Oh, craven shadow
Can you draw your eyes away
And fix your gaze?
Can you ignore that
In front of you?
A truth
In its fierce intensity
Demanding your attention
Refusing to go away.
The inevitable is finally
Leaking out
Of the locked box
You’ve squirrelled away
Oozing out
From cracks and crevices
To show you
Your enduring shame.
Oh, craven shadow
A cancer that has been eating
At your soul
Invisibly doing its damage
Your suit of armour helpless
As your rotting corpse
Decomposes
A stench proceeding you
Growing stronger
More noticeable
Each and every
Passing day.
And even though
You control the airways
And set a nation’s agenda
Some truths are too big
To be contained
And this truth is one
That must be told
Your slights of hand
Cannot distract from this day.
There must be consequences
For those that shamed
And also, what of justice
For those silenced
For the depravities
On bodies soiled
For those whose very souls
Have fragmented
Living quiet lives burdened
Lives full of shame
Tortured lives
Extinguished
Oh, craven shadow
Time for truth
Your truth
The victim’s truth
To finally have
Their day.
Silence sits uncomfortably between us
It’s tangible presence
Full of foreboding
And dampening our ability
To share the moment.
Silence sits uncomfortably between us
It’s tangible presence
Full of foreboding
And dampening our ability
To share the moment.
Staring into nothingness
My fidgeting hands
Awkwardly placed
Time now to draw a breath
To take a leap of faith
To reach across that infinite chasm
Of time and space
Of my mind
Of my own making.
And just as suddenly
That simple gesture
Of clasping hands
Causes the weight of the world
To contract
To diminish.
A connectedness again
With the universe
Reignites
And that ache in my heart
Grows smaller
Though in the background
I feel its still there
A penance for too long away.
Goodbye silence
I’m home again.
Fascism has take a grip on America which will take years to tackle but we can also see its rise in Australia.
Fascism in the Breeze
Fascism has take a grip on America which will take years to tackle but we can also see its rise in Australia.
Dehumanisation of immigrants and the working class, attacking the university system, political corruption without accountability, increasing militarisation, increasing racism, media complicity and the spread big lies are some of the signs.
These are some of the things that we need to be vigilant against to maintain a vibrant and healthy democracy.
What are other things do we need to consider?
It began with a whisper An almost imperceptible murmur An uncomfortableness stirred That could be heard faintly In the breeze.
At first we ignored it That annoying irritant We rose above it Reassured by our moral superiority.
But the noise became louder Impossible to ignore Drowning out all rational thought As it inflamed all in its anger.
Nothing now left but cinders Yet I hear more whispers In the breeze.
It began with a whisper
An almost imperceptible murmur
An uncomfortableness stirred
That could be heard faintly
In the breeze.
At first we ignored it
That annoying irritant
We rose above it
Reassured by our moral superiority.
But the noise became louder
Impossible to ignore
Drowning out all rational thought
As it inflamed all in its anger.
Nothing now left but cinders
Yet I hear more whispers
In the breeze.
We live lives
Of fallacy
Sleepwalking
Oblivious
Indentured slaves
Endlessly
Monotonously
Going around and around
The hamster wheel
Powering someone else’s
Flame.
Parroting those
Surrounding us
Their diatribe
Lulled by ignorance
Sweet Lullabies
Deadening blows
Leaving no visible marks
As we gorge
Leftover morsels
Their seductive charms
Brainwashed and
Blissfully unaware
As we are
Inevitably trampled
Ground down
To dust.
Marionettes
Pulled to and fro
By dispassionate puppeteers
Elites
With a system rigged
Unfair to most
Stark disparity
Their right of birth
To maintain the status quo
Intent to fulfil
Every privileged desire.
Time removes
Unstitches
The invisible strings
That bind consciousness
Unbidden thoughts
Seep though
I sense
My surrounds
With newly opened eyes
I start
To spot
Needless disparity
Injustices all around
My mind
It does
Cause me to pause
To assimilate
These hidden tapestries
No longer
Beyond my
Grasp.
I see
The world as if anew
Layer upon layer of
Nameless institutions
Politicians Protecting
Power and inequity
Revulsion
Fills my core
How have we
Allowed this
To become our society?
How could
Our apathy
Be so great?
So many remain
Cocooned in false narratives
Playing another’s
Game.
It’s time
To take a stand
Break the chains
The bonds that bind
To protect
What remains of
Our land
To stand up for those
More invisible
Than you or I
To break the shackles
On our minds
Regardless of consequences
To take a leap of faith
And act
As if our
Very lives
Depend on it
For they surely do.
Come.
Do your worst.
The challenge of finding your voice and telling your story. An kinetic typography animation using the spoken word.
The challenge of finding your voice and telling your story.
