When I think of my heart

How to make a poetry film when you can't film inside your body.

Photo by Alexandru Acea on Unsplash

If you had chance to read yesterday’s Creative Tuesday update, you’ll remember I spent the afternoon working on a new poetry film. I’ve been a bit behind schedule with this one, mainly because I wasn’t sure how to tackle it. I aim to use my own images for the bulk of my films’ content (fortunately I take a lot of random photos) but images for this poem stumped me.

Inspiration came from an unlikely source. A friend recommended a heart monitoring app, which happens to record my pulse. Voila. after much tech-wrangling, I managed to capture the image and set to work creating the film.

My first step is always to record the poem and place markers on parts I want to emphasise, either through image or text. My goal is to create an entity that is enhanced by the film, rather than simply illustrating the poem. When I’ve mapped out my poem, I continue to add the key images and effects. It’s easy to get carried away with these, and I’m careful to challenge myself about the purpose of applying glitch effect 10 or teal overlay. Once I’ve built my framework I begin to experiment, tweaking, untweaking, reviewing and revising until I feel I’ve achieved what I need to. Creating these films is way of delving into the meaning of the poem, and I love the alchemy of bringing image and language together.

Here’s the final poem, which is the ninth in a series of films from Dust, which published in 2022. I’d love your thoughts. To get the best experience I’d recommend watching on a laptop and at full screen. I’m fairly sure you’ll know but you need the sound on too x

And here’s the poem

from Dust - Kathryn Anna Marshall 2022

You can read more about Dust here.

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