Making the “Gravity” poem fragment video was a bit tough. Mostly because I had no idea how to even start.
I didn’t really know how to approach this exercise. I had no background in filming or media, and I barely can handle a camera. Nor do I have any software to create videos. So, when I read that I have to make a two-minute (2 minutes!!) video, I freaked. I spent quite a bit of time worrying about the two-minutes minimum mark that I almost forgot the whole point of the exercise: transposing the David Whyte’s poem.
After some hours of internal panicking and procrastination, I finally put my head down and broke down the poem. I read the poem over and over a couple of times and figured that thematically, the poem was concerned with desire and… loneliness, somehow. I read it silently. I scanned it, following every line drops. Then I read it out loud, wanting to hear how it sounds, if there was any ‘character’ or ‘voice’ in these words and immediately, I noticed a difference.
I want
The “I” in this poem sounds pleading rather than demanding out loud. To say “I want” is to be in the mercy of those you say it to. There’s vulnerability there, an insecurity maybe.
As I continued, I found myself lingering on the phrase, “I want to know”. I read the line out loud multiple times, I muttered it, I wanted to be the “I” in the poem and asked myself, what do I really want to know? The line implies secrecy and it sounded anguish, the kind that burdened guilty secret keepers or a liar. I keep repeating that phrase to myself. “I want to know” and for a few moments, I felt like my boyfriend had cheated on me and lied, I felt like I had that bad gut feeling and just want someone to give me the bad news already, it felt sad, felt angry at times and most of all, it felt lonely, like you’re the only person on this earth who don’t know.
I had a mini obsession with that line and from that line alone, the visual concept came to me. It was the image of ocean waves hitting the shores, repeatedly, and the sound of its crashes. The image would replay and the sound of it would go on: the build-up, the tipping point, the crash, and the sound of water receding back to where it came from. On and on. Every time the line is spoken, “I want to know”, the waves would crash the shore, or rather I’d hear it.
I realised I was more fascinated with the sound of the waves then the image of it. I felt that by hearing the sounds alone would stimulate your imagination and make you long for the beach, especially for those who don’t live near the beach. So, I went and searched for stock videos that were the opposite to images of beaches or waves, while yet embodying the themes of desire and longing. The goal was to play the sound of crashing waves over that juxtaposing image, to give the viewer that desire to be in two places at once. Eventually I decided to use a video of an aerial traffic view at night, with the camera/view zooming backward away from the traffic, as if we were leaving the urban city to go where the sounds came from.
I spent several hours putting the video and an mp3 of crashing waves together, my eyes were counting time lapses in multiple frustrating attempts to synchronise the audio and the video. I added a few lines to the poem before recording it and synchronising it (URGG) with the video as well. In order to concur with the imagery and the themes of falling and longing, I mentioned “surrender” and added, “I tossed coins to test the moon”, referring to the moon’s gravity, which became the title of this video and also happens to beautifully juxtapose the zooming-out camera movement as well. In overall, I’m quite happy with what I made. The message or ideas in the video can be a bit vague and maybe I should have planned these ideas out better, but there’s a beautiful rhythm to it when all of it comes together and most importantly it felt honest to me. Beside the technical difficulties and possible lack of creative sophistication in video making, I thought that the spoken words were grounded and intimate and emotionally synchronised with the rhythms of those wave sounds.
So yeah, it was good first try. I’m not too scared of taking on another video exercise, now.