Spoken word

Brief

Our task is to produce a ‘FilmPoem’. The sound track must include,

.A single musical instrument

.A spoken word piece

We need to focus on creating a strong combination of music, message and image. Each one reflecting the other.

Poem

The poem we’ve initially decide upon is ‘what I don’t understand’ by Mary Ann Brooks.

I don’t understand why children are afraid of the dark.

Why my sadness is magnified as I sit on the swings of a park.

And I don’t understand why cold fingers feel as if they’re on fire,

or why the people that don’t notice us

happen to be the ones we admire.

I don’t understand why some of us spend our time hating;

spend our time hurting, wishing, and waiting.

There are an abundance of things I don’t understand in the world

but that only makes me love it all the more.

Ideas

We want to focus on the imagery involved in the poem without making it too pretentious or just showing exactly what the words are saying. I think the key to this is to establish what the underlying message of the poem is, that being that there’s beauty in mystery.

1.

One idea that we’ve had that was inspired by ‘seconds of beauty’ is to have a number of shots of mysterious or difficult to understand things to help build the idea of mystery.

Such as, Hard equations, spider webs, religion, birds flying, magic (card tricks), torch in a dark room, silhouettes, eyes, rubix cube, sheet music, camera capturing a photo, the sky, books, newton’s cradle, floating, fire (candles), japanese text.

We decided to pick out keywords from each line and use various shots of little things to build the picture of the poem.

Dark – For this we wanted a night sky and also ‘monster’ puppets because in the line it refers to children being afraid of the dark, and we wanted to show that in some way.

Sadness – Since Kendal has been so lovely recently we took advantage of the rain. Also we thought we could have a shot of someone alone with a sad song on an ipod to support the tone of the line.

Cold & fire – For this we wanted to create a scene of someone well wrapped up and eating an ice lolly to show the contrast in this line.

People – We thought we could have a collection of people’s faces to show the variety and quantity of people you see each day.

Admire – For this we thought we could create a scene of someone looking in the mirror to check themself.

Hating – Kitty apparently has a deep hatred for broccoli so we want to include that in our film.

Hurting, Wishing and Waiting – We thought we could use various props like, First aid supplies, lottery ticket, coin toss, calendar and clocks to represent each word.

The last two lines we’ve left room for anything else we see or think of when filming as a lot of this film depends on what we can find on the day to combine with the props and ideas we have. Also the last theme beginning love we thought we could simply use paper hearts and try to incorporate them in the titles somehow.

Test Shots

We decided to try out the shots we could do without having props, to get a feel of how it would come together. Also we decided to do some audio tests so we could see whose voice suited it best and also practice syncing audio with footage.