Dodo, poetry stop motion
Stop motion inspired by my the book Dodo, which was published in 2013 by the National Council of Culture and Arts (CONACULTA). This poetry book was awarded with the "Elías Nandino" National Award of Youth Poetry, the most important prize for young poets under 30 years old in Mexico.
About Dodo: The search for the “full poem” can be recognized in Karen Villeda’s pulse of poetry. The stylistic accuracy she expresses in Dodo, her third book, offers to the readers a powerful symbol that rides among dodos, children songs and the literature classics: Robinson Crusoe and the Treasure Island by Daniel Defoe and Robert Louis Stevenson. Pirates, sailors, adventure novel characters who talk with Moby Dick, such as The Admiral, a villain who “paints his lips with blood and dreams six sodomized sailors and a pregnant woman”. Dodo is a book where the polyphony maintains a characteristic: To purify the language.
Seven rickety barrels. Seven barrels as a pretexts for fourteen arms. Forty nine sacks, sacks of buckwheat flour for the pugilist mettle. Flies, one hundred. Seven camisoles that get pale with seven barrels. Fists of salt. Fourteen rival arms, seven seas, one hatch.
Siete barriles desvencijados. Siete barriles como pretexto para catorce brazos rivales. Cuarentay nueve sacos, sacos de harina de trigo sarraceno para el ánimo pugil. Moscas, un ciento. Siete camisolas que palidecen con siete barriles. Sal por puños. Catorce brazos rivales, siete mares, una
Conception
In mid 2013 , I made the sketches of a series of digital poems based on Dodo to present in conjunction with the printed poems. However, I was very interested in combine craftsmanship with a creative process that will maximize the playful character of Dodo, which is a micro-history of violence with the rhythm of a lullaby. The dodo has been marketed to children audiences. We all know the caricature figure made by Disney for the movie "Alice in Wonderland". Few know that the dodo appears in bestiaries for children as the Bad Child 's Book of Beasts by Hilaire Belloc in 1896: "The Dodo used to walk around / And take the sun and air / The sun yet warms his native ground- / The Dodo is not there! / The voice , que used to squawk and squeak / Is now dumb- forever / May Yet you see his bones and beak / All in the Mu -se- um". I conceived this stop motion to give a new meaning to that figure, it's childish in our imagination but is revealed to be sinister at the same time because the dodo became extinct because of mankind and its greed.
Realization
At
first, I wrote a literary script. In order to keep the theme of Dodo in the stop motion, I
chose fragments from four sections of the book can be part of an
image interpretation. The verses that appear as inspired in the art
of silent film intertitles are from the first section entitled
"Güeldres", which is based on the second expedition undertaken by
Flemish into Indonesia in 1598 ; The second section "Mauritius",
that refers to the sight and enter into the territory which was
named Mauritius in in honor of John Mauritius, Prince of Nassau-
Siegen and also the rebellion initiated by the seamen crew; the
fourth section "Fist in the nest" , an approach to the discovery of
the dodo by the invaders, and the penultimate section "Natural
History" , where violence erupts as a cycle that condemns all the
crew.
For the story board, I draw the characters: The Dodo , The Admiral,
Wybrand van Warwyck, Jacob van Heemskerck, The Mongolian, The
Redhead, The Indonesian and The Slave, which were personalized with
characteristic features. Later, I made the patterns, cut the figures
as molds indicated and sewed the figures by hand using quality
materials such as German felt. I tried to pay close attention to
details to create a unique and unrepeatable figure of each one of
the characters.
With these elements, I complemented the shooting script for stop
motion in which the numbered drawings are included length ,
describing what happens in each plane and the soundtrack .
The scenario is a childish atmosphere: scrawled cardboard, colorful
fabrics, walls painted with bright colors and toys from my childhood
that were reused and had lost its function (such as a pirate ship
from Fisher Price). Also some organic elements in their natural
state as ballast and gravel of similar size between 5 and 10 mm to
simulate sand or the egg use.
Scenes were configured one by one and about five thousand high
resolution photos were taken during the month of November 2013. In
the post-production work, I selected 500 photographs, which were
edited in order to make a little short.
Dodo, poetry in stop motion was
launched on February, 12 (2014).
Technique: animation.
Keywords:
animated poetry.
Creation year: 2013-2014.
Photo Library
Dodo The Admiral Wybrand van Warwyck
Character Character Characters
Jacob van Heemskerck The Redhead The Mongolian
Character Character Character
The Indonesian The Slave The seven sailors
Character Character Characters
Güeldres Birth of the dodo Birth of the dodo
Scenary Scene Scene
Mauritius Island
The sky and the sea
Güeldres
Scene Scenary Scene change
- "Elías Nandino" National Award of Youth Poetry 2013.
- Selected for the I International Festival of Literature and Interactive Media "Cinemapoesía" of Peru.
- Carmen Villoro: "Dodo leaves us in that middle ground between reality and fiction in which all readings are possible. It is the memory and the harbinger of a great and terrible world that belongs to everyone. We just look at the footprint to recognize our memory. This delirium frightens and fascinates us".