Artificial Matt
ABOUT
Thomas Hardy's poem, Drummer Hodge, read aloud by a character who never existed. Hardy wrote the poem in 1899 for a drummer boy killed in the Boer War and buried 'uncoffined, just as found' under foreign stars. He never gave the boy a name. Hodge was Victorian slang for any country lad, and that was the point. He stands in for every young soldier history didn't record. This film gives those words an invented face. A character with no past reads for a boy with no name, in one continuous, unhurried performance. It was made for Remembrance, to carry the poem rather than illustrate it.
SELECTED FRAMES — 8 OF 8
PROCESS
The poem came first, and everything was cut to its rhythm. Hardy's three stanzas move from the burial to the boy's ignorance of where he died to his becoming part of that land, so the performance had to move with them: still, then uncertain, then quietly resolved. The character was designed in ChatGPT. I was looking for someone who could plausibly have known a boy like Hodge, old enough to have lost someone, with nothing theatrical in the look. The synched voice was made in Seedance, with 3-4 takes per line to find a reading that sounded like someone remembering rather than reciting. The hardest words were the Afrikaans ones, kopje, veldt and Karoo, which most voices mispronounce. The performance was animated in Runway. The direction was to listen to the poem, not perform it: small movements, eyes that drift away and come back, no big gestures on the big lines. Every clip where the character emoted over the words was thrown away.
Credits
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