Dance - Choreography for the camera lesson + further planning

In this lesson rosie went through all of the pre production kind of work and thinks that need to be thought about when filming a dance film.

Some of the things she talked about included:

• Writing a treatment- Thinking about the videos structure, cobolations we could use , the target audience
• The choreography -  getting the dance first or improvising the dance with he dancers. 
• Finding dancers 
• Taking the dance into a more diverse environment than a studio 
• to rehearse on set and with a crew 
• the type of camera movement and to use close up shots
• keeping the camera involved with the dance and not just filming it statically. 
• some times you dont have to stick with story boards 
• to be very clear and a people person 
• devine a space and time of the story 
• remember where is the eye drawn, where will it move next and what effect dose the composition have 
• challenge yourself 

All of these things kind of kicked our group into gear as we realised we had a lot more work to think about in a lot less time than we thought we had. 

The main things that sprung to my mind were 

• we need to find a dancer and rehearse a routine with them ASAP 
• we probably need more crew on set 
• we will need to film over 3 days preferable, one fore rehursal, one fore full dance , one for pick ups of what we have missed 
• we need to find music or a soundtrack soon 
• if we have to film underwater the risk assment is going to be a nightmare 
• if we can film on land we need a glide or a steady cam 
• we need to dedicate a day to testing how we can make it look underwater or how we can film under water 

As the lesson we going on our group was frantically  brainstorming some of the things she was talking about of facebook. 

 


We decided it would be best if we went to speak to rosie about some of the issues we were having the main things we discused were :

- Having a crew, which she said if we are doing most of the work and we jsut need people to hold cameras and microphones then we dont reall need a bigger group from the start we can just use other people from the class on set.
- How can we make a film look like its underwater but not film underwater, she said we are better to ask simon about that but sugest we do it in a blue room and do something in post prodiction to give it an underwater look and that we defiantly need to do tests.
- She put is in contact with acm ( the music college near by )  so we could start disscusing making a sound track for our film.
- To find dnacers we are best to ask rachel as she works with dancers.

We asked mollie to join our group as she said she was looking for one and hadnt had the experience of working in a group yet,  then went to see if the studio was avalible for us to film in a and build a set however is is fully booked for the next month or so  so we went to see simon  for advice on how we could make it. 

We showed him this video as it has a simmilar kind of look of what we wanted to do 

He said to get an effect like that we would have to film it underwater because even if we filmed it in slow motion it would not have the same kind of floating effect on there clothes and hair. Filming underwater isnt imposible how ever to be aloud to film we would have to do a lot of research and planning because of safety of filming underwater. 

He gave us some advice about camera and underwater equipment which one of the suggestions was go pros. 

Another way he said we could so it would maybe to use a green screen and fans to make the kind of 0 gravity effect how ever it probably wouldnt look as realistic as we like.

As we have quite a lot of work to do if we want to pull this video to the style we want  i wrote a google dox  for our group with all the task that need doing and key dates to do them by. 

I felt it was best to get the idea before everything else, so we decide to all go away individually and reaserch the poem / dance styles etc then re group a few days later with a set of ideas 

we are doing it individually because everyone can interpret something differently so one of use might come up with something the other people have thought and it be a stronger concept then if we just did it on a surface level as a group


I also thought it was best to see if anyone else at the uni had filmed underwater before as they might be able to help us. 

to which i go these replies