Dance Video Group Meeting 4

On Tuesday 7th March we all had a group meeting to discuss the Dance Video. In particular we needed to review the Showreel submissions from the dancers who wanted to take part and choose who we would use. The deadline for submissions of there showreel was yesterday and also yesterday was the deadline for our musician to give us a rough music track so we also needed to listen and discuss this.

Firstly here is the poster Katherine (Producer) designed which we had all been circulating:

And here is the email which I sent to our musician just over a week ago about the music we wanted:

Here are the main notes we discussed in the meeting:

We looked at who had applied and we found we had 4 people who wanted to be a part of the video. There were...
- Shanice (first year advertising student)
- Georgia (Godalming College doing a Dance Btec)
- Gracie (Godalming College doing a Dance A-Level)
- Sofia (UCA Student)

We then reviewed each of there showreels and discussed together what we thought about it...

- Unfortunately Georgia hadn't sent a showreel and said she didn't have anything to show us so we were unable to really gauge what her skills were and therefore we didn't really feel comfortable taking her on.

- We liked Sofia's video because she showed us a really nice contemporary dance she had done. However it only showed us one dance she had done and she had edited it to slow it down etc in certain places so it was difficult to tell how the dance originally looked. I did really like her though and she was really promising although we didn't know what kind of dance background she had as she did not explain in her email submission.

- Shanice showed us a massive variety of dance styles she had partaken in and learnt which was really good for us to see her skill set. She was talented however she only had group dances in her showreel which made it hard for us to judge what she was like independently dancing. We liked her but didn't know how confident she would be on her own.

- Gracie told us via email that she was trained in Contemporary, Lyrical, ballet and modern dance which was an impressive range of skills. The video she submitted was from 2 years ago but was still very impressive. It was a nice contemporary dance which showed a large variety of movements. She linked us to her social media to look at her more recent dance work and that gave us even more faith because she has a large following from the dance world online and her dance skills are very good. I had a really good feeling about her and so did the rest of us so we decided she was our best bet.

Katherine is now going to contact Gracie and tell her the good news! She will also just confirm that Gracie can make all the shoot times and arrange a few rehearsals with her before the shoot. Just incase there was any problems with this we chose a backup dancer which was Shanice. She had a large variety of skills and this led us to believe that she would also fit the part well.

We were originally wanting 2 dancers to work together for our piece but after many discussions we feel like this may make the meaning misinterpreted because then it would look like it was about relationships etc. We also now having seen who has applied feel like they are such mixed abilities, styles etc that it would be really hard to ask 2 of them to work together. We also feel so confident in Gracie's abilities that we want to work with her alone a lot more effectively rather than trying to add another person into it.

We then moved on to talk about the music. I got first version of the music track sent on a private link to soundcloud so I shared it with the girls and we all listened to it. (Unfortunately I can't upload it on here yet!) We all really liked it and it was themed really nicely for each phobia spanning 6 minutes in total. We loved the introduction and also the way it built up really nicely however we felt like there needed to be a few more moments of stillness. I gave this feedback to our contact and he said that he will be remixing it next week to adjust the levels so he will take our feedback on board when doing this but structurally he won't change it which is good because this means we can begin choreographing on it for timing etc and it won't change on the final version. I am very confident that this music will work really well.

This meeting has been really successful because we are now all really excited to begin actually rehearsing and shooting. We have a dancer sorted and a music track so now we need to get our paperwork together and get signed off so we can begin.