Endless wall to wall carpet

This piece was made for the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Germany. In each of its biennial editions, the festival calls for film-makers internationally to respond to a 'festival poem', which is made available along with a voice recording and English translation. This year's poem was 'Endless wall-to-wall carpet (of the VIP foyer)' by Ann Cotten. The original language of the poem is German and Ann's voice performance in my video is in German too, with English subtitles. The poem seemed to me to be very unusual, describing a microscopic view of carpet as a metaphor for wider societal observations. I found humour in this, as well as deeper commentary and even an expression of personal sadness in the face of the world. The voice performance was fast, almost breathless. I often work with much slower readings and elongate them further in the process of editing voice with music. These immediate impressions I had of poem and voice led me to adopt a playful, experimental approach to adapting the poem to the screen. As with many of my videos, I started with the music and voice. The process of searching for an existing music track to work with led me to Gurdonark's 'Insect Love'. Like all of his music, this was generously published on a Creative Commons remix licence, allowing me the legal freedom to adapt it for the video and to distribute once completed. Once I had cut the music and voice together, I turned attention to the image track. Here I sourced still images from a range of different photographers on Flickr. These were also all licensed under Creative Commons. I edited them tightly with the rhythms of the soundtrack, which contains sharp and unusual variations. I had already slowed down Ann's reading by separating the spoken phrases and placing them within the discrete musical parts, creating short aural spaces in between that contained only music and no vocals. This created enough duration to express the poem visually, while still maintaining Ann's sense of urgency in the reading. Even with the extended time in the reading, the video only comes in at 1 minute 50 seconds. It is a fast piece. This is the third time I have specifically made videos for festivals. Each of them has involved working in a language I do not speak. In each case, I have approached this with a combination of close phonetic listening, and comparisons of the original text and its translation. Each video has required subtitles back into English, which I constructed using a similar method. My video of 'Endless wall to wall carpet', was selected for screening as a finalist in this otherwise non-competitive section of the overall Zebra festival program. It is the first time I have had work selected for this event, the largest poetry film festival in the world. It was a delight to be part of it.