IMRAM: Bíog, Gíog, Míog
This short film was created for IMRAM, the Irish literature festival. It is inspired by Marcus Mac Conghail's poem titled Bíog, Gíog, Míog. The poem contains several voices, interweaving with celestial imagery which is both haunting and beautiful. The poem is punctuated by short stanzas, some lines only a single word long; a brief glimpse of something bigger than ourselves. Planets, stars, myth and history weave together in this complex and elusive piece of literature. When Mac Conghail recites the piece in person, some lines are sung, other shouted, whilst some are delivered as a mere whisper.
I wanted to capture the ebb and flow of celestial images in this poem in my short film. My final pieces uses vertical bands of light, which flash across the screen leaving single lines of text from the poem in their wake. I sampled audio taken by NASA as they record the resonance of the planets in our solar system and played it over the pieces, allowing the audio to build to a crescendo in tandem with the light beams. This film mirrors the sense of awe and fear that Mac Conghail's poem provokes.
