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.
(“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
Kerrie Welsh, cinematographer of Fünf 'n' Twist, a new videodance by Anna Brady Nuse. Photo: Susanna Christians
Jessica LaCombe wrote a great article in Dancer Magazine this month about making dance for screen, and I was honored to be included in it. My friends and colleagues, Ellen Bromberg (professor of dance at University of Utah and director of the Dance for the Camera Workshops in Victoria, BC) and Douglas Rosenberg (professor of art at University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Dancing for the Camera Festival at ADF) were also featured prominently.
The article gives a well-organized overview of the state of the field today, and some practical advice for new would-be film-makers coming from a background in dance. I’m pleased to see a more main-stream dance publication turning its attention to this burgeoning hybrid medium. As I say in the article, “This generation of choreographers have grown-up with media and been exposed to media so much more even than live dance, that they think in terms of media.” It’s time for dance teachers and educators to wake up to this reality and start helping the new generation navigate the vast media landscape of today and tomorrow.
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”.
I’m continually impressed by the forward-thinking and progressive workshops being offered by the Queens Council on the Arts (QCA). Last year they had a “Dance Doc Slam” where dance artists could show their promotional/documentation videos and receive advice and critiques from a panel of presenters, funders, booking agents, and videographers. This was a really useful way of learning the perspectives of different key figures about what they look for in dance documentation videos and how our work can be conveyed more effectively on screen.
This week, on Sept. 25th, QCA is offering another great workshop for today’s dance-maker: STAGE PRESENCE ONLINE, a dynamic workshop for performing artists on how to best use the internet to capture and promote your work. Once again there will be a fabulous panel of esteemed experts including Jaki Levy of Misnomer Dance, Meghan Sprenger of Dance Theater Workshop and Tom Pearson and Zach Morris of Third Rail Projects. (Yours truly was invited, but I have my Media Sales class that night…) This is an opportunity to have your website reviewed by your peers and gain insight from professionals into the myriad options of developing a presence on the web.
Here are the details: STAGE PRESENCE ONLINE Thursday, September 25, 2008, 6:00 – 8:30 p.m. Topaz Arts, 55-03 39th Ave., Woodside, topazarts.org
Admission is free. Registration is required. Space is limited.
To register, please email your name, address, telephone number, and artistic discipline to mblouin@queenscouncilarts.org A select number of performer’s websites will be reviewed and evaluated at this workshop. To have your website reviewed include a url in your registration.
Also, be sure to check out the other workshops QCA is offering this fall, including a presentation by Dance Theater Workshop on Tuesday Sept 23rd at the Chocolate Factory, and one that sounds great to me:
“schmooze or loose” learn how to work a room, get new contacts and maintain professional relationships on Tues. Oct. 16th!
Dancers: Remi Harris, Matt Sweeney, Donna Costello, Kyleigh Sackandy, Zachary Pace, production still from Fünf ‘n’ Twist, directed by Anna Brady Nuse. Photo: Penelope Roussetzki
For the last three weeks I’ve been completely consumed by my videodance project, Fünf ‘n’ Twist. Last Thursday and Friday we shot all the prom scenes of the video, and it marked my first time directing (and producing) an indoor shoot.
Kerrie Welsh & J Why, on set of Fünf ‘n’ Twist. Photo: Susanna Christians Through a monumental effort on the part of my cast and crew, we got all the essential shots done, including a tricky Busby Berkeley-esque overhead shot that required my DP, Kerrie Welsh, to climb a 16 foot extension ladder and mount her camera to the side with a hi-hat and rachet strap.
I haven’t even looked at the footage yet. I need a few days to clear my mind before I launch into the editing process, but I can share with you the storyboard for the scenes we shot, and some production stills.
This storyboard is of the twist dance scenes of the video. Originally I was also going to shoot a slow dance scene that would have more of an 80’s feeling. However on the first day of shooting we were getting very behind schedule, and I realized the slow dance scenes would have to be cut. I had already decided that they weren’t so essential to the story line, and in some ways they might have even detracted from the overall piece. The twist dance is at the opening of the video, and the dance along with the music will set up the themes of authoritarianism & rebellion, fear, sex, and that in between place I’m calling fünf, as well as point towards America’s cultural adolescence in the second half of the 20th Century.
