Marie Craven is an Australian film-maker who has directed, written and/or produced short films since 1984. Based in Queensland since 2002, she spent her early childhood living on a sheep and cattle station in country NSW, before her family relocated to Melbourne in 1967.
Poem & reading: Matt Hetherington
Soundscapes: Miles du Heaume & Zaziz
Source images: Mskrzyp, Bill Collison, Kjetil Aavik, Videoblocks, Mazwai, Flickr
Video: Marie Craven
Director’s note
Recently I’ve started going to a monthly poetry night, ‘Alternator Poetry’. It’s held at Currumbin on the Gold Coast, Australia, within driving distance of home. Through our mutual interest in this event, I’ve come to meet poet and musician, Matt Hetherington, and to collaborate. This is the second video I’ve put together incorporating his poetry. I’m writing about it first, because it was the closer collaboration between us. To get the ball rolling on this one, Matt sent me over a selection of audio via email. I was immediately drawn to the poem, ‘Everything sleeps but the night’, and Matt’s vocal performance of it. It also came with an ace musical soundscape, composed by Melbourne producer, Miles du Heaume, and Zaziz (Matt himself in another guise). After more initial discussion by email, I set to work on an image track, first sourcing stock footage from the royalty-free site, Videoblocks. I went for night-time shots and interiors, layering different shots together like collage. A few of the image components were stills sourced on Creative Commons licenses from Flickr. One key shot was from mskrzyp via the Mazwai Creative Commons video site. I selected the images for associative resonances with the poem. I put them together in editing and added fx, aiming for an abstracted narrative, in sympathy with my perceptions of the poem’s content. After I’d completed a first draft video, I sent it to Matt. He gave helpful feedback and I continued into further drafts of the video, refining the visual metaphors and the way they melted together into a flowing and complete piece. I sent the video back to Matt and, after a few more suggested changes, it was complete.
