leilamurray514

[leilamurray514]

the filming process behind the scenes:

all taken by Yasmin

[leilamurray514]

the final outcome:

Overall we were very happy with how our video came out and we think Abbie’s edit of this really highlighted our concept of ‘Isolations’. Our vision of this really came to life and developed far deeper than we initially planned which was really nice to see develop as we explored every possible meaning and idea regarding the word ‘Isolations’. This exploration enabled our creativity to project into our final piece to its fullest potential.

here is the video of our final piece:

[leilamurray514]

working together as a group:

Overall i think we did a good job at working together as a group in this project as in the end we had a completed project that we were pleased with within the deadline. Something we did particularly well as a group was agreeing on ideas and all being able to voice our opinions and ideas and then putting in action to implement everyone’s ideas. This allowed us to be as creative as we could as a group as we had 5 different brains all with individual ideas that we were able to use.

Something i feel was slightly poor within our group and definitely something to work on as a group is scheduling rehearsals/group meetings. Some of the rehearsals that were scheduled weren’t clearly planned and confirmed in our group chat meaning rehearsals and meetings had taken place without all members of the group which meant we weren’t always on the same page about what was going on. This miscommunication definitely effected how smoothly the following rehearsals went as things had to be re-established and ideas had to be amended when we had everyone’s input.

Despite this minor problem, we all got on very well as a group which made it an enjoyable experience overall. I think this also showed through our final piece as you can see we all are enjoying the process and we’re able to have a laugh with each other while filming.

rehearsal photo taken by yazmin

[leilamurray514]

the filming process:

The day before filming we all decide on a costume. This was quite last minute and was something we probably should’ve took into account earlier on however we wanted something neutral to not distract from the movement of our piece. We decided to all dress in a white too with black bottoms as these were things we all had at home and were simple enough to not alter the meaning of our piece.

When the day of filming came, the first part of choreography that was filmed was very successful and Yaz was able to secure lots of different angles and formations of the choreography to allow Abbie to have plenty of options in picking the best clips when she came to edit them altogether. However, the space we had booked ended up being double booked so we had to give up our space half way into our filming. We had planned for it all to be filmed in the same studio as it had a plain background and we wanted all of the focus to be on the movement. We compromised and filmed the second half of our piece in a different studio however ultimately we were not happy with how this looked when Abbie tried to edit this together as we felt it was a huge distraction in the piece and didn’t make sense with the concept as to why we would change locations. To ensure our piece was to its highest quality, we arranged another day to film the second half in the original studio.

On the day of filming the second half of the choreography we started out by filming my solo. As id had previously struggled with choreographing this due to it lacking the free, improvised like feel i decided to improv this solo incorporating certain elements to it as i envisioned it to be contrasting to the other sections of choreography and have elements of flow and large movements. I was happy how this turned out with the first try and did not want to keep repeating this as i wanted the movement to remain organic. It wasn’t perfect but it captured my intentions perfectly.

After all of the choreography was filmed we then had to film some improvisation to fill some gaps in the music and for Abbie to edit into the in between sections of choreography. As the choreographer i helped direct this improvisation so that it would be specific to the type of movement we wanted to show in our piece of work. One of the improvisation tasks i set for my group was assigning each person a body part that they had to focus on within their improv. This was the improvisation had a meaning and a purpose and wasn’t random meaningless movement just to fill gaps. I really like the way this turned out as you could really see when watching back the piece that we all had different focus points and it really variates the way we are all moving to create a more interesting visual.

[leilamurray514]

inspiration/concept development:

As our rehearsals and discussions progressed we continued to develop our ideas on our concept. One of the main discovery’s of working on our piece was that movement had more of an impact and was more powerful as a team rather than individually. This theory also worked for our isolated movements as our piece showed that a single isolation of a body part is not interesting nor has no meaning or energy behind it on its own. Whereas the combination of all the isolations put together is what makes a piece of work exciting. This also applies to us working together as a team as our ideas and execution of ideas were only fully successful when the full team was present.

As we began to look deeper into this we could relate it a lot to current times with everything regarding the corona virus. Since the pandemic has happened nothing has been fully back to normal since and the world has suffered alot due to all of the isolating because of this. Which is what we ended up realising could be some inspiration from our piece as it conveys the meaning of how all of our isolations are better when they are together. The different stages of the pandemic are shown through different amounts of isolation throughout our piece.

[leilamurray514]

my choreographic input:

I feel i achieved my role of choreographer to some extent with this piece. I would say my role involved providing more choreographic ideas and direction of the movement rather than choreographing a lot of the movement. Kim ended up choreographing the bulk of the actual movement as a lot of the beginning sections of choreography that kim created were decided to be repeated which filled some of the parts i could’ve choreographed.

The first choreographic idea of mine that we decided to put into place was when Kiera and Abbie joined Kim after her beginning solo and i chose to have Kim remain isolated from the two other dancers as they joined together by having Kim dance movement that matched the melody of the song and have the other two dancers move to the beat of the music. This made the piece more interesting to watch as it added layers and matched the layers in the music. This also showed different kinds of isolation at the same time as Kiera and Abbie were isolating specific body parts while Kim was isolated from their movement.

Another one of my main responsibilities as choreographer was to choreograph my solo. My vision for this was to have it be a big contrast point in the piece as it was in the middle of the piece. When i started trying to think of choreography, i tried improvising a few times to the specific part of music to try and create movement from the improvisation. This was proving quite difficult as i felt every time i tried to choreograph movement it did not flow the way i wanted it to and it looked too set and less organic. I knew i wanted thus part to be big, full bodied movements that used all of the space as i thought it would be nice to show lots of expansion to contrast all of the previous isolated and smaller movements. I also wanted to highlight that the only form of isolation at this point was the isolation of my body in the space. In the end i decided to do more of a choreographed improv which i was far more happy with as it allowed the movements to flow much better and be more free-feeling which helped my intention come to life.

[leilamurray514]

inspiration & plan

We took a lot of inspiration on how we wanted our video to turn out from the music video of the piece of music we had chosen to use (‘Dog Days Are Over’). We noticed the video portrayed our concept of ‘Isolations’ as the video switches between Florence on her own in the space and other dancers/performers in the space. We liked the way it started with the focus on just Florence doing quite subtle movements as it matched the tone of the music as it starts of quite gentle. We wanted to replicate this with the piece starting out with just focusing on Kim isolating specific body parts within her choreographed movement. With this inspiration we were able to create a rough plan of different timings of sections of choreography we would create. As the role of director, Kiera created this rough plan with the input from our whole group.

we also decided to create a mood board to help inspire us with the actual movement to create the piece. We looked at photos of different body parts and how they move which then went on to inspire some of the movement. We also included photos of full bodies and how they can make shapes individually and how shapes can enhance when multiple bodies are in the space together. This was very useful in our group as every time we were struggling to come up with new ideas we could look back at this to inspire us.

[leilamurray514]

Music:

After having an idea of what the piece would be about and establishing job roles, we thought the next step would be to decide on a piece of music for the piece so we could start choreographing and playing with different ideas. We discussed that we would like a piece of music that was quite versatile and that would encourage a wide range of styles/types of movement to be choreographed to it. I suggested we look at the artist ‘Florence + the Machine’ as i find her music to have lots of layers that can be used for creative choreography. I also really appreciated the way her songs have a build up and thought this could be used to embellish our concept by using the build up in the music to have a build in the amount of dancers used in the space at one given time. The first song we agreed on using was ‘Shake It Out’ by ‘Florence + the Machine’. Kim and I saw a lot of choreographic potential in this piece of music and spent a few sessions trying out some improvisation to inspire movement for our piece. Although we felt we could be creative to this piece of music we thought the build up of the music was too early on and there wasn’t a lot of contrast. Alternatively, we listened to the song ‘Dog Days Are Over’ by ‘Florence + the Machine’ and much favoured this song. The style is very much similar however there was more variety in this piece of music and felt there was more creative potential in this piece of music.

[leilamurray514]

Allocating job roles:

After deciding what our concept was for our piece of work, we then chose to allocate job roles to each person in the group. We started with deciding that Kiera would be director due to her mainly pulling all the ideas together to come to the conclusion of the topic of ‘Isolations’. We also based this decision on her organisation skills as her role was established to be looking over everyone’s roles and ensuring everything is getting done. She was also responsible for organising rehearsal times as a group. We decided that the choreographer was a big role in the group as the majority of our piece was a choreographed routine so therefore thought it would work best to have two choreographers. Kim and I were put forward for this role based on our creativity and experience of choreographing movement. Abbie had previous experience with editing and already had an initial idea of how she wanted the overall piece to flow together so she was assigned editor. Finally, we assigned Yaz to be videographer as she had the best filming device and had the most experience being a videographer in the past. She also had a preference not to be a performer in the project which coincided well with her filming the piece.

[leilamurray514]

Isolations

Originally, our group formed on the basis of all having similar ideas on what we would base a group project on. Some of the key ideas we had to base the project on included bodies/individual body parts, movement and unison. Discussing these key ideas as a group helped us to come to the conclusion that we were going to explore how different body parts move when you isolate them individually and how that contrasts to full body movements. We also decided to expand on the overall topic of 'Isoations' to look at how bodies move in relation to each other and experimented with the idea of isolating bodies from the space and playing with the number of dancers moving at one time. We decided that it would be best to portray this idea in a pre-filmed video to ensure we could highlight the isolations of specific body parts by zooming in on them with the lense and so we'd be able to flip between different body parts seamlessly which is something that would be harder to achieve in a live performance.