SFX to Dance, May and Oct 2009

Motion evokes noise, and noise evokes motion.  Choreographers build movements against music. Music gives both the dancer and audience a baseline for kinetic expectation.

These two videos reverse the process by first building the movement, and then mapping it to noise. The movement sequences were improvised, and a soundscape was designed in post-production to match the physicality. By removing the factor of music, these videos give a fresh perspective on the relationship between noise and visual motion.

Camera Throwing, Dec 2008

When dance is performed in front of a live audience, a choreographer may choose to draw the audience’s attention wherever they wish.

Camera Throwing, filmed in one continuous shot, employs camera motion and the malleability of digital time to experiment with an audience's attention.

Tut Cam, Jun 2008

Tutting is an urban dance style that exclusively employs the use of right angles. As a viewer, I’m consistently amazed at how aptly dancers can express themselves with such a rigorously unforgiving rule set (when you hit an angle that is not 90 degrees, it looks bad pretty quickly).

To express my fascination with the form, I took some footage of a friend and made two videos with it. Just like Liquid Cam (next section), the center of the frame is the dancer’s hands. The first video has a pair of hands in the center of the frame, always pointing towards one another. The second video is of just the right hand, in the center of the frame, always pointing downwards.

Liquid Cam, Nov 2007

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 a major aspect of Liquid 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

Virtual Boxes, Apr 2006

Often dancers will create imaginary shapes with their bodies to manipulate and dance against. Sometimes the goal is to get the audience to see and digest these shapes, and sometimes it’s just a tool for the dancer to achieve a variety of interesting and related shapes with their own bodies.

This video uses post-production editing to explicitly assert these shapes’ existence, and to expose a part of the dancer’s process.

Tuts Programming, Mar 2006

Dancing is a sequence of movements. Movement is comprised of a beginning state, an end state, and a tween across the dimension of time.

By approaching the definition of human movement from the mechanical perspective, this video explores the relationship between human movement, information, and expression.