When first given the task of completing a dance film in the time period of only a few weeks, I was honestly terrified. I had hardly even worked with iMovie and my old phone took terrible quality videos. Now I was going to be using an advanced program, Final Cut Pro, and having to play the roles of videographer, creative director, music producer, and editor. However, despite my intimidation, I was very excited about learning a whole new aspect of study in dance.
The first step was finding a location and performers. I asked Maxi Riley and Laura DeAngelis to help me with my project, knowing that they were creative, responsible dancers who were comfortable with improving on the spot. For my location, I chose my dorm, Bradley Hall. I have always found the halls of my dorm to be oddly eerie, so I knew that this scenery would add an interesting mood to my piece.
I asked my dancers to take multiple shots. I asked them to simply walk down the hall towards me, contact improv with the wall and each other, and make detailed movements with their hands.
Upon gathering all of my film, I realized that my film was incredibly sinister. Hauntingly sinister. I was incredibly inspired by this mood acquisition and thus decided to embrace it fully using dark lighting effects on my videos, switching speeds, fading in ghostly half opaque images of dancers on top of each other, and even naming my video “Asylum”.
To keep to the integrity of my theme without being gaudy, I knew my music had to reflect the isolated insanity of an asylum. I found a piece of music of freesound.com that was an atmospheric eerie soundscape that was apparent throughout the whole film. In addition, I added in tracks of the voices of a melancholic singing women, a crazed whispering man, and a quiet child to emulate the trapped voices of a haunted asylum.
With the music and film editing, my video easily turned into a horror film. I felt like the Stephen King of dance film. Altogether, I was honestly very proud of myself for being able to provoke fear in my viewers because I knew this meant my video had their full attention.
Kelsey Kempner 