Rehearsals

On the day of our rehearsal with Amelia, I was really excited to meet her and to get working. I had such high hopes for this film and for her as a dancer and I really wanted it to work out well. I came with a general plan of what I was going to go through with her, such as setting her tasks and then seeing what we could generate with her. The day also offered us an opportunity to do some technical tests and decide on costume ahead of the actual day.

Once Amelia arrived we introduced ourselves and sat down with her to talk through the project and how the day was going to go. She showed us some of her costume ideas at this point and we decided that we would see how the clothes looked while she was moving and then decide based on that.

Firstly, based on the audition we did with Daisy, I gave her the task of trying to dance as if she was trapped in a box, and she really wanted to get out. The harder she pushed, the bigger the box got. I put on some music that I had found previously and we watched her do that. I was very pleased with her movements and knew from that moment that we had chosen the right person for us. She had a mixture of qualities of Joe and Sophie from the dance workshop with Rachel that we really liked. From there things really progressed, and Amelia gave us a lot of input which helped us structure how we thought our film was going to look, and we had a lot of fun in the process. In the end the task we found most successful was getting her to react to different body parts being shouted out. We shouted out random body parts and a verb to go with it e.g. spiky tailbone, and saw how she reacted. This then threw up the problem of how we were going to time it to make it match in the planned wide shots we had, and so we decided to shout out the same words running through it twice, timing when the words were said and then telling Amelia that she was either being oppressed or the oppressor. This gave us some really interesting, contrasting quality of movements without the continuity errors that would have not allowed it to work.

The last thing we did with the day was to shoot some technical tests and just generally shoot some footage of her for our own reference.

We also later on that night decided on costume for her to wear, we took some reference photos of what she was wearing for the rehearsals, but one was too floaty and one was too restrictive. 

We wanted to keep the costume simply, and we liked the bare legs and plain white shirt, so we wanted to keep that but we wanted something with a bit of movement.