Dance Film Blog Tony Barros

 Who knew a dance film could be filled with so many set backs? Actors getting deported, dancers injuring themselves riding a bicycle under the influence on a Friday night, dancers giving up on you a day before shoot?

If there is one thing I learned from this dance film is how resilient I was... well if it weren't for the words of encouragement from the lovely tutors at UCA I would have surely given up after the 4th set back.

Plan A - A twelve minute dance film that would include Salsa, Kizomba, Hip Hop and Afrohouse styles of dance. A love story about two innocent birds that meet in a club and are too scared to delve into the animalistic vibes that the club presents to them. Will they or will they not fall in love with each other?

Plan B - A story about a rapstar being too accessible and taken advantage of by his peers and even random people that recognize him. Once knocked down he learns to be a bit more selfish and focus on himself thus involuntarily inviting people to follow him. A metaphor for his music progressing with him and people listening to his "advice" - Moving on.

Plan C - No plan, shoot a friend freestyling and filler shots with nature.

Plan D - Utilize a song from a close friend of mine that resides in the UK and turning the film into a dance within itself with the main story being about addictions.

Approach:

    The way I approached this film was in a sense thinking about a scene. Almost like a novel per say. Starting in media res is the correct term I believe. We start in the middle of a story within a world that already exists and the way I wanted to end it was with a sense that there is more to the story that we don't know about. After all I want to impress a musician with the hopes of later on correlating a finish story for her music video and showing different angles of what can be shot.

Song:

    The song talks about countless types of addictions not just substance abuse and for me to gather all of those I would need more than 3 actors not including me and we all know how that turned out. With roughly 2 weeks and a half to go I wasn't going to risk it.

Camera:

    With the SONY A7III it is possible to do many things however what I did not account for was the only lens in my arsenal that works with my gimbal. The basic 24/70mm that does not allow for aperture control even on the manual setting. I shot 25fps, f-stop 3.25, 1/50 shutter speed with the short ISO of 100 and for slow motion I doubled or tripled or quadrupled the shutter speed depending on how many frames per second I was changing to. What I was not expecting was the grain that I found within the shots when I transported the files to my computer. Maybe it is a camera setting or maybe the lens itself. Something I need to research on but I did test out with other lenses with the same settings and the grain was nonexistent almost so it was pretty weird. The angles shot were mostly close ups with one angle being wide.

Lighting:

    My main protagonist (not story wise but future goal wise) was the lighting department. I have been using these weak LED panels I bought from a Chinese online store which are not too bad when dealing with close ups in indoor areas (we can forget outdoor even if they are practically smothering the subject) or only at night can they be used for even closer close ups or background lighting depending on the f-stops you use. To achieve the look I wanted I needed to bounce the lights off many reflective surfaces with the only problem being I only had 3 lights and they are not that bright so in that case I knew coming in that one of the things I wanted to light up would have to be discarded.

    The subjects face needed dramatic lighting almost Rembrandt like but not exactly. The arms would need to be properly lit as well and the hair would need to be lit slightly with what most people call a hair light. To achieve this I bounced a light from the ceiling, one light I had facing a reflector aimed at the subject's left side with the light also slightly illuminating the wall next to the subject. Another light was aimed the subject directly to the face with diffusion paper and also with a lower intensity to create shadows and a contrast that made it look dramatic. By bouncing the light onto the ceiling I managed to reflect the light onto the background but I realized it wasn't creating the little glow on the hair. Had I had an extra light I could attack to the ceiling or placed under and reflected upon a reflective surface on top of the subject it would create that hair glow that makes lighting in films look cinematic.

    This little setup led the final picture to look a little something like this:

VFX:

    Some visual effects of sorts was needed to achieve the snorting of the lines of cooking flour so I attached a small tube to a vacuum cleaner and hid the tube with a note so the camera could not see the magic trick.

Editing:

    For editing I used Premiere Pro, used little effects and tried to replicate the look that the black pro mist filter brings. For that I duplicated the images, applied screen blending, gaussian blur and luma key. For the wiggle effect I used turbulent displace and finally color wise I fixed the colors so we could have this golden tone and had to isolate my skin so I used HSL secondary on the lumetri panel and isolated my skin by blurring and denoising on the color selection then changing it so it would be near impossible to notice the changed color anywhere else but my skin so it could look a bit more natural.

Self Assessment:

    I noticed a big improvement on my editing, managing and lighting. However I also noticed places where I can improve in these areas and others too. 

    Having learnt how AVID users like to use bins to organise I should do the same to spend less time looking for clips, in terms of lighting I had to make a choice to not include a hairlight and I noticed my light on the left was a bit too strong however it was necessary to get the shadows on the face. I like the natural yet a bit cinematic look I achieved but I can do so much better with more lights, more powerful ones, more areas or objects to reflect on. If necessary I will keep using household items but definitely need to invest on more powerful LEDs. 

    Acting - I personally feel I could have done better with the acting, in a deep breakdown a colleague of mine told me he would lose control of his mouth and the alcohol he was consuming would sometimes spill from his mouth as he was trying to swallow every last drop quickly. I could have done a more exaggerated drunken dance sort of like the Drunken Master an ancient Chinese martial art form in Kung Fu to make it more fluid instead of the film itself being a dance within itself.

    Set design - I should have made it messier and more gnarly to suit my vision.