This poetry film was made by Stevie Ronnie with the poet Lucy English, as part of the Book of Hours poetry film project. The process is interesting and here Stevie describes the process.

This poetry film began as a colour palette that I generated and sent to Lucy. Lucy wrote in response to the palette and sent me back the text and a voice recording of the poem.

I had some footage sitting waiting, so I got to work straight away. I wasn’t happy with the way the words and the film were rubbing against each other so I cleared the decks and went back to the poem. I listened to the recording over several months, trying to slip under the surface of the words. The poem began to play over and over in my head.

One morning over the summer I lay in bed listening to Odette, my eldest daughter, practicing the piano. As she played, the poem was also playing in my head and I was taken by how the two seemed to fit together. I recorded Odette and combined that recording with Lucy’s voice. This audio track then provided the spark of an idea, which in turn led to new raw footage. By the time I sat down to draw the images and the audio track together it felt as if I knew exactly what I had to do.

 

Directed by Stevie Ronnie
Written and Spoken by Lucy English
Music by Odette Ronnie

Stevie Ronnie is a freelance artist and writer with a background in computing. His work crosses art forms to produce pieces for exhibition, publication, installation, screening and/or performance. Stevie has received two prestigious MacDowell fellowships for his interdisciplinary works and a Northern Promise Award for his poetry. His most recent book is Self Portrait as Someone Else (Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, 2017).

Stevie has been involved in the making of several poetry films as both a poet and a filmmaker. His work has screened at several international festivals including Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Monstra, Kinofilm, Filmpoem, dotdotdot Festival, Juteback Poetry Film Festival, Ó Bheal International Poetry Film Festival and others. His experiments with poetry and film have also been shown in galleries around the world as an integral part of exhibitions and performances of his other works.

Lucy English is a spoken word poet and novelist. Her Book of Hours project (thebookofhours.org) is a calendar of poetry films created in collaboration with a group of international filmmakers and printed poetry collection from Burning Eye Books.