MCI22081559 FINAL PROJECT

MCI22081559 SHR6E032F~002 Portfolio and video evidence (Final Project)

1. Project Overview

For this project, I collaborated with a local dancer, Josh Morrison (see appendix 1). Josh is a student at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, and considers himself a dance-artist, proficient in other fields of art. His style is very modern, and he likes to incorporate video effects and videography to blur the lines between them into cohesive pieces of media (see appendix 2). This project was envisioned as a similar piece of work to his past, with a larger scale of choreography, and a more immersive experience- with the dance blending into the music and vice versa. We wanted to tell the story of a person that has undergone trauma, conveying the cyclic nature of this, how it comes and goes, and how it attempts to break a person. Josh feels very strongly toward this subject, and wanted to emphasise that one of the ways a person can overcome this- for those that are able- is to ‘fight back’ through expression and freedom of self.

Objectives:

-To create a video that uses dance as a way to express a feeling and idea, with an explanatory documentary at the end, also serving to help better understand Josh

-To have this work as a dance-movie; with the music and dance blending, rather than being a dance to music

-To tell a story

-For the video to work as a portfolio piece for Josh, to be used to apply to a dance academy (this was a core goal alongside the storytelling aspect)

2. Panopto Video – Final Product (10-12 Minutes)

WARNING: THIS VIDEO CONTAINS CONTINUOUS FLASHING IMAGES

3. Chronological Monthly Diary

October

-First made contact with Josh- discussed project and ideas (See Appendix 3)

-Arranged to and met up to further discuss influences, rough idea of project

-Created 3 drafts of different tracks to gauge my own interpretation of Josh’s ideas (See Appendix 4)

-Got a Spotify playlist of inspiration tracks to listen to

November

-Had Josh choose a draft that we would progress on from

-Decided on a weekly schedule to keep a back and forth on direction of track, as well as the broader timeline (See Appendix)

-Finalised the story and vibe of track, got a clear sense of ‘plot’ and theme established

-Began research on Josh’s style of dance

December

-Continued previously mentioned schedule, however at a less productive rate due to personal issues and the holiday period

January

-Choreography began for track, as well as building story board for final video

-The track was now close to being finished- structure and instrumentation mostly completed; is now at the ‘tweaking’ stage

February

– Continuation of personal issues meant this month was also not very productive

March

-Began meeting in person twice weekly at my house, Josh auditioning dance parts and giving in-person input on the track, us together working on finer details etc

-Josh finished planning the shoot for the video

April

-Track is completed

-Video is shot and edited

4. Evidence of Planning/Process

The plan for this project was to be split into two, with a broader timeline of what we wanted to be done and when, and a smaller, week by week routine for us to keep. (see appendix 5,6). The broader timeline was made up of five overlapping sections, being; formulation, track development, track completion, choreography and video planning, and filming/finalising. During formulation, we would get a bare bones sense of what the track would be, collating ideas and inspirations, and I would start making demo tracks to gauge if we were on the same page. Track development would be the bulk of the music making side of the process, during which we would have a weekly schedule where we would show what we had been working on, and what ideas had been had. From my perspective this was sending new drafts of the music, from Josh’s it was ideas for story and dance concepts for me to interpolate into music. Track completion was mixing and mastering, and choreography was to overlap with track development/completion to take us into finalising.

During the making of the music, I would explore different synth instruments that I’d made for use in the track, as well as melodic components, and adjusting them based on example short dances Josh would do so that they fit together better. An example of this would be the quick jab-like movements Josh does lining up with percussive hits and synth stabs throughout the track.

For more evidence see appendix letters

5. Reference Material/Inspiration

As previously mentioned (see appendix 7), we compiled a playlist of tracks to get a sense of what we both liked sonically, as well as what Josh felt worked best with his style. We found a lot of middle ground here in terms of electronic, synth based music, which gave us a good platform to work from. The main take-aways from this were that we wanted to utilise lots of analog synthesis, and long, washy sounds to move smoothly to, with underlying motifs throughout.

Having never composed for dance before, I was eager to research the proper mentality and approach to it, to get the best results. In doing this, I came across an interview with composer Angelo Naso, who highlighted the statement that “It’s always important for the composer or musician to understand the dynamic of the body, the meaning of a specific movement.”¹. This told me that it would be pertinent to look at some of Josh’s previous work (see appendix 2), to understand the ways he likes to move his body, and try to figure out how to mould my music around it. Also from this interview, I read Naso talk about composing in tandem to and around the choreography of the dance, as it can have a huge positive impact of the final product, helping create new ideas for the dance itself that couldn’t be there if the order was reversed. This thought had a huge influence on our approach to this project, as it ended up describing exactly what we did: moulding each others work around the other to creative a more cohesive piece.