Organisations are constantly striving to make the complex simple. How to engage their audience and not miss key information? How to remain authentic and retain the substance of their value proposition?
So many digital animations today have little substance, and though there is a large audience for that, there are other audiences craving something more. Audience drop off rates over time lead creatives and marketing teams down a path creating videos and animations of shorter and shorter duration with less positioning of their topic. There’s a constant tug of war trying to get the balance right. The reality is that there are markets for both and both should be well served with appropriate content. There are other influences such as target audience and media distribution channel that have to be accounted for.
In Australia an analogous example would be mainstream commercial breakfast TV versus Radio National. I would have liked to have said ABC Breakfast TV but unfortunately its adopted a very similar substance light approach as well.
This animation titled STORYTIME uses typographic kinetic animation that starts in a style from Apple’s Blink and then goes off its its own direction. I use a poem I created earlier this year to describe what my business is about, that initially I had set to a typewriter style animation effect but I think this is much better.
I’ll keep exploring the relationship of spoken word, emotion, narratives of substance as well as creativity and technology in my work. I hope you enjoy it to.
Do you ever Reminisce of childhood past A cherished memory That you return to A touchstone To reorient To draw strength And love That transcends all boundaries Of space and time That rejuvenates The magic of yesteryear I feel again in my heart I remember As I play alone Content Golden rays of sunshine gladly invade Smells of my mothers cooking pervade Life can get no better A simple A beautiful A perfect day.
As I reminisce of our nation’s capital Of vanquished ideals our forefathers swore Where megawatt smiles are switched on in an instant Compassion only available through a camera’s lens Carefully crafted words available in neat little packages With well-practiced obfuscations wheeled out in response to crisis A dance well-choreographed as it sidesteps all questions.
As the world burns around us with increasing frequency And the environment is damaged beyond repair As science is followed or ignored depending how well it aligns to manic ideology And pandemics disrupt any sense of normalcy As our previous generations are treated as chattel And money source to be milked and not revered.
As authoritarianism and neo-fascism become increasingly institutionalised And we turn our backs on fellow man escaping deprivations beyond our imagination As millions face destitution, death or despair And we turn inward and ignore our moral duty to the world.
As our leaders become thralls to big business And corruption becomes a badge of honour As the media sings to a single tune And propaganda and news become indistinguishable As our outrage putters out in a single news cycle And we sleep to forget our waking nightmares.
Don’t worry for our leaders are here to protect us Save us from a far worse fate Let their words soothe you and dull your senses As they lead you blissfully unaware To the butchers table.
I see the winter rain pooling on rooftops
Overflowing gutters and drenching the grounds below
Foreboding resonances and modulating rumbling
Added ominous tones to the dank dark air.
I see the winter rain pooling on rooftops
Overflowing gutters and drenching the grounds below
Foreboding resonances and modulating rumbling
Added ominous tones to the dank dark air.
As I inhale I can smell and taste
Those dancing ions
Igniting spectacularly
Carving swathes of intense light
Splitting the darkness
Separating mists before my eyes.
I watch minuscule stragglers scurrying below
Frightened of the falling moisture
Touching unblemished skin
Ants in distant anonymity
My dispassionate observations of humanities failing
Confirm my mission’s ultimate objective.
As I stand there in silence
I wonder why I decided today was the day
I could’ve chosen a better announcing
I’ll be soaking if I linger.
A wet and miserable figure
Not much of a legacy
My dramatic flourish at the end
Would be wasted
Crowds would not gather
In shock, to frown
To contemplate my message
So...
I excuse myself
For my ego needs a platform
Even at the end.
I shrug my shoulders
And laugh with gallows humour
The irony of my message
My impatient mistress must wait a little longer
To embrace me
I step back from the edge
The ledge that was to be my last anchor
And decide to wait for less inclement weather.
I scurry home
Trying to avoid
That falling moisture in the air.
My fingers achingly trace a path in the air
My fingers achingly
Trace a path in the air
Imagining your fingertips
Touching tentatively
A fleeting apparition
No longer there.
Spoken word on Covid-19. Its easy to forget how blase we were all about this before X-mas when it was something happening in a far away land. Now the whole world has been turned upside down.
I used stock video from Pexels site which I made black & white and added a number of effects in Adobe Premiere Pro. I liked how it started and ended with the same footage, but with the ending in colour.
The music was Royalty free music from https://www.fesliyanstudios.com which I treated in Adobe Audition to add effects such as coughing and laboured breathing… I hope I didn’t overdo that!
The poem was written over a few weeks as I tried to figure out what message I wanted to give. I guess I opted for realism. The future is uncertain and we can all hope and pray for the best. Hopefully, we’ll all learn from this and become a fairer and just society.
The Spoken Word 