Poetry Animation

The two animations I really enjoyed most was The Language by Robert Creeley and Let Us Consider by Russell Edson.  In The Language animation I really felt the artwork and the pauses when reading the poem helped me understand what the animation was about.  I liked how the artwork appeared to be realistic but hand drawn.  I also felt using black and white colors gave the mood of serious and I felt like it kind of contradicted the video itself, which makes it work.  In the animation he says, "Words say everything," which is true but so does color.  Color can represent a mood.  I also enjoyed how the animation is like a dictionary and when the screen shows the word emptiness and makes the inside of the word disappear as if water was draining out of it.  This is such a useful technique because he took a word and gave it an action that made it represent its meaning.  Also when the animation says, "take care not to hurt," it showed a person and then it darkened his heart.  The word hurt was then represented to mean heart, like pain is only from the heart.
     In Let Us Consider I loved how when the old woman transforms the lamp into her son and then the son changed into a sun!  That was just genius.  I did not realize that son (meaning a boy) and the word sun (as in the heat source of planet earth) are pronounced in the same way.  This technique by taking a word and making it represent 2 things gives the audience a sort of like WOW factor.  It makes you think and say, "Hey this word is pronounced the same as this word but they both mean different things."  It may seem very common sense but many people do not realize this until they are shown it.  I also liked the part when they showed smoke cowed tongues for shoes.  I thought it was very clever to take a normal shoe and make it act like a moving tongue but not make the shoe appear as a cow tongue.  In both these animations I found that we should explore other ways of representing a word and give your animation a sort of Wow factor.  Make things not appear the way people would think it could appear as!