Archive for the ‘artistic process’ Category

Collaboration between choreographer Monica Bill Barnes and filmmaker Celia Rowlson-Hall. Composer: Emily Lee Bellingham

With increasingly affordable video tools and the pressure to engage with audiences online, ‘Behind the Scenes’ media creation is exploding in the dance world. The growing online presence of rehearsal footage, dancer profiles, and choreographers talking to the camera is fast becoming an assumed part of a company’s marketing repertoire. It is worth noting, refreshing even, when a choreographer takes an entirely different approach to ‘Behind the Scenes’ video.

Take for example NYC-based choreographer Monica Bill Barnes and her recent collaboration with filmmaker Celia Rowlson-Hall. When invited by Jacob’s Pillow to create video for online audiences during a week-long creative residency for the new work Mostly Fanfare, Monica and Celia took the opportunity to carefully consider how they were interested in showing process or illuminating work.  Their questioning and collaboration resulted in 8 short ‘companion’ films, each one a window into the worlds, scenarios, characters, and elements explored during the creation of Mostly Fanfare.

The films are a collection of beautifully stylized imagery with character, humor, a touch of sadness and texture.  They create an abstract space for my own questioning and rewards for engaging in the work at differing entry points- in short the films are a brilliant media partnering of Monica’s stage work/world.

Both collaborators value clear choices in staging and reward audiences for staying present/patient – an important element in successful media. Bringing those values and concepts to the video and online space, a project specific webpage was created in collaboration with Jacob’s Pillow to frame the films within a “blank stage”.  For this reason the videos are not embedded here; please visit the website to view the films in HD.  On August 24, 2010 the curtain will come down on the website and the online performance of the films will end.

This week’s webdance is brought to you by Spike Jonze and The Pharcyde.

Got it figured out? See Spike Jonze’s one-page treatment below:
I love being able to see the broad strokes in which he designs the video (“eating chips, wearing a clown suit, hobleing [sic] on crutches, speedo”), as well as the commitment to specificity and detail needed to learn an entire song in reverse.

As you know, Boris Willis was our curator for our last Kinetic Cinema of the season. The subject of his evening was dance vlogs: a video blog with dance.  As an experienced dance vlogger, Boris has many insights into the process of creating videos, performing for the camera, editing, and using the web to share his work online.  He has graciously offered some helpful information about making dance videos, and creating dance vlogs.  Check out his inspirational work and helpful tips below.

Capitol Spring 2 by Boris Willis

Boris writes:

Why should artists create a dance vlog? I believe the answer lies in the number of times we have to explain what we do and have little in our culture to point to as an example. We have an opportunity to reach out to the public to show and explain the process of what we do, why we do it and how we feel about it. Here are some tips for you to think about as you make your dance vlogs.

1. Have a vision
   Find a way to make videos that you feel express who you are and what you want to say as a dancer. That being said, don’t just turn on your camera and dance, find a way to make an interesting and exciting video. Look at commercials and other short videos as inspiration.
2. Vlogging is personal and performative
   Make your vlog about you because it is the one subject that you know more about than anyone else. Dance, talk about dance, talk about making dance while you are dancing, dance about making dance.
3. Understand how the web is used
   Just because you have twenty minutes of footage doesn’t mean you should post it all to your vlog. Generally speaking three minutes is the most someone will watch. In other words keep it short, a sixty second video is plenty. As you gain more skills you will be able to make longer videos compelling by the way you edit them. It is always better to leave them wanting more than to bore them. Make stuff that people want to see and make it short enough that they watch it all.
4. Edit
   Learn how to use the tools of video editing. There are free editing tools that come with your computer operating system, Window’s Movie Maker for Window and iMove for the Mac OS. If you want to be able to do more sophisticated editing you can get Final Cut Express for the Mac and Premiere Pro Elements for the PC. For professional level editing you will need something like Premier Pro CS 4 for the PC and Final Cut 6 for the Mac. The great thing about video is that you can take the time to get it right and make your content compelling. However, the most important edit you make is at the end of your video, use a black out when the video is over and put your credits at the end of each video without a blackout so the credits are the last thing your audience sees. That way if your video gets distributed around the web everyone will know its yours.
5. Get the best camera you can afford
   You never know what will become of your work it is always best to get the highest quality video of your original work. When you put it on the web it will get compressed and lose quality but that is what we expect from the web. Having a high quality version for showing offline is a very good idea. I also recommend that you use a camera that records to video tape so that you have a backup. I always shoot in HDV but down-convert to SD to save disk space then compress it to the Quicktime format which eventually gets converted to flash.
6. Find a video host that you like
   I have been in debates about whether it is better to put your videos on Vimeo or YouTube or Blip.tv. There is no reason not to try all three and of any number of others. Just find one that you like. If image quality is what is most important then Vimeo is for you. If ease of distribution is what is most important then Blip.tv is for you. If getting your videos seen by a large number of people then YouTube is the way to go. There are pro’s and con’s for all three services and I use all three and others as well. Once you decided on a host for your videos choose a host for your blog. Blogger and Wordpress are two popular services that give you a variety of tools to enhance your content.
7. Be Consistent
   Follow your vision, update on a regular basis, make videos in manageable viewing times for your audience. You are not going to make money from advertising on your vlog but you can use your vlog as a tool to get work by showcasing your skills as a performer, choreographer, editor and artist. Let your followers know what you are up to especially when you are taking a break. People want to know that when they go to your blog there is regularly new content there that they want to see. Your dance vlog should be fun and informative. You should do it because you enjoy it.
8. Say hello
   How do you get people to follow your vlog? Email your friends, comment on other people’s vlogs, tell people you meet, get cards made. You can get free cards online from Vista Print.
9. Music
   Don’t use copy-written music. Find a musician among your friends or on the web that will let you use their music in exchange for some cross promotion. You can find plenty of music at this url http://www.archive.org/index.php Learn about Creative Commons use and credit the musicians for their work.
10. Describe the videos you make
    Write a description of the videos you post and use tags to help yourself and others find them. It is time consuming at first to describe your work but the value in doing so cannot be underestimated. Describe what you are doing in the video, give the location, who is in the video, when it was done and what the video is about.

-Boris Willis

danceaday.com

On April 24th Movement Research presented “Internet Killed the Video Star”, a night of dance video work created by performers, choreographers, and visual artists was as part of their Spring Roll Call festival at Monkey Town in Williamsburg.  All the works shown were originally submitted via internet, and the program was designed to support artistic considerations of resolution, degradation and quality within kinetic film arts. Since the Monkey Room has centrally-seated DJs/VJs who project videos on all four floor-to-ceiling screens, it offers an intense viewing experience in a cozy atmosphere. Watching the program on four big screens I was uncertain regarding the intended format of each film, and I quickly became aware of the effects of viewing different works on a small screen versus a large screen.

Some films seemed more powerful being shown on the four large screens at Monkey Town, while the film “MM2″ by Rebecca Gaffney felt overwhelming to view due to the intense strobe lights used in the film.  Later in viewing this on a smaller singular screen, it was more forgiving on the eyes, and kept me “pulled in” and interested (rather than making me want to close my eyes to ward off a pounding head ache as it did at Monkey Town).

I found Ben Pranger’s “Erased Dance” film intriguing during the screening, as it was the only silent film presented.  The absence of music seemed to soften the movements of the dancer, and the full wide shot of the dancer’s body, that was continually being erased, was very effective, especially on the floor-to-ceiling screens at the MonkeyTown.  This was a case where I found the work to be much more powerful on the large screen, rather than the small computer screen.

The remaining films presented by Movement Research seemed to work on either a computer screen or as a large projection.  Gina T’ai’s “Lumiere D’Ampoule” had a wonderful use of still images of the dancer with fabulous lighting effects.  Her work is beautiful, and it is easy to see why she was chosen as winner of the Dance for Camera 2007 student film award.

Our own Anna Brady Nuse (Pentacle’s director of Movement Media) showed “Funf ‘n’ Twist”, a fun and lighthearted look at dance on prom night.  Another delightful piece was Alex Cassal & Alice Ripoll’s “Journey to the Navel of the World”, in which action figures traveled across landscapes of human bodies.  Comedy was central in both of these pieces, which made them especially enjoyable and memorable.

http://www.vimeo.com/2575596
You can view all of the films and videos in their “natural” environment online at Movement Research’s festival blog: http://movementresearch.org/rollcall/?p=1153.

by Dawn Paap and Anna Brady Nuse

(“Maybe we all dream to be………?” by T.A.G.San Francisco, shown at the March 25th Artist Salon with Jaki Levy)

At the last Artist Salon on March 25th at Chez Bushwick, Jaki Levy, a media artist and new media consultant, discussed dance work created specifically for the web. The question of the evening was: Why should artists make dance films specifically for the web? In short, making dance videos for the web is convenient, inexpensive, and relatively easy to do.  For dance works in progress, posting videos on the web allows artists to conduct “audience test screenings”  and get feedback.  Web videos also offer artists the ability to communicate and mix media in different ways.

Jaki Levy compiled a few videos that gave us a peek into the present + future of dance, art, and technology on the web.  Some of the work was completely choreographed, others were more improvisational.  Jaki shared how videos are created for different purposes, and gave examples of what a digital performance world looks like, including live web casts, web series, and site specific performances.

For example, Tendu.TV is looking for a mass market for dance by offering high quality broadband content of dance concerts and dance for camera works. Jaki showed an example of a show produced for Tendu.TV by Marlon Barrios-Solano entitled “Dance-tech Ep. 1“. In this episode Marlon interviewed various international choreographers talking about their work and intercut the footage with excerpts from their New York performance seasons.

Troika Ranch was exploring a process of editing for their up-coming multi-media show, “Loop Diver”and shared it with their MySpace friends.  This process is called “Algorithmic editing” and it assaults the senses. In this experiment (a collaboration between Troika Ranch and Street Pictures), a simple phrase of movement is fractured into thousands of shots in various locations all over Brooklyn, New York.

3rd Rail Projects & Julie Fotheringham both used web video  to share their site specific performances with wider audiences. 3rd Rail Projects fully integrated  web activities into their recent month long performance series at the World Financial Center by posting videos online and writing about each day’s performance on their blog. In this way, the work had both an online life and a physical life that co-existed and supported each other.

Julia Fotheringham makes guerilla-style dances that interrupt normal routines and cause people to stop and observe. The video is both a document and a voyeuristic view of the performer’s journey through the city.

“A Facet of the Real” explored how performance in “first” life and Second Life can intersect, creating a trippy situation in which a live performance is viewed in real time by online avatars in a virtual venue.

Some artists make web videos for artistic purposes, others for marketing purposes, and some have both in mind.  The intention of web videos can be to develop audiences by hooking viewers online and enticing them to come to live shows or screenings, or to simply to post a personal video diary from the studio. The web space allows for both anonymous and public modalities and is as broad and rich as the physical world. What is exciting is how dance artists are starting to embrace the web for all its potential. It feels increasingly apparent that we are all media-makers now.

To see all the clips from the screening and read more commentary go to Jaki’s blog post at: http://www.arrowrootmedia.com

by Dawn Paap and Anna Brady Nuse