A few months ago, I was commissioned by Apples and Snakes (the national board for spoken word poetry) to create a one-minute poetry video about ‘the North’, as a part of their ‘Future voices’ project, to celebrate 40 years of Apples and Snakes.
I have never made a ‘poetry video’ before – or, at least not one that wasn’t a single clip of me reading out a poem at a gig or in my house – and so this was both exciting and slightly terrifying. If you know me, you know I a) don’t do anything by halves and b) don’t like to not be good at something; so I knew this project would push me in ways I hadn’t been pushed in my practice before.
As a part of the commission, I, alongside the other writers, took part in some online workshops led by both Apples and Snakes and Young Identity Manchester, where we learnt from successful professionals in either poetry or video making. These sessions helped me generate ideas and think about how I could make a video with a low budget look good by using different angles or editing skills, for example.
Coming up with the poem
I write about ‘Northerness’ and ‘the North’ a lot, but for some reason, it took me ages to come up with a poem for this. I was attending the online sessions and excited to get cracking, but, once the call was over, nothing was translating onto paper.
I wanted a poem that wasn’t deprecating of the North, as some ‘Northern’ poems sometimes are, I wanted a poem which shared the experiences of more people than just myself, I wanted a poem that encompassed how I felt about the politics of the North/South border – which is to say, I put myself under a lot of pressure for a one-minute video!
With about two online sessions to go, inspiration struck. I was having a shower and talking to myself, as every normal poet does, and an idea came into my head – I had this line floating about below the surface, itching to escape – something about people arguing about where the North/South border is, and the fact that I don’t really have an answer bar the fact that is is well below where I am.
And then the double entendre hit me – the North/South border is well below where we are – living conditions are well below where we are.
I got out of the shower in just a towel, hoping that my housemate wouldn’t walk into the livingroom, and scribbled down the line into my messy notebook (the notebook I take with me everywhere and allow myself to be messy in).
It took a few more days until the rest of the poem was ready to reveal itself to me, but once it did, it came all in one go. I sat in bed with the dog at my feet and wrote the poem which was, originally, called ‘Well-Below’, but is now called ‘Where We Are’ (thanks to the suggestion from my friend and person I go to to for feedback on my writing, Emily).
Coming up with the concept
Once I had the poem, in theory it should have been smooth-sailing, but I had no set concept for the video – that is, I had so many ideas and only one minute, a cheap tripod and almost zero filming experience to make them happen with.
I knew I wanted to show the bits of my local area that I love – the green spaces and the graffiti. I know some people hate graffiti, but I personally love it – I think it has its place in the world – I think it gives people who don’t have access to art a way to express themselves artistically.
I wasn’t brought up in the exact area that I live in now, and so can’t claim to be an expert – but, luckily, I know one. My friend Cooper is the Heaton oracle. He knows everything about every inch of Heaton, all the way to the centre of toon.
So, I enlisted him to be my tour guide in return for a Greggs coffee and a yum yum, and we walked from our estate (we live on perpendicular streets), through Heaton park, through to Sandyford and back again (with my dog, Bonny, in tow).
We visited the amazing graffitied walls of Sandyford, the beautiful Heaton park, and my favourite place in the area: the shoe tree.
I took clips of anything I found beautiful, or intriguing, on the way, and by the time we were done, I had about half an hours worth of footage (again, remember, the video is only one minute long!).
Originally, these clips were meant to be the main focus of the video, but I had no idea how to edit them together to mean anything bar just, essentially, a carousel of clips, and so they sat in my camera album untouched for another couple of weeks.
I was starting to get frustrated with myself at the beginning of December – I had the poem and I had some clips, but I had no video concept.
Not long before Christmas, I booked in a 1-1 session with the producer of the ‘Future Voices’ programme, Grace Attlee, hoping to get some advice on what to do with my video. I read out my poem, chatted about my (lack of) concept and Grace was so encouraging.
We chatted through how, when you’re a facilitator helping others write, sometimes it’s hard to write yourself, and also about, in general, what I want to do in my writing.
