Exploring Video Poetry as a Performance Alternative

This project is an album of four animations exploring animated video poetry as a medium for poetic performance under COVID-19 protocols. 

In collaboration with experienced emerging animators and composers, Paloma developed four video poems, in which she actively met with collaborators to develop both visual and musical narratives for each poem. Meetings served as crit sessions where they revised and conceived storyboards, recordings, soundscapes, scores, and overall visual styling.

With the help of the animation workshops led by her collaborating animators Andrew Edwards, Remy Davison, and Danny Cho, Paloma gained a better insight into storyboarding strategies and visual narrative tools for video poems that enable her to produce videos that best portrayed the poem’s message to the audience. 

Throughout this project, Paloma developed a video poetry album consisting of four animations for three original poems, Let This Be, I Am Soil Breaking Off, and Every Word I Say to You, which has been disseminated through festivals and publications such as Motion Pictures Film Festival, National Short Film Festival, and SOLFEST: A Latinx Theater Festival. The director is also expected to share the project with broader audiences in collaboration with the City of Asylum, The Pittsburgh Book Review, Button Poetry, and other film and video poetry platforms.

This project was made possible with support from the Frank-Ratchye Further Fund Grant #2022-057.