Before starting filming and collecting videos, I spent a lot of time in sketching and writing down thoughts and ideas that came into my mind about the word “dance.” At first, I thought dance can’t be expressed in any other ways than physically dancing in front of a camera. However, after contemplating more about the meaning of dance, I realized that dance is something more simple. Dance is a form of communication and language that translates words into movements. Then I realized that human bodies aren’t the only ones that can do this; other tangible objects or even intangible things like lights and water also have this relationship where they talk to each other with the forms that they create.
I also kept myself restrained from adding clips of myself or other people dancing because I tried to seek for different meanings that dance has. I wanted to convey that dance can also be represented with dynamic movements using only hands, feet and simple actions such as jumping, and shaking.
I wanted to introduce this narrative of how the movements we make and movements created from our movements can talk to each other. Therefore, I divided my videos in order of lights, hand and liquid, water, and other objects that move including our body and plants. While I was compiling the videos together and seeing some effect that I can use, I wanted to try using match cuts for my lights compositions. But, I realized that match cut effects won’t work in this kind of videos because the compositions weren’t matching the action. Once I tried different effects, such as wipe and jump cut, I began to see the effects move, not the compositions. The way compositions were presented without special effects but only with subtle zoom ins and outs created interesting language where the compositions danced from each other.
After the first critique, I got suggestions about shifting last couple compositions to beginning of the video. With this change, the transitions in between the compositions became more smooth and I was able to represent the communication that each compositions had with each other more strongly. I also connected the beginning and end of the video by having the first and last frames talk to each other in a form of having same movement (jump).
Through this video, I wanted to show that there are countless ways to interpret the word “dance;” and everyone or even everything can create and represent dance in any kind of forms.
