Film poem 'bottled' released

'bottled' is another instance for a creative piece of work that lives on across years and media.

It started as a poem written in 2016 on a lengthy stay in the Shetland Islands and lonely walks on the most Northern of the British islands: Unst. Sunny, warm late spring days along remote beaches full of driftwood and flotsam, and mussel farms in view just off the coast. I still remember the flow of loose words and phrases, how often I would stop to retrieve my crumpled, sun-bleached notebook from my trouser pocket. It was a period with time and space to do things like that, both to do with the unusually warm spring weather and just having finished university.

The poem 'bottled' was finished a few weeks later.

A couple of years later, a conversation with a friend produced a nudge to turn the written 'bottled' into a film poem. An interesting and vast medium, film poems are a great opportunity to think about the relationship of text and image. They allow you to broaden the meaning of words, and likewise extend the filmic world beyond the image. They can spark new visual dimensions, metaphors and symbols, and merge different audiences and creators.

There are so many forms of film poems, and I'm particularly inspired by giving the film a special force of expression - so the film isn't only underlying the words, but its rhythm and combination of images become a poem in themselves.

Here is 'bottled' as a film poem, with the nuanced and haunting soundtrack composed by Islay Allen-Hopkins.

Scotland has a strong history of filmmakers who engage with film poetic forms. Margaret Tait is one of them with an enormous and thrilling body of film works. Roseannne Watt is perhaps the most prolific of contemporary Scottish poets who explore the medium of film as part of their work. For those interested, Filmpoem is a project that connect poets, filmmaker and composers and has a beautiful library of film poems.