Production still of Fünf ‘n’ Twist. Photo: Susanna Christians Remarkably we were able to shoot all of the scenes I had envisioned without any major compromises. My dancers pulled off the choreography that I came up with on paper.. Donna Costello and Matt Sweeney, the two leads, rehearsed the choreography with me ahead of time and then taught it to the other three couples on set.
The dancers all handled the surprises I threw at them with poise and a can-do attitude. This included asking the guys to flip off the girls’ backs from a bridge position and do a cartwheel from the left side. The latter request wasn’t possible for all the male dancers to do, but our grip, Stephen Long, stepped in to save the day. With a background in gymnastics he put on the tux and performed the cartwheel perfectly, earning a second credit of “stunt double.”
Remi Harris, Kyle Pinneo, Donna Costello, Matt Sweeney, Production still from Fünf ‘n’ Twist.
Photo: Penelope Roussetzki
Now I just have one more scene to shoot, which is a “flash-forward” scene of the lead couple holed up in a dingy tenement with paper walls. I won’t give away the details, but I’m hoping to raise the funds and resources to shoot these scenes in early ‘09. In the meantime I’ll be working hard along with my composer/collaborator, J Why to create a rough cut of the finished scenes to screen here in New York before the end of the year.
Production still from Fünf ‘n’ Twist. Photo: Susanna Christians
Here is a video study of the final scenes of the film, when the boy and girl escape the prom and run into a wild overgrown city park to “get it on.” Instead of portraying the cliche sex scenes literally, I decided to portray them in a ritualistic metaphorical way, where we see the inner feelings of the characters portrayed outwardly in symbolic imagery.
Yes, that’s right! There is a lot going on this week that you should know about…
Screening: First, you won’t want to miss Kinetic Cinema tonight (5/5) curated by downtown dance fav Levi Gonzalez. Levi has brought out a bunch of friends to share
cutting edge dance videos and talk about experimentalism in dance and film. Come
see new videodances by Melanie Maar, Sarah White, Theo Angell, Yasuko Yokoshi,
Hedia Maron, ChameckiLerner, and much more!
Be one of the first 10 to arrive and get a free Corona
for Cinco de Mayo!
Kinetic Cinema
Monday May 5th,
7:30pm (and the first Monday of every month)
Salon: Tomorrow night is Dance Film Lab at DTW, moderated by the wonderful Zach Morris of Third Rail Projects. This salon brings dance filmmakers together to present raw footage, drafts, works-in-progress and newly finished films to their peers for constructive feedback, to share information, and address technical, practical and artistic challenges. The lab is free and open to the public, though reservations are necessary.
Contact Zach Morris for more information and to RSVP.
Meeting Details: Dance Film Lab Tuesday, May 6, 8-10pm
at Dance Theater Workshop (DTW)
219 West 19th Street
(between 7th and 8th Aves)
Phone: (212) 691-6500
Blogathon: Last but not least, yesterday marked the beginning of the week-long Dance Movie Blogathon! Marilyn Ferdinand over at Ferdy on Films has organized this fabulous web event in which dozens of dance and film bloggers (including yours truly) will be blogging about dance on the silver screen. Check out her blog during the week for links to all the great blog entries around the web. There are already a number of fabulous posts up including:
Glenn Kenny from Premiere.com offers some great screen caps from four films by Jean-Luc Godard.
Danielle Gordon grapples with the definition of a dance movie at Lady Wakasa’s Journal and promises a week of posts that try to answer that question in the broadest way possible.
So, as you can see, there is a lot to see and do this week for the dance film maven! Unfortunately I have to finish up a major school assignment this week as well, so I will need to rely on my commentators more than usual to give me the run down on all the week’s events. Hope to hear from you soon!
Dance/NYC and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts are teaming up this Thursday on April 17th to host a workshop about intellectual property issues on the internet. This is a hot-button topic we all need to think about in today’s remix culture. If you’re in NYC come check it out! A link to RSVP is below.
From Dance/NYC:
Do you have a website with
video clips?
Do you post on YouTube,
Facebook or MySpace?
Do you blog?
Do you secure music rights for
performances?
Did you know there are
legal requirements for all of the above activities? You and your organization
might be at risk if you are not legally complying with state and federal law.
Come meet with legal
experts from Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts and find out the facts to
protect yourself and your company. RSVP HERE!
