Life Becomes A Girl

Proposal

The basis of this first experiment will be the first poem from my creative writing poem portfolio, entitled “One”. This poem gives perspective on the marvel of a newborn baby and just how the world perceives a new life. This experiment adopts the poem into the video poetry discipline with visual and audio components incorporated. I'm at this pivotal jump into a new life chapter right now that’s made me reflect upon my own childhood memories. Yet it’s always intrigued me how children can’t store those earliest life moments – the perspective of those initial years is fabricated completely by others, who have a completely skewed, glorified viewpoint of a newborn child. I want to visualize the untold perspective from the newborn, and I think video poetry can accomplish that through quick-cutting visual components that symbolize a baby's gaps in memory. The audience is really anyone that has an appreciation for life, who values the love, potential, or simple creation of a newborn baby. This experiment matters to the broader world in tackling something unknowable. No one can ask a newborn infant what they’re feeling or thinking. Until science can advance enough, it’s as if the creative arts are the most telling way to delve into this concept and provide a potential image of a baby’s mental and emotional capacity. This video poetry experiment can’t answer that unknowable question either, but it can give one person’s imagined visualization of it.

Genre Analysis

The discipline of video poetry is fairly novel, with much of it influenced by Fluxus, an international artistic group in the 1960s and 1970s who developed “intermedia”, a cross of interdisciplinary arts across different genres. I prefer the collage technique, more so joining visual images and audio with writing, to typographical image technique of "tavole parolibere". After watching collage video poems from the likes of Eduardo Yagüe and Claudia Rankine, conventions were deduced. Typically employed is a duration of two to six-minutes, incorporating instrumental musical audio and a poetic narration along with concise and crisp visual cuts. What I'm examining is called “infantile amnesia”, the profound memory loss associated with babies that's attributed to either storage failure or retrieval failure and alleviated by emotionally emphatic events. My experiment tackles this emotional recall, but through an artistic lens. While the novelty of video poetry has let the conventions keep a core structure, there's been artistic diversification, namely shifts towards non-fiction subject matters. Rather than telling the story of a person or experience, there's trends in poetry of diving into politics and science. It’s interesting that my project lies somewhere between this trend, taking a subject addressed by science and putting it into a fictional situation.

Sketch

Begin with nature and hospital shots to establish the transition from life to a physical human being and fade to black
Rise instrumental and narration, display affection and caution given to newborn infant
Show emotionally prominent and monumental life achievements, relationship with world surrounding child

Sample

Reflection

While I envisioned the video poem fairly easily in my mind, it was difficult to realize it in the media, with an unexpectedly immense commitment of time and creativity needed. In working with iMovie, I had to learn its ins and outs, especially with trimming video clips, integrating audio, editing sequences, and making sure the transitions and cuts were timely and crisp, which I ultimately believed I accomplished well. Changed circumstances made me reflect on this experiment and my whole e-portfolio direction though. My grandmother passed away shortly after Spring Break, and it’s been hard for me to cope with the fact that I was unable to say a formal goodbye to her before her passing and am still unable to make a post-mortem goodbye because of school responsibilities that have prevented me from going home. While before I planned for my whole project to circulate around a nameless boy’s life progression, similar to my origin piece, I’ve now decided to dedicate these projects to her and change this video's title to “Life Becomes A Girl”. I want my future experiments to be based solely on her life and her story. I always had a personal focal point on an appreciation for life and the moments that define us – this has become an even greater part of my focus and intent not just in this project, but in my life as well.