A Play On Words.

When we first started experimenting with making word clouds, I thought it was fun. The site made our poems or text into visual groups of words; with differently sized words which depended on its frequency. I thought that it was also neat how we could change the colours, arrangement and fonts of the words. I kept playing around with my free verse and sonnet until I came to the final results. I think it was smart of the IBM employee to create an application based on "tag clouds" on blogs and websites. Unknowingly, it has become a great art form. With playing with typography, we could make clouds from Obama's speech for example. Another example would be an outline picture of Rihanna or Darth Vader created from her song lyrics and the screenplay of Star Wars. There can be many art creations from making word clouds.

I also learned how to print-screen on a Mac: Command-Shift-3!

My poems were simple and plain and with wordle.com, they became alive, in a way. My first poem, Letter To A Doppelganger, was a free verse on mistaken identity, ranting, and trying to find some individuality. I wrote it partly because I have been mistaken for another person and I was inspired by Diane Chea's video which we watched at NFB. After importing it on wordle.com, it formed a mask like a Venetian mask. Get it? Identity and holding or hiding behind a mask to hide one's actual feelings. Also, the biggest words were: "Identity", "Name", and "Receive".

My second poem was a sonnet based on how much I dislike sleeping. Honestly, we could get so much more done without having to stay in bed for 9 hours everyday. In that time, I could've finished 1.25 units! So in this poem, I chose a dark background and some reds, grays, dark blues, and light blues to match with the themes of lack of energy, bloodshot eyes, and being nocturnal beings. With this poem, the most commonly used words were: "Sleep" (obviously), "Without" and "Less".

In the end, word clouds were fun and easy to make. I can't wait to get started with LiveType and Final Cut Express to make them appear animated and alive. It'll probably take long with rendering though. :S

Here's both poems superimposed onto wordle.com: