Screen Dance Journal

Week 8: 23/11/17

Prior this session, we filmed all of our material in a green are behind the Contemporary Arts building and send our footage to Anna for her to edit ready for this session. We started this session by watching the film and discussing what works and what didn’t work. The location itself we liked and it allowed for lots of possibilities, however, it was just the camera angles and the actual material in the space that was the issue. Some of the costumes worked in the space, such as the wedding dresses. The flowing material worked well against the green grass, and the sharp edges to the bushes and walls.

This was our first session filming in costume with Anna. Some of this footage we captured could be used in the final film we create. Before we began we had to get changed into our costumes and pick costumes to wear for the piece that didn’t work in the footage we shot for homework. I made sure that I took not what I wore under my wedding dress, as I wanted to make sure I kept the continuity while filming so we didn’t have to re-film any shots that do look good next week. We used two cameras when filming so we could get two different perspectives. The higher angle was nice to get a wider shot, with everything and everyone in. This worked well for my beginning floor section as you could see the detail and the movement of the fingers, and you could also get the volume and the layers of the wedding dress, especially as we were sitting down. When filming the rolling shot, it was important to position ourselves as dancers correctly because if we didn’t, there would have been different spacing’s between us. If the space between us was too close, we often found that we were rolling on each other’s dresses, which then stopped the person from being able to move.

When filming the slow line section, the material looked better with the camera really close to us and moving through our dancing bodies. We made a decision whist rehearsing the material to focus on our hands. Focusing on the hands made the movement more intriguing as it made the viewer wonder what we were looking at, and why it was so captivating.

For the fast moving section we decided to really use the space, and to travel it quite a lot. The location we were filming at had grass slopes leading down to the path. We decided to really uses these slopes to run up and across on the fast section to add some more levels to the piece. We found this very tricky to film, as there were lot of moments of empty space because we were using the whole of the location. We still wanted to have the camera moving through us really quickly to make sure we got the movement of the dresses and to make the material more interesting and would make the material seem even quicker.