Here it is: The film of the Dede Dada do!

First the link and then I’ll tell you all about it.

The film is dedicated to fellow blogger Tony who has the blog x-raypics.  Tony kindly sent me a Dada poem when I first floated the idea back in June. He works in radiography and uses a speech recognition program to convert his spoken notes into written text. He found out that when you feed this program with real poems it spits out Dada type text. So he kindly provided me with a sample called Dada Jack and Jill. (Figure out the original text :))

On Saturday, finally, a few people gathered in my studio to create a short film around the poem. Professor loves the arts and held his hand up to perform. A good disscussion ensued as not all the Dedes share his enthusiasm for this type of art. While Cash Cow is also fond of the arts, for her it has to be accessible and make sense. (Only the initiated will know why she is wearing a feather boa). I don’t know how many of the other puppets clapped and cheered only because that’s what you do when you watch a performance. Needless to say we had a lot of fun on and off the stage and thank you Tony for your wonderful poem.

We ran out of time on Saturday to record the spoken words, but I always thought it might be nice to do the full circle and use a TTS (text to speech) program to read out the text. I spent yesterday afternoon putting the film together and the first program I used was difficult to understand. Originally I considered it wasn’t important that the conversion back into voice was turned into unrecognisable mumble jumble and uploaded the file last night. But then, if you watch the film without knowing the background story, it might be viewed as poor quality. That irked me all night. This morning I found a new program and replaced Professor’s voice. Apologies to all the people I have sent the link to already. I really owed it to my collaborators to make the best possible film out of the material we’d produced on Saturday.

And now I have the sequal in my head, I guess I have to run another workshop. Any takers?