Madeline Millan FDGA 2017

Department of Modern Languages and Cultures

Submitted by Madeline Millan/July 17, 2017

SPAIN FOR POETRY & FILM:

DRAFT OF CONFERENCE, DRAFT OF SCRIPT; DRAWINGS FOR A STORYBOARD

Dear Members of the Faculty Development Grants and Awards Committee,

I take the opportunity to thank you for supporting my scholarly and writing career to travel to Spain.

On May 24, 2017, I presented a talk about poetry and film, entitled "Poetas que no son solo poetas" at the Poetas en mayo, V Festival Internacional de Poesia Victoria-Gasteiz-Alava, an International Poetry Festival in the Basque Region, Spain. The FDGA committee funded me to work on this talk at a writers and artists' residence, Fundaci6n Valparaiso, from June 1-15, 2017 (Mojacar, south of Spain). As I stated before in my proposal, this talk has been conceived as the introductory chapter of a book about film & poetry from Spain, and Latin America. The tentative title is: Poe sf a que se mueve (Traducir entre generos, enfoque interdiciplinario entre literatura y artes visuales)/Translating Poetry of Words and Images: An Interdisciplinary Approach). The idea of this book is the result of my conferences and workshops on poetry and visual arts since 2015.

Besides the scholarly writing produced at the residence, my other work was related to writing a script for an animation project. The materials included here for this section are: the first 2 and last 2 pages of the script, and, related to the script, drawings of whales. The draft of this script is based on my narrative poem El secreto escondido en un caracoll The Secret Hidden in a Seashell. Secret will be used later on to illustrate the visual sequences for a storyboard (complete script was sent by email). In addition to working on the script, I had the chance to go back to drawing. The drawings that might be used for the storyboard of Secret were made at the residence. They are based on photographs taken by me during whale watching tours from 2014 to the present.

The residence time inspired me to learn how to write the technical script for the animation, and I have been doing many readings on the topic. What I have been trying to do then and now, is to visualize each sequence of 3 lines with an image that derive from my photographic files on whales. Each sequence of three lines will correspond, ideally, to one of the photos (each photo changes into a drawing). Each literary unit helps animate the story and gives me and others a better understanding of what will become the relationship between the text and the still image. All these components will, eventually, give life to the moving images or the animation.

In sum, this description reports on new findings and development of new skills beyond my writing skills. I am trying to produce everything as to be able to animate in the future other poems and short stories. This sojourn at the writers and artists' residence, funded by the FDGA committee, is the closest experience, similar to a sabbatical leave, that we can have.

Thank you again for your support, 
Madeline Millan, Ph. D. Assistant Professor