The seasons come, the seasons go

This is the second part of my 'Cowslip Sunday' film. In this section I have used footage shot between January 1st and early March 2012 - to try to give some sense of the changes affecting the landscape in and around the Nottinghamshire village of Lambley during that period of time.


The next section of the film will then feature footage of the first rehearsal for the Cowslip Sunday play, which took place on March 11th of this year - I blogged about that event earlier:


http://poetryseen-in-lambley.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/cowslip-sunday-2012-first-play.html


The film will then feature the successive rehearsals, filmed between March and early May, interwoven with footage of the landscape during that period. This will then culminate with a sequence documenting some of the activities of Cowslip Sunday itself - May 6th.


My intention with the film is not to provide a continuous narrative of the preparations for the play and of the period of time in which they took place but instead to provide a personal reflection of that process, which will inevitably (though not willfully) be selective and somewhat fragmented - in the way that most of our experiences actually are.


I have taken the editorial decision to produce the end of the film next - and I have just completed the penultimate sequence of the film. I will post this section when my Vimeo account allows - for economic reasons I am only able to use the 'free' video hosting option that Vimeo offer (and I'm very grateful to Vimeo for allowing me a means of uploading these films). 

Anatomy of type

As part of my 'Poetry Seen at Cowslip Sunday' art installation I created two 'branches' of poetry - using lines from a Shel Silverstein poem:

The branches of the poet tree

Reach from the mountains to the sea

I was happy enough with the finished product - see pictures below - which consisted of six pieces of 'laser-cut' plywood, cut into almost cartoon-like tree branches. I knew that the location of the work would be fairly important to how the work would be viewed; ideally it needed clear sky behind it to show it to its best advantage. I have now taken down the work from its original location - with the intention of photographing it in a few different locations in fields around the village of Lambley. Hopefully these images will allow the idea of 'poet tree branches' to take root in people's minds.

One interesting aspect of the creative process involved in producing the branches was that, in order to successfully render certain letter forms - 'a' and 'e' and 'o' for example, I needed to create a link to what would be blank space in printed letters. In order to explain this problem properly I needed to delve into the 'anatomy of type' and it turns out that the empty space inside the letter 'o' is known as the 'counter'. But the blank space in the top of a lowercase letter 'e' is known as an 'eye'. Below you can see illustrations (taken from the 'Typography Deconstructed Anatomy of Type' poster) of these and other examples. I particularly like that certain typefaces (such as decorative serif fonts) give the letter 'g' an 'ear' and the letter 'r' a 'teardrop terminal':

A by-product of the production process I used are the actual letter forms themselves - and the letters that contain 'counters' and 'eyes' seem to become part of an almost imaginary alphabet. You can see these shapes (which feel almost like the bones of small animals) in the photograph below. They remind me of the 'neutral' alphabet that the writer and artist Shaun Tan uses in his book 'The Arrival'.

Mirth, and youth, and warm desire...

The past couple of weeks have been fairly hectic. The first piece of paid employment I've had in over 3 months (which amounted to about 10 days work) happened to coincide with the final week of preparations for 'Cowslip Sunday' - which itself entailed filming the increased number of rehearsals as well as trying to capture some aspects of the changes to the landscape occurring as Spring develops. There was also the little matter of getting my own 'Poetry Seen at Cowslip Sunday' art installation finalised - both in terms of production and getting it in place in time for the day itself.

Everything has been further complicated by the weather. Obviously the rain is a fundamental (and much needed) aspect of the climate - it's just slightly irritating when it all comes at once. From my point of view the real difficulties with the rain are two-fold. One has been the problem of filming in those conditions - my camera isn't waterproof and I know (through frustrating experience) that trying to set up the tripod and camera whilst sheltering the equipment under an umbrella is extremely challenging, particularly for the 'one-man-band' film-maker.

The other aspect of the heavy rainfall that impacts on my project is that my art installation is outdoors. Although the work itself is rainproof, the location (a short, woodland path close to the site of the main 'Cowslip Sunday' festivities) has become a little waterlogged over the past couple weeks - making the actual installing of the work problematic as well as seeming likely to discourage the less hardy visitor.

Anyway as it turned out the clouds parted for 'Cowslip Sunday' and the day was a great success. At the top of this post is the first edit of the start of the film I have been making documenting some of the preparations for the event. Over the course of the next few weeks I will continue putting together the film - with the intention of creating an hour-long documentary. The idea then is to upload the film – as 6 x 10 minute films – to YouTube.