CROW - written and read by Ted Hughes

Featuring Ted Hughes reading what he considered his career masterpiece, this film tells the visceral story of CROW, the lead character from this seminal cycle of poems - a dark reworking of the Genesis story. Music by Leafcutter John. Poetry © Faber, FSG.

CROW - Written and Read by Ted Hughes

Producer / Director - Yoav Segal

Assistant Director - Alasdair Beckett-King

Composer - Leafcutter John

Theatrical Concept - Mervyn Millar

Art Director - Holly Waddington

Animators - Yoav Segal, Alasdair Beckett King, Nandita Jain, Aindri Chakraborty

Model Maker / Ideas Machine - Daisy Popham

Studio-mate - Zach Walker

Colourist - Ross Birkbeck / Singer Street

Sound Mix - Seb Juliver / SNK Studios

DCP conversion - Onsight

Story Consultant - Mikey Please

Project Consultant - Heather O’Connell

Thanks - Wessen Jazrawi, Simon Paul, Toby Trackman

The material started life as part of the Handspring UK theatrical production ‘CROW’.

Director - Mervyn Millar

Composer - Leafcutter John

Dramaturg - Matthew Dunster

Designer - Holly Waddington

Choreographer - Ben Duke

Lighting Designer - Lucy Carter

Handspring Executive Director - Natasha Bucknor

Producer - Matthew Jones

Production Manager - Ben Payne

“The Door,” “Crow’s Vanity,” and “Crow Hears Fate Knock on the Door” from ‘Collected Poems’ by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 2003 by The Estate of Ted Hughes. Used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

With thanks to Carol Hughes, Emma Cheshire at Faber and Faber and Victoria Fox at FSG.

Music © Leafcutter John 2014

© Yoav Segal / Atime Productions MMXIV

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Official Selection:

Encounters Film Festival 2014

Animest (Bucharest) 2014

Zinebi (Bilboa) 2014

Leeds International 2014 'Best of British'

Sleepwalkers Cinema 2014

Foyle Film Festival 2014

London Short Film Festival 2015

Tripoteca Film Festival 2015

Cinequest 2015

Lanzarote International Film Festival 2015

Mecal Barcelona 2015

Edinburgh Film Festival / McLaren Animation Awards 2015

Tate Modern Turbine Festival 2015

The International Short Film Festival of Cyprus 2015

L'Etrange Festival 2015

Shiver Genre Film Festival Constance 2015

Reviews:

'Horribly hypnotic and unnervingly beautiful, the Apocalyptic assault of Creation is made impulsive and frightening and pure in Yoav Segal’s adaptation of Ted Hughes’ seminal cycle of poems, CROW...

We feel it. It is visceral. It is real. There is a sense of haptic visuality, as the eyes of the skin feel the very pulse of CROW and Creation course hot-blooded through cold veins and searing flesh. The very skin of the film is inscribed, microscopically, indexically, with the keenly felt presence of life in its initial, most primal sense. As micro and macro collide, stars burst through cells into space and under skin, and in every ‘vital fibre’ of my being, I am CROW.'

Hannah Clarkson, Take One

'Visually stunning'

Joe Gordon, Forbidden Planet

‘Mesmeric’

Bridlington Poetry Festival

‘In Crow, a recording of Ted Hughes reciting his own poetry is set to wondrous animation under Yoav Segal’s direction. Its symmetrical imagery is evocative of nebulae, smoke, biological structures, fire, rock, and other natural phenomena; its darkness and mystique respond to and amplify Hughes’s poetry.'

Sasha Burik, Savage Online