The Lanyard

I really liked the sudden shift in music, and with that, tone, that occurred halfway through the video. It made me focus more on the contrast in the tone of the poem itself - which is what I think it intended to do. I also thought that the decision to reuse the clip of the lanyard being stringed together was a nice addition that helped piece the video together nicely. The only thing I'd recommend is maybe choosing a different clip to end the video. The brothers fighting seemed a bit random and fairly different from the couple of clips prior to it.

The Lanyard is one of my favorite poems. I like the pacing and use of text for the piece. I particularly like the image of the mother and skinned knee as it is juxtaposed at around 36 secs. I'm not sure how I feel about the transition at around 40 secs. I like that the piece is aiming for more variety, but I'm not sure the switch in musical background is working. I almost feel like more variety through the shifting of imagery will be as or more effective. Weaving in more images with aspects of parenting, I think, makes sense. And exploring strategies of juxtaposition could be helpful. For instance, when the text is referencing the intense mothering gestures like milk or spoons of medicine, perhaps showing the weaving of the lanyard then will get across the contrast between these acts of love and--what seems at first--the trivial gesture of weaving the lanyard. You might be able to add some pauses or chunk up the text to amplify this kind of effect. And I gave her . . . [pause and wait] a lanyard. I wonder if there is a way to end on this kind of gesture. At this point, I have a sense that the piece is not quite complete or is not quite wrapping up, so perhaps since you are excerpting, you can be building toward this kind of ironic statement. I like what you are doing and feel like the weaving of the lanyard, if mixed with more imagery and the text, is a successful strategy, so fine tuning things to more clearly get at these kinds of trivial vs deep acts of love will make it even stronger. Nice work.