I Exist, Nothing Else: An Illuminated Text of John Gardner's Grendel

This whole illuminated text, was just amazing. I loved your creativity. It was obvious you knew what you ,were doing, the music was just right for the way you used the words of your text. You did an excellent job of making he words come alive, it was very creative

From the beginning I could tell this Illuminated had so much hard work and effort put into it. Every line and every word has a specific role, and this really showed the power of words. The point of the Illuminated text is to get the story across using words, but also it is to engage the viewer, and it did both of those things perfectly.
When "blink" started blinking and "pulsation" started pulsating it engaged the reader. When the "king" hurled the word "ax", I thought that was genius. The back round changing black, to signify the black hole, and red to signify the bloodshed in the mead hall, again engaged the viewer and the viewer really didn't know what would happen next. Wow, just reading my notes of all the creative things you did for each word is amazing. When "I" and "they" started bumping into each other, which showed how Grendel and the people fought in the mead hall. Really great Illuminated text!

I loved the irony of the epic, heroic music being paired with a poem about the emptiness of life. There was a lot of action in this poem, so the words did a lot of literal motions. The word pulsation seemed to pulse, the black hole of eternity expanded, the king hurled the ax. In the same way, other parts of the poem that did not have a literal meaning were animated in the way described, which enhanced the understanding of the metaphors. The med-hall stretched, time grew taller, and the leader looked like a mountain. (Leader is shown like this instead of the actual word mountain, because the point is to describe the leader.) The words give visual images to the poem without using any pictures. The word accident gets into an accident, the “I” tears through the sleeping man, and later slips. Since the poem has such a clear story line, it is fitting that the words become characters themselves. The different fonts used help make the transitions in the poem are very clear, but the themes still carry through. For example, “mechanically” looms and is used in different parts, but in different ways. At the end “so may you all” fades into black and consumes the page. This is very ominous and matches the classic good vs. evil battle elements in the poem with its equally theatric ending. (The ending in itself is ironic, because it leaves the savor for meaning even though its meaning is that there is none.)

Great job! The music really went with the text- it got louder as the "story" within the illuminated text progressed and then reached a suspenseful point which added so much excitement and a sense of uncertainty to the actual words.
The way the words "blink by blink" are actually blinking was smart. I enjoyed watching this; the movement of the text wasn't predictable and it was all really creative. You did a good job of playing with the fonts, sizes, colors, shapes, and movements of the words.
I like the way the word "mechanic" remained visible for a longer time than the other words; it did a good job of stressing Grendel's frustration with the universe and it's predictable "mechanical" ways. Later when Grendel is thinking to himself/having a conversation with himself, you used different fonts to make it look like someone was actually responding to him, which was very clever.
It was smart to restate the main idea of the illuminated text by concluding it with Grendel "slipped" and had an accident by having the words slip too.