This video based interpretation of Hughes’ famous poem has been something of a labour of love, largely because it served as my transition from still photography to more ambituous video creation and editing, taking full responsibility for the the full workflow of project delivery from concept to final edit..
The inspiration for this particular project emerged from a deeply felt regard for Ted Hughes' highly anthropomorphic 'naturalistic' poetry and, in particular, those poems published in the collection by the name of 'Crow'.
Unexpectedly. the project sprang into life, finally, at a Dance Workshop hosted by Nicola Selby, herself a talented dancer and photographer. The concept finally turning into a collaboration between myself and the dancer I met there, who is Amy Eccleston, now Amy Hallam. We worked together for several hours; me shouting keyword directions summarising extracts from the poem with Amy interpreting those ideas in beautiful modern dance poses and movements which I captured on the studio’s Hasselblad.
There are many interpretations of Hughes' Crow poem, and many think it's fundamentally a re-telling of the Bible's Genesis story but, as Hughes envisions it, with a demonic, apocryphally evil twist.
Hughes himself explains that 'nobody knows quite how Crow was created, or how he appeared' (into the world). Crow, he says, was 'created by God's Nightmare'. What an inspiration that line turned out to be. I took that idea and interpreted it freely with Amy's spellbinding choreographic interpretations of my somewhat clumsy direction. The approach is described in an earlier post here on my companion website. The images used in this final edit were from the low-key lighting session. I hope you enjoy the outcome:
It turned into a very challenging project, taking several months to complete. One of the reasons for the long gestation period was that It also offered me the chance to work on a sound design for the score. I attempted to create a soundscape that complemented the darkness of the poem while weaving the still images into a semi-continuous evolution; from Crow's 'birth'. or 'coming into existence' to its final triumphant realisation of the havoc it was about to unleash on Man.