3d Movement for Video

Dance is a 3d experience. Video is a 2d experience. This is a collection of videos exploring alternative ways to communicate 3d movement across the 2d medium of video.

Liquid Cam

Whenever I watch dance online, I’m always painfully aware of how different the experience is compared to being in front of the real dancers in 3d space. These two videos highlight an aspect of liquid (rave dancing) that looks just plain different when presented through film: flow.

Film has a static frame, and all the contents of a film are compositionally relative to the frame. Contrastingly, dancers are constantly framing and re-framing the information that they are trying to communicate. By pinning the focal point of the dance in the center of the frame, these videos open up the possibility for a new compositional framework.

The two videos are the exact same footage, just scaled differently to convey the different relationships that the focal point has with the hands and the body.

Camera Throwing

In this project I explore the range and scalability of the audience’s point of attention. When dance is performed in front of an audience in real 3d space, a choreographer may choose to draw the audience’s attention to large things, small things, things outside the dancer’s bodies, and even things behind the audience. This video employs camera motion and the malleability of digital time to experiment with ways to fling the audience’s attention around in a 3d environment. To hold a sense of unbroken focus, this video is one continuous shot.