machinimas and has had his own YouTube channel since. He’s got a lovely podcasting set-up going too which he allows me to use sometimes. We’ve developed a system in the house so he remains undisturbed while recording. He places a funky beaded necklace—a souvenir of Hawaii—on the door handle. I’m so lucky, he’s a great kid and he works cheap; the third major challenge, a zero budget. (I’ve spent fifty bucks on a dress and seven bucks on flowers.) We barter. I copy edit his fan fiction in return for video editing services.
British Columbia-based poet Al Rempel made this film with post-production help from Steph St. Laurent of VideoNexus Productions. The text is from Remple’s collection understories.
Another animation from Martha McCollough‘s erasure project Grey Vacation.
Poem, music and film are all by Forrest Gander.
Brazilian poet, performer, and visual and sound artist Marcelo Sahea produced the text, did the reading and made the film with the help of some crowd-sourced footage:
During two months, some friends and interested people were invited to participate sending short clips of its naked bodies filmed by themselves with any types of cameras. Some of these images are part of the work that you will see.
Ben Pelhan shot, wrote, edited, supplied the voice, etc. Pelhan is a Pittsburgh native currently living in New Orleans. “When he’s not playing poet he plays with whatever video equipment he can get his hands on,” according to a recent bio at smoking glue gun.
An interesting kinetic-text animation by Martha McCollough, a painter and animator from Boston, who notes in the description that it it is “Based on a page from my erasure project Grey Vacation. The wrongest thing ever said.”
Raymond Luczak signs a poem from his newly re-issued book This Way to the Acorns, which sounds great: a collection of nature poems based on memories of his childhood in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The music is by John Stutte.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has been making and posting poetry videos to her Ryezome channel on YouTube for about a year now, and like so many video-inclined poets, hadn’t been aware of the richness of the videopoetry tradition, as she confessed in an email: “I had no idea there were so many of them out there. It was as if I thought I had invented them!” But working in isolation did lead her to forge a unique approach, especially in regards to the soundtrack.
For more of her poetry, check out her daily poetry practice at A Hundred Falling Veils.
http://vimeo.com/39721815
An affecting and allusive videopoem by poet and children’s author Holly Karapetkova. The text originally appeared in The Ledge.