Read other posts in this series
- Funding for Tanz.io
- Stage 1 Tanz.io: Planning
- Stage 2 Tanz.io: Starting
- Stage 3 Tanz.io: Budgeting
And so it begins. Last week we—me, myself, Leonie and Gareth headed into the studio make some art. We had 4 days in DRB to get as much footage as possible.
The process
I know artists love to talk about their process, well hear me out or humour me at least. I’ll do a write up about technical stuff later on but one of the biggest limitations I have putting moving images on the web is files sizes! In the web world a rule of thumb is to keep a web page under 1mb (megabyte) or else they just take too long to download—especially on a crappy 3g connection. One high quality photo can easily be over 1mb and I’m aiming to create a series of images that animate through like an old school flip book. These images can quickly add up and make the web page super heavy so as a choreographer I set myself a few restrictions going into the studio.
Each sequence/phrase/image etc:
- has to be short
- have the same beginning and end, so it can be seamlessly repeated
- has to be clear, there’s not too much point in having small subtle movement as it will be lost when translated on a flat screen
- hopefully interesting ????
I used these as a rule of thumb, we deviated a little but I knew if we could stick to these rules it would certainly help me when I got the stuff onto the computer.
In two minds
Leading up to the week in the studio I’d really been looking a tanz.io from a design and development point of view. All the ideas I had were design styles or little technical tricks I knew about, I had very little idea of what the movement would be, I just thought ‘ahh we’ll insert some cool movement here and there’ and when it came to make said cool movement… I drew a blank, I’m a little out of practice in that regard but hopefully I’ll warm up as I go along. Thankfully I had Leonie and Gareth to fill in the blanks with ‘Oh what if we did this?’, I love it when that happens.
The week was filled with thousands of ideas that we tried filmed and move onto the next thing. Good thing about dancing for film is that once you’ve got the shot you can move on, no need to rehearse it further or perfect it. But I’ll admit there a certain satisfaction in rehearsing the movement especially when it’s leading up to a showing.
Take aways
Now we’re out of the studio, I’m sat at my desk with a ton of footage that I’m flicking through frame by frame trying to find interesting moments that I could turn into something. For me the creative process is only just starting now, I have some movement, I have my design tools and I’m playing around like a bucket full of lego. I’m in my element to be honest, it’s rekindled my love for design, my love for development but most surprisingly my love for movement. I can see already a ton of ways to create movement that would be better than the stuff we’ve got, that’s a good thing, we’ve learnt already. Once I land on a few solid ideas, we’ll go back to the studio and remake the movement.
Here’s some snaps from the week.