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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(“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
So before we get into the pre-production goodness, there is, in the true fashion of all things dance, an update that affects, well, everything. To start, my soloist dancer Julia has a major neck injury/illness, and won’t be able to move for a while (probably somewhere around three weeks). So that’s something. Additionally (perhaps for the best) a sudden rain/snow leek at the production co’s office directly on top of my work station and computer put us behind a few days (although, wouldn’t you know it, that little G4 took the water like a pro, and is back up and running!).
So there’s that. However, while i can’t fascinate you with all the exciting post-production details that we’ve yet to discuss at our yet-to-be meeting, i can take this post to tell you about the general structure for this piece, and the side project that’s developed off of it.
I’m back, and ready to dive in with you and bring you up to date on this new project/piece/film/thing that i’ve been working on. To give you a little context about the piece as a greater whole:
I’ve been working with my company, the A.O. Movement Collective, since the beginning of September on a new piece. Through Dance Theater Workshop’s Van Lier Fellowship, i was awarded 100 hours of free rehearsal space at Topaz Arts in Queens (an awesome studio, if i may say so) which we’re just finishing up this month. We’ve been through a lot already – cast additions and subtractions (and additions and subtractions), improvising, brainstorming, making, editing, throwing out, remaking, renewing – the works. The piece in itself (and i’m going to talk about it broadly here, but you can find more on my blog) is comprised of many small sections (“spots of time”) that will eventually all be connected by a non-linear narrative. Rather than working on a section at a time (which, we see very clearly now, would have been much easier to schedule and more economically viable) we’re making all of them at once, inch by inch and layer by layer. Working on them in this way means that they all continue to inform the others and continue to grow. I’ll be talking more about that process, and other Epic Work at my program at Chez Bushwick this Wed. night at 7 (come!!!) but that’s clear enough for now. All of this is to say: there are many sections (“13 variations on a car crash”, “Muerte Chiquita“, “fat fingers”, “Rock Solo”, “Slow lift evolving”, “eyes closed”, “gun to face”, etc) and this one is called “Glass Tree in Harlem”.
As part of their Wednesday night Visual and Media Arts programming, Chez Bushwick is holding an Artist Salon on the fourth week of the month moderated by different guest artists. Coming up next Wed. Feb 25th at 7pm, choreographer and media artist Sarah A.O. Rosner will moderate an evening entitled “Negotiating the Epic.”
Whether you define ‘epic work’ by it’s length, detail, or literary definition, epic work has proved to be some of the most engrossing, groundbreaking, and problematic work ever created.
The evening will feature screenings, interviews and discussion about epic work as well as an open invitation to YOU the audience member to bring in questions, stories, artifacts or material to add to the conversation.
Sarah will start by looking at a few examples of epic art across genres – Joyce’s Ulysses, the computer game ‘Myst’, and the marathon dances of Sara Rudner to name a few, and then open it up for discussion and showing.
Once the decision has been made to create an epic work, what are the pros, cons, and questions that arise out of the process that follows? Why is epic work appealing, important, or sometimes the only option? What about epic work is rendered problematic by our current modes of working and art-making structures such as funding, process, performance, and audience? What are our options for negotiating the creation of epic work in the current artistic and economical climate, and how does it affect the work itself?
To show video/media works, please email Sarah at srosner[at]gm.slc.edu with a brief description of your work. We can only show work on DVD and clips must be under 5 min in length. We look forward to negotiating the epic with you!
DATE: Wed. February 25, 2009
TIME: 7:00pm
LOCATION:Chez Bushwick
304 Boerum Street, Buzzer #11
Brooklyn, NY 11206
DIRECTIONS: L TRAIN to Morgan Avenue
Exit the BACK of the train, Turn LEFT outside the station,
Turn LEFT onto Boerum Street
(Chez Bushwick is roughly 80 steps from the station) Click here for Google map
Sarah A.O. Rosner with The A. O. Movement Collective
Hello there!
I’m Sarah A.O. – Anna has been kind enough to invite me to blog on Move the Frame on a regular basis. So, yes, i’m thrilled to be here! I guess you could say i’m a dance blogger. You could also say that i’m a choreographer, and dancefilm-maker, as well as newmedia lover/developer. You could also say that I am a lumberjack, but you, my friend, would be wrong on that last one. My company, the A.O. Movement Collective, is a contemporary dance co. based in NY, in love with and dabbling in many things: the aesthetics of mess, epic work, new media programs, and dancefilm being some of them. My blog, the Urgent Artist, is a digital space for some of those ideas and questions, as well as a space for anyone who “lives by their art” to throw down some good old fashioned knowledge, questions, or heartaches. I also work as a producer/editor for reels4artists, a video production company for the arts, and as an artist services intern at Dance Theater Workshop. But enough about all that.
Since Anna approached me about writing for her blog, i’ve been thinking about how to structure my time and space here. Do i blog theory, or about performances and screenings, or maybe turn my attention to the economics of dancefilm versus performance? I find them all vast and interesting, but luckily there’s a fairly easy answer already in place.
Move the Frame is the official blog of Pentacle's Movement Media, a project serving to help dance and media artists make dances for screen and use media to market their dance work more effectively. Move the Frame is a locus for dialogue about the form and a clearing-house of information about all things dance and media related.
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