Digital Video Poetry

Element one

While I was studying in England, one of the things that kept me from getting too homesick was going to the movies. (Don't get me wrong – I loved England. But I also saw a lot of movies.) Just as here in the States, the Brits ran short commercials before the previews in the movie theaters. What impressed me, though, was the sheer quirkiness, the cinematic nature of a bunch of these ads. They were often like little short films themselves. Imagine going to see The Matrix and seeing one of BMW's The Ride films before the show. (This didn't happen, but the idea was similar.) It was great – somebody finally cottoned on to the inherent virtues of doing advertising on the big screen.

Element two

One of my all-time favorite websites is Born Magazine, a fantastic webzine dedicated to multimedia poetry. Poets submit verses, and video designers interpret them into Flash or QuickTime. The artwork that results is often much like the beautiful movie title art that you see produced by companies such as Imaginary Forces.

Hmmm.

The proposal

What would happen if you recruited a number of poets and video artists to combine abstract visual films and the verses of contemporary or classic poets to produce a series of three-minute short films? You could run them either as a series for a Video Poetry Festival, or as individual shorts before movies in art house theaters as a component of National Poetry Month.

Digital film and cameras are getting so cheap these days, that such a project would probably be doable for peanuts. A couple cameras, a couple iMacs, and the results... Well, the results could very well be digital storytelling at its finest.

Anybody want to play?