For Project 1, I was assigned the word “dance”. In all honesty, I was (and still kind of am) nervous about how I would go about interpreting this. I’m not a dancer myself, but I can appreciate dance as an art form. I used that inspiration to guide me in starting my drafting process.
My mindmap had a very narrow scope at first, focusing on the literal aspects of dance (ie. Exercise, Aerobics, etc). However, after making the “Art” branch, I expanded upon my own interpretation of dance in more depth. I loaded it with pop culture references and one name that came up was Bob Fosse. I’ve actually been really interested in his work as of late, I was surprised it took so long for his name to pop up. After ruminating with all the compiled phrases, styles, and references in media, I started fleshing out a barebones idea for my project. For whatever reason, I’m very sonically-driven and consider myself a kinesthetic learner, so putting together the audio felt like a natural first approach in making the piece more cohesive. After gathering some sound bites, I went into my DAW of choice (Bandlab), edited everything together and tried to visualize my idea based on my “audio storyboard” before finalizing my actual sketch/visual storyboard.
For the concept, I wanted to take a more story-driven approach. We open on our main character walking alone at night in the rain, when they stumble upon a flyer for a dance studio. They enter the studio and not too long after, we hear ominous footsteps. The screen goes black, and a couple of questions appear: “Who are you? Why are you here?” It’s implied that this is an icebreaker introduced by the dance instructor. The main character contemplates this, depicted with a brief dialogue snippet from A Chorus Line (a musical about dancers). Then we cut to the instructor again, much less ominous, seen as an older snobby woman (stock images) and using audio from an SNL skit.
She discusses Bob Fosse, who is an actual choreographer, but here I’m using his name as a metaphor for the orthodox approach to dance. We see a few examples of what the instructor thinks is “Fosse,” and what isn’t. I’d like to add a bit of comedic relief here to segue from the more serious atmosphere (ie, using a dial up tone audio to represent “traditional dance”). From here we fade to an upbeat dance track to represent the character’s separation from what’s considered “orthodox” dance. I want there to be an overarching theme of breaking away from what society views as appropriate when it comes to dance and a freedom to express yourself how you see fit. I thought it would be neat since we’re experimenting with slideware and seeing how we can use it creatively, deviating from from its intended use for lectures and business purposes. I created a storyboard on my laptop at first before going in with a hand drawn sketch (I didn’t have a lot of visual cues initially, so being able to lay things out digitally before sketching it out by hand seemed helpful).