The Annex

Animating Poetry

How I Made the Mayor of Castor Oil

Animated Poery is exactly as it sounds: a poem read aloud is animated. The first time I came across an animated poem was on Google Video where some art students / entrepreneurs had animated the poetry of former Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Regardless of what you think of Collins's Poetry, the animated versions are quite entertaining. Thus I decided I should make some of my own. The end result of my efforts are available online right now via Google Video [or see below]

The most difficult step for me was figuring out how the hell to edit video. I knew my digital still camera could take 30 second bursts of video, or that I could draw or use software to create still images; what I needed though was software to edit any video or animate any images. Thats when I came across Virtual Edit. I found it on download.com and have been using the freeware version. This of course means I can't add fades or titles, but I can edit together my crude drawings. Since I had no plans to distribute my animated poetry to movie theaters, but instead was going to send them over the internet tubes on Google Video, I figured I could get away without proper fading transitions.

Step two was recording the reading of the poem. I bought a USB microphone and some software from Sony. All told the microphone and the software cost me about $80. I'm sure I could have found something for free on the internet, but I was really being impatient.

The next step was selecting a poem. While I think it might be interesting to go back an animate some classic literature, I thought I start with a poem I'd written. The best, most recent, and only complete poem I had available really was "The Mayor of Castor Oil Celebrates Election Night".

The Mayor Of Castor Oil Celebrates Election Night

The Mayor is coming.
I am told, to care,
by democratic strumpets
passing party hats and placards.

Hallowed, hollowed speakers,
senators, & sycophants
hope for flattery, yelling:
No. Flatter me!

I’ve heard these constipated stumps
belched before for the benefit of
suburban housewives / drunkards,
but, gin and rye is never televised.

The votes, virtues, yesterday’s favors,
once tallied,
impugn pollsters,
pundits praise coattails.

The Mayor stands five foot four,
adored for thinning hair and loose
purse strings, & daughters.
They garner the applause.

Raise your cocktails
to the promise of reforms,
but I predict patronage
with recipients patterned on before.

Once I had a suitable reading recorded-- actually, multiple readings, as I spliced several versions together-- I began the animation. I had the day before in order to practice, put together a short animated Office Haiku. I knew as a result, roughly how many frames I would need for a 55 second long recording. It was alot.

The whole concept of animating seemed alot more fun in concept. By the time I sat down with a recording of poem, I was really at a loss as to what I should depict in the animation. After a few hours I came up with the concept of the "mayor" arriving on a stage. Most of the time, real campaign elections do not have a stage. Usually victory celebrations are held in the banquet hall of a hotel. They have 'classy' written all over them. Anyway, I wasn't going for realism; I was trying to animate a poem. So I built the first set:

The stage looked really plain. The Solution: People. I added a number weeble-like folks. The trouble was though that they all needed to be seen from behind. In one sense this was an advantage because they didn't require faces. Yet, the lack of faces presented another problem. Since the people were fairly deconstructed, a face would have been an easy way to understand that those little blobs of color were people. Anyway, the stage was soon populated with a number of misfits:

Even with the people something was missing. I then added the miniature American flags. I realized also that for each new frame, I could adjust the flags slightly to give off the appearence of movement. After all, action is what differentiates animation from illustration.

Once the stage was set, I had to come up with the action that would take place for the length of the 55 second recording. In essence, I then created a number of "scenes" that play out while the Mayor is speaking. These scenes include the appearence of the Mayor's daughters, the passing of a money bag, and the spilling of a martini.

I used a number of tricks during the animation. In one instance, the Mayor raises his hands in a speech, and lowers them again to settle the crowd. This effect came from simple using the same frames in reverse order. Another little trick was the appearence of the Mayor's daughters from behind the curtain. I made only one, and then replicated her. Also, the daughters have no legs and only one arm.

Anyway, that is the story of how The Mayor of Castor Oil became an animation. Below is the embedded video.