Click or press any key to progress to the next stanza. Clint Smith is one of my favorite poets. He writes from his experiences as a Black man in America and many of his poems, including this one, combine themes of fighting against racism with themes of joy, beauty, and hope. I love the way he uses imagery in his poems, so I wanted to illustrate one of his poems. I chose his poem "For the Hardest Days" from his book Counting Descent because I appreciate its message of hope. Making this project helped me understand the poem better. At first I thought it was just about what to do when you have a bad day, but by reading and rereading it, I realized that it is also about the possibility of societal transformation, even when things feel really hard. This is why I included footage of protests, including a Black Lives Matter protest.
I made this for the studio Poetic Cafe. I have enjoyed using gifs in my projects in the past, which is what gave me the idea to create a collage of videos. I wanted to bring together videos created by other people, so I used Flickr to find Creative Commons videos (credits below). I read each line carefully and looked for videos that related to the images it evoked for me. Then, I used an application called GIF Brewery 3 to convert them to gifs so I could upload them to Scratch. =Music= "Drifter" by Podington Bear =Videos= All of the videos are from Flickr: "Pouring rain" by Mary and Andrew "shadow puppets" by Kyle Van Horn "Cabezon Mesa Sunset 6-1-15" by John Fowler "Caterpiller digging" by Jean and Fred Untitled tree video by steve p2008 "Autumn leaves" by Tom "Black Lives Matter Milwaukee 2020" by Susan Ruggles "Video of the March to Close the Gaps in Minneapolis" by Fibonacci Blue "Taryn Elliott - Gas Drawing Human/Art (No Copyright Video 12)" by eXploration EtoileFollow "Parachutists" by Erich Ferdinand "Spring Breeze" by Katja Schulz "Sunrise" by Min "Chugach Mountains Timelapse" by Ben Townsend "mystery bird" by Charles de Mille-Isles "New England native garden, native plants, gardening" by LEONARDO DASILVA "Sage-brush seedling planting" by BLM Wyoming A photo: "Beige (burlap sacks)" by jakeromeFollow
