Our chance to see the lunar eclipse was spoiled by dreary weather here in Durham, NC. For this week’s dance/video improv project we spurned celestial inspiration for the music of Lost Trail and the earthy smell of rainy fall days.

Welcome to the fourth and final installment of the September MAKE IT MONDAY series! We decided to take things full circle and return to playing with film. Keep an eye out because will be sharing all the fun things we learned, struggles we faced, as well as featuring some stuff other people made in a Make It Monday wrap up post later this week.

WHAT WE MADE

Autumnal Rain Dance video

HOW WE MADE IT

While Luke filmed, I improvised short movement phrases inspired by the gray, wet weather, and feelings of fall. Luke took that footage and improvised layering effects on the video – changing the blur, delay and mirroring in real-time and recording the result. We decided to keep everything simple for this project. We filmed on our side porch, using a “one board chair” made by Luke’s grandfather and a basket his grandmother made as props. Movement wise, I decided to use limited vocabulary (partially due to an ankle injury and partly because it is interesting to explore limitation in project like this). Luke spliced together bits of a live editing performance, rather than spending too much time arranging/composing the video.

• Music: “Twilight Entity” by Lost Trail, off their album Golden & Elegiac.
• Movement: Anna Seagrave
• Visuals & EditingLuke Selden
• Camera: GoPro Hero 3
• Effects: VDMX

WHY WE MADE IT

If you saw our our first Make It Monday post you might remember that we are really into video work right now. This was a chance to explore it in a different way. Hopefully, this will inspire us to dive back into a larger dance film project that is on the back burner right now. We love site specific dance and how how locations and spaces influence movement. The music we chose involves layering, echos and manipulation of time, so we emulated those techniques in the visual effects to match the fairy tale, dream-like quality of the music.

WHAT WE LEARNED

ANNA: In all honesty, I am not 100% happy with the movement for the piece. I wasn’t in full fighting form for the filming, and I wish I could have set specific movement—or at the very least given a little more time to find/feel the gestures in my body. I still see glimpses that make me excited about the potential I see in the project. That is the most important lesson for me in this WHOLE cultivation of a personal creative practice: recognizing the seeds of what can become a bigger project as valuable. I put a lot of judgement on works in progress, instead of allowing it to be a rough draft, one step on the way to something bigger.

LUKE: I’m just not someone who’s creative all the time. Sometimes being creative is effortless, easy. Sometimes it’s like chasing a bus that’s already two blocks gone. Over the course of three days I would open the project, stare at it for a second, try out a few effects, layer blend modes, etc…then close the laptop because nothing spoke to me. On the third day it clicked, and the actual work didn’t take that long. Was I wasting my time the other days, or was I preparing for the eventual “a hah!” moment? I don’t know.