PETERBOROUGH, Nov. 15, 2006. Public Energy and Peterborough New Dance presented a "dance film"-making workshop facilitated by director/choreographer Jenn Goodwin and sponsored by and the Peterborough Arts Umbrella.
Jenn Goodwin provided the situation with some simple props we had to use: a table, a chair, a telephone and a dancer (Kate Story). Since everybody had different ideas, we decided to make 8 different films. We had 15 minutes to plan (storyboard) and shoot it. As the video editor, I would have to take the footage and edit them all in the next 48 hrs.
I had hand-scribbled notes to work from. There were a lot of ideas and everybody was open to my interpretation of the footage. Alot of the director's notes didn't get attended to because I had no time. The films evolved organically. I had to restrict my process a bit so that it wouldn't take too long.
All the music is by OFF THE INTERNATIONAL RADAR from one CD that Jenn had given me. Brilliant. It works! I restricted myself to using only those 6 tracks. There were some incredible sound coincidences. For Ray Barker's piece, the part when Kate put the phone down, there is a corresponding sound of a phone being hung up - this is actually on the music track - I didn't add it in. It was perfectly in sync the first time I slapped the music to the footage by sheer coincidence.
The footage was all silent so I had to find canned sound-effects (for Michael Morritt's film) and in some cases actually doing some foley work (for Jess and Sara's film).
Overall the films where enthusiastically received when they were premiered at the Artspace Mudroom a couple days later.
The word/number combination "motion8" kept coming to my head as I edited all these films. I mentioned to Bill Kimball that I would be into creating a "dance film" collective to make more films under that name. Esther Vincent thought it's like dv8 and I swear I wasn't thinking of it as a direct response to another collective (but maybe that could be kinda cool.)
I enjoyed working on this project - the filmmakers really just left it all up to me so it's a real co-creation. And certainly hope OFF THE INTERNATIONAL RADAR enjoy the films as much as I enjoyed working with their music.
This compendium/blog can grow. And we can align the strong dance community in Peterborough with the burgeoning community of experimenters and pioneers in dance-filmmaking. I'm excited for the future.
Looking forward to our first meeting in 2007. Stay tuned for more films. All the best. Cheers, Lester
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