Together, the dancers and I decided on our locations for filming by the conclusion of the Rehearsal Phase by considering which locations the dancers and I felt would enhance the movement material and concepts best without distracting or taking away from the main goals of the project. We did not want to shift attention away from the
inquiry into how touch can be a vehicle for conveying relationship by emphasizing the site itself too much in the filming process, but we did feel that it would be to our benefit to select at least one indoor and one outdoor location for variety. While moving through the process with the dancers, I saw that this variety would benefit the film overall and could enhance the experience of touch and relationship. The sites we selected were ideal for enhancing narrative and thematic context as it related to our investigation through touch.
We first selected to film inside of the studio theatre that offered a black marley floor, open space, and stage lighting options, as well as a hallway area to the side of the stage. We were already quite comfortable in this location because we had been
workshopping and rehearsing for two months. We chose to do our first film shoot in a hallway of this studio theatre that has a door to a green room and a ladder leading to the lighting booth for the theatre. In this hallway, we lit the dancers with a multi-bulb floor lamp and I had the ability to climb the ladder and view the dancers from above, capturing them from a bird’s eye view. This camera angle created a shot that I ended up using in Petrichor, in which the dancers were lying on the ground, and I used it because I found the shot to capture an intriguing perspective of the dancers’ touch relationship, as it almost felt like, from this perspective, the dancers were entangled, floating in a void of black space, rather than lying next to each other on the floor.
We ultimately filmed in the dance studio two subsequent times later in our
filming phase. The second indoor shoot was in the main studio theatre area instead of the hallway and we used the same lamp to light the dancers with a soft amber glow. The studio theatre space gave us privacy and lighting options as well as a large working area
and dance-appropriate floor for the dancers to explore physically aggressive movement and floorwork, which we created in the Rehearsal Phase.
We spent the weekend of November 10-12 filming in our outdoor location, which was the Brainard family property in Deadwood, Oregon, about 45 minutes northwest of Eugene. This is the same location where I filmed a screendance I made in the Fall of 2016, entitled Deadwood. This location has both indoor and outdoor options--the
property spans 40 acres of preserved and posted mountain wilderness, with an abandoned house still standing near the roadway. Knowing the property owners allowed me full access for staying on site for several consecutive days. Day one of filming, we went into the woods around the Deadwood campsite and conducted a long filming session on a pathway with surrounding forest. We mainly filmed phrase work that we had created during the Rehearsal Phase. This same day, we also filmed in the field on the property where there is an abandoned house. We also filmed phrase work created in the Rehearsal Process and began to mix and match phrase work to create new structures. That evening, we filmed in the abandoned house itself, experimenting with both phrase work and structured improvisation. Before nightfall, we filmed on the rural roadway leading to and from the property, focusing on one particular phrase for this session. In the evening after it was dark, we built a fire in a fire pit and filmed both phrase material and structured improvisation by the fire. On the second day of filming, we captured structured
improvisations by the creek and did a longer session on the same roadway, expanding our filming to other phrase material.
Equipment and Other Logistics of the Film Shoots
I filmed on my Canon Rebel T5i DSLR camera. I own this camera and other related equipment, including a simple shotgun microphone, tripod, SD storage cards, external hard drive, batteries, etc. I filmed with two different lenses - one standard Canon zoom lens and one 50mm portrait lens. All outdoor shots were filmed with the 50mm lens and all indoor shots were filmed with the zoom lens. Having my own equipment allowed me flexibility to film my dancers throughout the project, and specifically allowed me to upload and store my own footage without restriction.
Filming Procedures
I recorded the dancers performing their repertory of movement material using a variety of formal elements of film, including the use of different camera angles, camera movement, and adjustments in lighting. We recorded this material in full sequences as well as in deconstructed segments and we did a lot of mixing and matching between different movement motifs throughout the shoots. I also employed these same techniques to record structured improvisations, which I guided them through in rehearsal as well as on site as necessary.
The dancers and I met for developmental rehearsals between each film shoot. During these developmental rehearsals, we watched all the raw footage together and had discussions about what we found effective and what we wished to explore more. This is why we ended up filming three separate times in the dance studio - after each shoot, we came to a more refined understanding of what was coming forward as impactful and what we wanted to work toward in between shoots. We also had intermittent meetings in
between filming sessions while at Deadwood, since we filmed at Deadwood over the course of two days. We were able to film material and then review it on site before continuing with more filming, which proved to be extremely useful in understanding how we were capturing touch and relationship within the site and what we wished to develop further while on location as well as when we got back into the studio. After we
conducted our fourth and final shoot, we met one last time to review material and discuss how our collaboration would move forward into the Winter term for the presentation of the film, the lecture-demonstration, and the talk-back. Upon completing the film shoots and this final meeting, the dancers and I no longer met for regular rehearsals at the end of the Fall 2017 term.