On Monday night I attended a panel seminar on web marketing at the Joyce Soho as part of their “Free Advice” series. The panelists were all familiar dance blog acquaintances and friends: Doug Fox (my fabulous host on GreatDance.com), Kristin Sloan of The Winger blog and the Director of New Media at New York City Ballet, Jaki Levy an interaction designer and New Media Director at Misnomer Dance Theater and Chris Elam, Artistic Director of Misnomer. The collective knowledge of those four panelists was very rich and insightful, and got my mind working.
What the evening made me think about most was how to enlist video in a dance company’s overall web marketing strategy. To me, the video element of a dance company’s web presence is super important. Nothing can come closer to showing someone what your work is, short of witnessing it live. However, making a highly effective dance video is a very different process from making a highly effective dance for the stage. Not just that, but a dance video should be catered specifically to the type of screens it will be viewed on. Different media platforms have different characteristics, and a brilliant documentary film on your new work for 1500 dancers won’t necessarily be interesting viewed on a small patchy YouTube screen.
Here is a short list of tips for making effective dance videos for the web.
1. Set intentions for your videos. What do you want your videos to do for you? Do you want to get more bodies into seats at your next concert? Are you trying to build audiences for the future, or do you want to test out some ideas you’re working on for feedback? Whatever you want, be specific about it and align your video efforts around that intention. Kristin Sloan talked about the different marketing intentions behind NYCB’s video campaigns. In their marketing department they make promotional videos for each program in their up-coming season with the sole intention of getting people to buy tickets. At $80/ticket, video previews help people decide whether to splurge and go to a concert. In Kristin’s new media department, the intention is to grow a future audience base for NYCB. Here they make videos that allow people to encounter the company in different ways, such as through intimate glimpses behind the scenes or interviews. These videos get distributed around the web and help increase the visibility and recognition of NYCB in demographics outside of their core audience.
2. Keep them short and streamlined. People don’t spend much time on any one thing online. They browse and flit about. Just think about your own behavior online. I know I’m all over the place sampling one thing that links me to someplace else. So, if someone comes across your video, you need to capture their attention in the first 10-15 seconds and then complete the thought in 1-3 minutes. Aggressively edit your videos and cut out all the fat. By that I mean unless you are telling us something new and relevant in a scene, leave it out. Have other people look at your video and watch them as they watch. You can see where they fade out or are trying too hard to get it.
Here’s an example of a dance video that’s short, simple, and streamlined.
Video by Nagi Noda
3. Make it personal and informal. The web is about making connections with other people in ways that wouldn’t be possible offline. The more human and relatable your video is, the more people will connect with your work. Some of the most popular dance videos on the web are of awkward teenage boys in their livingrooms trying to outdo each other with bad dance moves. For professional dancers, this means stripping away the make-up and the stage dressing, and giving a glimpse into the processes, joys and pains behind your work. Kristin Sloan did an amazing job of this in her series on the making of NYCB’s Romeo + Juliet. Anaheim Ballet has also made a great video podcast series that gives viewers a back-stage pass into the workings of their company.
4. Make different videos for different viewing formats and contexts. You may have a great promo video that you send out to presenters to get gigs, but it has lots of different clips that go all over the place and wouldn’t draw in the average viewer. Or maybe you have a great video of a performance you did, but the wide shots make the dancers look like little white blobs when you watch it on YouTube. In these cases, you should re-edit your video with footage that looks good in a small box (use more close-ups or mid-shots). Focus on one excerpt or idea from your piece that has a beginning, middle and an end. Or shoot an informal interview with a collaborator and put in short clips of footage from the concert to highlight something they said. Behind-the-scenes stories and rehearsal footage can also be very compelling for a web format.
Here is a link to a couple good examples of web videos made from dance concert footage by Misnomer Dance Theater (edited by Jaki Levy).
5. Make them easy to share. In many cases the intention of a web video is to have it be seen by as many people as possible. This means you should make it easy for users to share your videos, comment on them, and embed them into their own websites and blogs. Chris Elam and Jaki Levy described the web as a place where information is spread not from one central broadcasting place, but through dozens of individuals that spread it through their own niched networks. The more niches your video shows up in, the better its chances are to become viral and spread. Social networking sites and bloggers can help facilitate this type of distribution very effectively.
6. Make lots of videos, and experiment! The great thing about the web is that it’s cheap and results come very fast. So just jump in and try stuff out. You will know almost instantly if your strategy worked or bombed. Then go back to the drawing board, tweek things and try again. The risks are low and the potential rewards in eye balls, ticket sales, and supporters are great. So go for it! And be sure to share your videos here with me. I’ll do my best to blog about them!
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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