Dance Film- Tutorial and Further Research

My group's initial idea is to create a film in which a dancer is following a set of repetitive movements, stuck in this monotone routine, and their reflection begins to attempt to break the real person free from this kind of oppression. The dance would evolve slowly until the dancers were in unison with each other, and the reflection has achieved its goal of getting the real person to break free from the norm and follow their personal rhythm.

On 8th Feb my group had our first tutorial with Rachel, and this is a summary of what was said:

Glad that we are moving away from the idea of literal - office space,

although this was a good starting point.

I want you to think about that this video represents, what it is

saying -

We talked about:

Trying to escape from the constraints of daily life, particularly:

Facing what represses us

We get taught, told what we should do - the 'right' thing, the 'safe'

thing

As a person as an individual you want to do so many things, but

responsibility sometimes constrains us

Also a lack of motivation, self belief, the pressure of social

acceptability constrains us.

You liked the idea of two different movement styles to represent the

opposing sides - you'll need to find a dancer who can do both styles

that you are after.

I wonder if it may be about constrained v's free movement, how do you

constrain the body?  What texture is in the body when it is

constrained, v's when it is free?

Think about oppositions to represent free v's repressed:

In water / out of water

In the air / on the floor

Slow motion / Real Time

Close up / V's Wide Angles

Tension / Relaxed

contained in something / in a large open space

How does a viewer experience watching the expressed self v's the

repressed self?

So there is alot to work on before our next tutorial. To begin with, I did some research into other dance videos that were similar to the idea we had to try and get some inspiration from them:

Pas De Deux- This film is very simple in its concept, but it's very effective. It is very much my feeling that if you are filming a dance, you need to do something interesting with the camera. These kinds of effects I think are something we could play with.

Lodela- Similarly to Pas De Deux, this also plays with the camera, but more with camera angles. Since we are mirroring it has made me think of a way in which we could mirror in more ways than vertically, and in what ways our dancers could interact. I also love the simplicity of the set in this. I think our film has to conform to something more along these lines.

Rosas Danst Rosas- This dance film has the kind of evolving repetitive sequence we are going for in our film, and the group love the sound design, which is more driven by the movements of the dancers than music. We have agreed that this is the kind of attitude we want our sound to have.

Weightless- This film cleverly plays with the angle, and the set design as the set has been flipped as well as the camera to give this really mysterious feel to the film. I also love the simplistic movements of the dancers which to me suggest a sense of childlike wonder.

The XX 'Islands'- This music video is interesting as it involved repetitive movements which evolve over time, but it a less progressive way. The same shot and movements of the dancers are repeated over and over whilst the band themselves have different reactions to the movement over time, this then appears to affect the movements of the dancers as well. I like this idea of a repeating shot.

These videos have given me a lot of visual stimulation, and will allow me to come up with some further ideas which will hopefully further the film conceptually into something simple, but effective.