Voyage

Because of the Covid situation, dancers had to be creative to keep on exchanging and creating. Of course, lots of content moved online too!

A big dance competition that went online in 2020 is the International Lindy Hop Championship, ILHC 2020. For the occasion, they added a new division to their long list of competitions, The Video Showcase. A comp where you could be as creative as you like.

We weren’t too keen on joining in this competition at first, but then Thom had an idea that we couldn’t pass on. We wanted to do a ‘One Shot’ take. Somewhat inspired by my recent watch of the film ‘1917’ by Sam Mendes. We spent a lot of time doing some research on what it takes to do a one-take clip.

It turns out that the techniques to pull off hidden cuts are actually fairly simple, it just takes a lot of planning and trial and error.

Unlike previous dance projects, this showcase would have to be choreographed while keeping in mind where and even what the camera was doing. So we set off to try something entirely new for both of us.

After shooting some test footage and figuring out what sort of cuts we wanted to involve, we got started choreographing to the song Voyage by The Schwings Band.

It seemed fitting that after a year with no travel, we would dream of it while dancing. Once we had the choreography done and practiced we next needed to shoot it.

Our photographer friend Melissa with the help of her husband Sean helped to film us in various locations in Hong Kong and helped with some of the editing.

You can watch the final take below. And while we’ll probably never be 100% happy with the results, we are quite proud of what we managed to create on what was essentially a no-budget production.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojB5HAroOIg[/embedyt]