Elaborate part 3 – Poetry

In the process where I experiment in the impact of the form of the story on the perception, coming up with the content seemed irrelevant, and it didn’t make sense to struggle with coming up with stories to tell.

That’s why I thought it might be a good idea to find some content, and short poems like Haiku seemed easy to work with, especially that they are so literal, illustrative and focus on the moment, on the detail, broken down to three lines.

At the same time I kept the illustrations minimalistic in form, so that they become more of a suggestion than illustration.

This one illustrated Yosa Buson’s haiku:

Light of the moon
Moves west, flowers’ shadows
Creep eastward.

When I read more about his haikus, it occurred to me, there’s so much more in their form that had to do with perception and painting an ambiguous image in one’s mind.

Haikus are seemingly simple, but in fact covered by multiple layers of complexity. Firstly, thanks to Japanese being an ideographic language, one sentence could hold multiple meanings, unfortunately often lost in translation to European languages.

Secondly, the descriptions although very precise, would only tell about certain details of the scene, which made the reader add much more to create the image in his / her mind. The words were mere prompts for the eyes of imagination.

Lastly, sometimes it was hard to tell, which line describes which. With each line the impression of the depicted moment could change. One line could be perceived differently after reading the next one. Like in this example:

A cold winter wind—
it stumbles suddenly
the returning horse

What stumbles – the wind or the horse?

E. McFadden starts his essay about Buson’s poetry from exposing this ambiguity:

Who’s right? Who’s to say? Neither of us? Both of us? Yes. No. I don’t know. The essence of haiku.

You can find the article here:

Yosa Buson: Haiku Master

In haiku, each line’s meaning overlaps with the next one, softly guiding the reader from one to another, without an abrupt cut.

This seemed worth exploring and translating to the medium of animation – drawing the scene in a way that would be open for interpretation, merging the scenes in a fluent manner, so that something giving impression of one thing would transform in front of your eyes into another.

This was Masaoka Shiki’s haiku:

Night; and once again,
the while I wait for you, cold wind
turns into rain.

And another one of the same author:

A lightning flash:
between the forest trees
I have seen water.

Personally, the choice to give up on clarity was a tough one, but it’s the other side of giving room for interpretation. The animations might seem vague and confusing because they don’t tell one story in a direct manner – but the intention was to depend on the viewer’s interpretation so much, that they don’t really make sense themselves.

Finally, the last inspiration I found was in ‘The Death of the Author’ by R. Barthes.

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not as was hitherto said, the author.

The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.

Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.

To me that someone, that sense of presence, is another construct of human mind trying to make sense of what it sees. In order to combine all the words in a book in a consistent whole, there is an impression of them coming from one source. Barthes’ essay was discussing what is that source we sense between the lines.

This idea of evoking a sense of presence just with the use of words giving an impression of coming from someone (because otherwise they wouldn’t make sense) was possible to translate to animation just like the ambiguity of haiku.

I wanted to build the impression of space and motion with words, but their meaning would tell what’s happening in the scene and that someone else that the person watching the movie is experiencing that.

I looked for a literal and descriptive poem in ‘Some Imagist Poets’, and decided on illustrating fragments of J. G. Fletcher’s ‘Station’ from the series of poems ‘London Excursion’.

Feedback from the final crit:

What’s working

• Strong illustrative style
• Interestingly, some considered the animations with text the most original and intriguing, as suggesting a lot with a little, some the weakest and least interesting
• Progress in manipulating with animations
• Using different references as prompt for new explorations
• Open-ended approach
• The style of haiku animations visibly referring to their ambiguous nature when familiar with it (but otherwise confusing?)
• Staying with the medium of animation

What’s not working

• Confusing jumps between the iterations, the lack of connection between them
• Unclear relation of references to iterations
• Using a different narrative each time
• Too much focus, in the presentation, on explaining references, at the cost of time for showing later work (and they didn’t have a clear connection with iterations anyway)
• Not using sound in a well thought through way, and then leaving them out completely

To develop further

• Focus on one thing ex. haiku and go deeper
• Keep to the time limit (in the presentation)
• Narrative through animation its worth developing
• Include more sounds
• Working just with dynamic font is interesting to take further
• Work with one narrative and various approaches, change one component at a time to compare the results