The deadline for submission of poetry films and other shorts to the 2019 Newlyn Film Festival, originally set for December 30, 2018, has been extended to February 28. Visit FilmFreeway for all the details.

I should also mention that there’s an excellent interview on the Liberated Words website with last year’s winner, Dave Richardson, conducted by Sarah Tremlett: “Unchartered Terrain: The Personal Within.” I was especially interested to learn that Richardson’s first poetry video gig was making Flash animations for the late, great online magazine Born. It’s an influence that persists in his videopoetry to this day:

DR: My journalism training in college told me to cut and cut to what matters. When I started to do that with the more poetic stuff, it felt more authentic, like my real voice. I try to keep it simple so that I am not trying to over-write. Many times I stop with the second draft of the text, just to not over-think.

ST: In relation to that, often you have different text on screen to the voice-over – is this something deliberate and is there a point behind this? It is difficult to get this right and quite an art.

DR: I did some experiments with Flash years ago, where I was randomly coding phrases to interact with randomly loaded images, and I was enthralled with the endless results and connections that were unexpected. That randomness, just a quality of unexpected relationships between image and text — I try to recreate that in my work for fun, for the pleasure of seeing what might surprise me. It makes new meaning for me. And then I edit.

Read the whole thing. A genuinely illuminating conversation.