Flour, who'd of thought?

The Spinning Dancer - 

oil painting by Afremov

 by Leonidafremov on 

@DeviantArt: Oil Paintings

Whilst I've been at home I've been leaning more towards Fields and Frames research as that's my individual project and so it's more under my control, however yesterday me, Megan and Emily had a quick conversation around Wednesdays tutorial and what we should have in regards to research. The idea itself is still pretty much an accumulation of different ideas however slowly but surely links are being made the main this for us at the moment is to not force the connections.

As I mentioned in my last post my initial idea was the use of paint/powder paint to create something during the dance so that when the dance is over there is a tangible thing left of it. But pursuing this idea would then limit the production to a studio (something we are aiming for anyway but with grad films still shooting I believe it will be quite difficult). But it just looks so intriguing, occasionally I like to pursue ideas that just look nice and see where they go. The current thought was that an acro-dancer would use talcum powder whilst training, to migrate the ideas together we talked about slowly having the powder evolve into coloured powder the more confident she get's whilst warming up before eventually washing it off in the tub of milk.

I know Megan has a better overview of the base storyline (Seen here) but here's my interpretation. Shot starts with the dancer approaching a room, once in the room - full of mirrors - she starts moving stunted, not fluid, in constant view of a mirror, constantly being judged. She then picks up the powder to start warming up, clapping the powder between her hands and rubbing them together (some of which are close ups, some shown in the reflection of the mirrors) and starts warming up - stretching and just generally preparing. She grabs another hand full of powder and claps her hands together before the camera follows the powder into the air acting as a transition to an empty room. It's here where the performance starts to happen, slowly the powder starts to turn into different colours as she warms up and then she starts performing - free, fluid, graceful - everything she wasn't in the first section. The dance then slows down to a almost painful speed as she starts cooling down and starts stretching again, eventually making her way to the bath of milk, dancing around the bath prolonging the experience before immersing herself in it. The camera would then track up just as her head goes beneath the milk showing the powder still in the air (highlighted by the studio lights), showing the remainder of her performance.

That sounded overly dramatic, but you get the idea?

Whilst I love the idea here I don't think it comes across too well, the yellow light being a particular pain taking away the dramatic effect of the powder - I'm also not a fan of drawing on the floor with it, it's just a bit too childlike for me. 

I then found this video, I was so excited when I saw the thumbnail because this is exactly what I had in mind when I thought of using the powder paint the first place. However it's a slideshow of images but the idea is still the same. The common theme when using this style of the video/photography is that the dancer tends to be going upward to get the ghost-like effect. A movement that could be very symbolic for our dancer consider the dance is her trying to improve herself. 

It turns out the way to get best results is to use flour? I was a bit skeptical but it looks amazing. 

Here there is a mixture of techniques that I like, the fact that they VFX the colour onto the flour is intriguing and looks fantastic in the still shots, I believe it would only look better in the moving ones. The mixture of slow motion shots and regular speed shots also shows a bit of what Megan spoke of in her blog by merging the two speeds together to show different sections of the dance. I also love the use of the powder as a transition - something I mentioned earlier.

Here is also a video showcasing some very interesting, crow inspired choreography. A style that could possibly be suited to the first section of the film but maybe a bit slower.

However the music in the final piece is very dramatic, overly dramatic to some extent which is why I have a whole other blog post ready to go on that side of things. You'll just have to wait and see. 

Working from home is hard

Due to a family emergency I had to come back to Middlesbrough for the week without any real plan of how I was going to work around missing Uni. I get quite restless when I don't have anything to do so I just started doing what I normally do when stressed - planning.

A mini timetable showing the end of Feb - March

For the dance video I wanted to expand on my post-production skills whether in sound or video editing I haven't really decided, both if possible. However I do enjoy the pre-production process so when Megan approached me about producing her idea it was a no-brainer. In the workshop I also spoke about an idea I had of a dancer dancing using paint and the paint flying everywhere so when the dance is over the camera would pan up and reveal the artwork that the flying paint had created. A long shot from the idea of a dancer warming up and stretching before entering a bath of milk. But we got talking and we thought about merging the two ideas however after that we both got caught up in different projects and didn't get to speak much about it other than who we are going to get to crew our project - Emily was then brought on as Head of Production Design.

Afterwards I went out and bought myself a new notebook because unless I physically write something down 9 times out of 10 I will forget it. The first thing I did was split my book into 3 sections (as this was mainly for Fields and Frames development) and draw up a potential timetable for the Dance Video, mapping out when we had tutorials and using them as mini-deadlines giving us something to aim for. This is primarily so the group can start working on F+F and know when to plan out their work so things don't clash.  You can see a full digital version here.

I'm still pooling together research and have a few books on hold for when I return but I'm afraid the next tutorial will be me playing catch up and working around Open Days (Work are being very understanding and letting me leave for 20-25 minutes at a low point in the day - I just need to work this into the tutorial sign ups). But other than that I'm still here but I miss my desk and the library, next week I'll hopefully be back to normal.