I always say that, where possible, I want to share, amplify and give voice to voices often unheard – this includes marginalised / underprivileged / and underrepresented groups.
And in this poem, although it was about ‘the North’ in general, and how the North/South politics affect everyone in the North, I realised that it was, so far, just my voice being shown (metaphorically and literally).
Grace was so great at helping me untangle all of my strings of thought and worm out what I wanted to do and show, and the concept for the video came like a real lightbulb moment.
Filming
Once I had the concept in my mind, I couldn’t stop thinking about it – I wanted to film other people speaking the poem and use their faces and their voices to tell the story of the poem.
I knew there were a few people I could convince to help me, like some regulars of my poetry night, my colleague and friend Richard, who is a poet himself, and, of course, Cooper, who is once of the best poets I know with, undoubtedly, the best Geordie accent.
I thought, if I could get around eight to ten people to let me film their mouths, I could make something cool. I could have them saying lines and then it wouldn’t be just my voice. I was mostly happy with this concept.
Now that the video is done, I can say that I had a whopping 21 wonderful friends and colleagues (plus my mostly-willing Mam) offer to let me film their mouths for this project! Those people are Tahmina Ali, Richard Boggie, Gemma Broadhead, Lewis Brown, Mandeep Chohan, Amy Coates, Andi Down, Georgia Goncalves, Lisa T, Gary The Hat, Deborah Langdown, Lizzie Lovejoy Emily MacKellar, Craig Moore, Emily Morison, Georgia Morris, Cooper Robson, Kevin Robson, Alex Skinner, Lauren Thompson and Anne Webster.
I filmed everyone over the course of three weeks – at work, at my poetry night venue, The Cumberland Arms, and at my Mam’s house in Northumberland. The filming was the easy part.
Editing
Then came the editing.
I must admit that, throughout the editing process, I, on several occasions, was convinced I’d bitten off more than I could chew. But, I am stubborn. I don’t give up when things are tough and I certainly don’t give up to make things easier on myself (which is both a blessing and a curse).
I didn’t want to pay for any ‘premium’ software, so I stuck to what I had, which is Davinci Pro (a free editing software that was actually perfect for what I needed to do). It allowed me to crop clips and layer them on top of other clips, and it also allowed me to separate the audio and video from clips, which made me come up with the final piece of the puzzle for my video concept.
Once I realised I could remove the audio from clips and add other audio onto them, I decided I was going to make life really hard for myself, and make it so that no person’s mouth would be with their own voice.
In my head, it was the missing piece, and once I figured that out and started to edit in this way, I was finally happy with my concept and hopeful that I could make something that I was really proud of.
I began by editing the clips I got on mine and Cooper’s walk together, picking clips I liked and making them into what would, eventually, become the background of the video. This part was easy in comparison to the next step.
Next came the mouths. This part took three weeks. I began editing before I had all of the clips filmed, so I could see where the gaps were and use that to inform which lines I asked people to record.
I began matching people’s voices with the mouths of other people and, all together, I have spent somewhere between 8 and 12 hours on this process (I have lost count). Some of this time is because I had to work with the limitations of the software – it isn’t built to accommodate what became around 100 clips (including background video, voices, mouths and background audio), and so it lagged a lot. I worked my way around it by saving clips once edited and adding them back in, but the more layers of clips I had, the harder this became.
I managed to make it work for me, and I definitely became much more efficient very quickly. At first, I was deleting the wrong clips by accident and then having to undo all my work just to redo it again without deleting the clips, and I got so frustrated a few times I had to walk away from my laptop.
The finished product
I’ve been so excited to see the finished product of this video that I have lost lots of sleep. I’ve been lying in bed awake at all hours of the night, thinking about cuts to make and whos voice to pair with whos mouth. Now that it’s over, I hope to be able to get a good night’s sleep.
I am really proud with how the video has come out. It’s been a labour of love, but now that it’s finished and submitted, I’m really excited for people to see it.
You can watch it yourself here: