Post-production (The edit) - Blog Post 14

A blog post by: Kelsey Reid

It’s stated that “Video dance operates outside classic narrative structures” (Dodds, 2001) and similarly, our film isn’t so much concerned with narrative as it is with meaning, feeling and emotion. We wanted the mind sequence to be edited in such a way that it evokes a sense of the character Leonardo’s internal struggle. Therefore, the edit was one of the most important elements of this film.

Bruce Conner’s “Breakaway” (1966) is a great example of how dance and editing can be beautifully married together, which is what we wanted to be able to achieve for our film. However, unlike Breakaway, this screen dance film not only consists of scenes of the protagonist dancing, but of him banging his head, his foot being held back by a chain and the food colouring being dropped into jars of water. Therefore, all of the scenes needed to be interweaved with one another and edited in the same kind of way. Editing is a choreographic process, after all (Pearlman, 2009).

Below are examples of how we experimented with our footage:

When selecting the footage, we mainly wanted to use close-up shots because “if the dancers stay too far from the screen the spectator loses contact with them” (Dodds, 2001) and as we wanted the audience to be so submerged into the protagonists’ movements and his state of mind, we avoided relying on wide and long shots. 

As the soundtrack for our film is largely made up out of diegetic sounds, we needed to edit the ‘mind sequence’ in line with the beat of these sounds. However, as a rough soundtrack hadn’t yet been provided, this proved to be difficult. Therefore, to solve this, we edited to the sound of 90 beats per minute due to that being the pace Leonardo banged his head to, which was the beat that the rest of the soundtrack was to be built on top of. 

Feedback

When the rough edit was shown to the rest of our team and tutor this is the following feedback received:

Avoid the mirror effect & splitting the screen into quarters.

Though our original purpose for using these effects was to convey a sense of disorientation and chaos, those techniques can come off quite amateur-like.

Therefore, to resolve this we shortened the length of the quarter-split screen so that it's on the screen for half the length of time and we replaced the use of a mirror effect with the image below:

We felt that this still gave off a disorientated feel, but in a more creative way than the mirror effect. It also enabled us to include some more of Louis's dancing. 

In addition, it was mentioned that some of the mind sequence almost looked ‘too pretty’ for the state of mind the character is facing. The character is in a state of chaos and struggle and so the edit must mirror that.

Therefore, we decided to use jump cuts to again create a sense of disorientation, which will better mirror Leonardo’s mental state. In addition, by using jump cuts, this will allow us to experiment with the dance footage a lot more freely and thus allow Leonardo’s dance sequence to be made “Not in real time, but in the edit time” (Porter, 2016).

Colour grade

In the colour grade, we wanted the mind sequence to have a more dirty, gritty feel. Therefore, to point out a couple of examples, instead of the bright, vibrant yellow food colouring, we changed it to a more off-yellow kind of colour, that had a more sickly, gritty look instead. This was to create a more uncomfortable, uneasy feel to match Leonardo's state of mind.

Before

After

Also, Louis's straight jacket was perfectly white and clean. What would have been ideal was if we made it dirtier and a little more battered and torn before we began filming. However, because we didn't do this, we had to do what we could in the colour grade and gave it an off-white colour. 

Before

After

REFERENCES

Breakaway. 1966. [Film], Dir. Bruce Conner. USA.

Dodds, S. 2001. Dance on Screen: Genres and Media from Hollywood to Experimental Art. UK: Palgrave Macmillan

Pearlman, K. 2009. Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit. US:Routledge.

Rosenberg, D. 2016. Dance with camera (a curator's POV). In: Porter, J. The Oxford handbook of screen dance studies. OUP USA: Oxford University Press, pp. 23-44