Josh also gave me two dancer/choreographers that he personally draws influence from, to help me better understand and implement his style. The first of these was Martha Graham, particularly her technique called “Contractions”. “Contraction” is “a movement pattern that mirrors the natural rhythm of breathing and symbolises the flow of human emotion. Contraction involves pulling the torso inward to create tension, while release expands the body, representing freedom and expression”.² We used this concept to tie in with our themes of attempting to fight past trauma through movement and freedom, using breath sounds as percussive effects to be mirrored with Josh’s use of the “Contraction” technique visually. (See appendix 8, and approx 35sec in video).

The other dancer/choreographer Josh mentioned was Jacob Jonas, who describes his dance as a way of releasing what is stored in his body.³ He has a big emphasis on bodily healing through dance, a theme which again, ties into the message and story we wanted to tell in this project. More descriptively, his style can be characterised by sudden, flowing, expressive movements, between more smooth changes in position. We aimed to mirror this in the music, adding pieces of sound design and melodic components that could complement the quick flashes of movement amongst the more gentle flowing ones.

6. Use of Technology

The music for this project was made almost entirely in the box, with the one exception being the shrill, swelling counter melody found around 5:24 in the track. I made these by recording my electric guitar through an amp simulator straight into my daw, which I then processed and reversed to create the effect. This was done to add an organic eeriness, to help with the tone we were trying to achieve at this point in the story.

The rest of the track was made using synthesis and sampling in Logic Pro X, utilising synths such as Serum and occasionally Logic Pro’s stock synth ES2. I chose to rely so heavily on synthesis as it is in keeping with a lot of the inspiring tracks as seen in the Spotify playlist.

One of the most integral pieces of production for the track was the use of filter gating using Logic’s Step FX plugin. This allowed me to adjust how much and what character of sound is audible at extremely small intervals, and pan it around the stereo image in a disconcerting way. (See appendix 9). The aim with this, as with many of the production choices I made, was to stray ever so slightly from musicality towards discomfort, to help enforce the emotion we were trying to create in the piece.

See appendix letters for more evidence.

7. Evaluation

Product Evaluation

For the most part, I believe that the project has been successful in achieving its goals, so far as we know yet. Due to the fact that Josh wants to use this piece as part of a portfolio to apply to a dance academy- something that has been a crucial goal of ours throughout- and this application has not happened yet, it is hard to evaluate the success in this regard. However I feel that the other goals, being that we wanted to tell a story with emotive peaks and a somewhat cyclical structure, have been reached well. We reached out to quite a few people for feedback, some friends of mine, some friends of Josh’s, as well as dancers and musicians to get a breadth of different reactions and different perspectives.

This feedback was gotten in-person during conversation, so collating data was difficult, but the feedback was extremely positive; the dancers said that the dancing was to a very high technical quality, and similarly the non-dancers said the dancing was impressive. As well as this, people for the most part found that the music worked well to emphasis the dance, and helped to set a mood and tone to which a story could be extrapolated from the dance. People also said that the mini-documentary at the end helps a lot to contextualise the piece, as well as, importantly, serving as a great way for Josh’s portfolio to be broadened, and give his application a better showcasing of who he is as a dancer.

Negative feedback was often critical of camera quality at times, as well as sometimes over-doing it in terms of some of the cutting effects and general videography. Also, the music at times was said to ‘need to go somewhere a bit more’, and at times felt like it got repetitive.

Lots of this feedback mirrors my own thoughts on the project; that it has been very successful in achieving its main goals, with a few drawbacks and at times not quite getting to the professional level. As a portfolio item to be used for Josh’s application, I think that we have done what we set out to do: it showcases his style of dance very well, as well as his further artistic tendencies with music that fits the style he works best with. With our other goals, being that it should work by itself as a dance-film, with an understandable story and theme, which blends the music with the dance to create a cohesive pairing, I think that we have done very well. Key points such as emphasising Josh’s preferred techniques (The Contraction technique, etc) were used to good effect, and recurring musical motifs to imply the cyclical nature of dealing with trauma ended up working well. A lot of the negative feedback I agree with, with my one contention being that while the music ‘doesn’t go anywhere’, it isn’t supposed to work necessarily as a piece of music by itself- I was careful to make sure the music never attracted too much attention from the dance, but rather that they supplemented each other. I do agree though, that at times my being careful here actually did somewhat detract from the final project, as times where you expect the music to get more intense and it doesn’t, do take away from the complete experience.

To be more critical of the final product, I would agree that at times the track does get repetitive, and that the quick cut effects overdo it at times. As mentioned before, my main critique of the final product is that it lacks a total sense of professionalism. This could in future be achieved through better use of sound effects, maybe incorporating elements of foley to help create a fully immersive experience. As well as this, the track maintains one tonal key the entire time. In future I would like to change this, as key changes help to establish change in mood very well: this is something done excessively in music for film. We also would have liked to experiment with filming in different locations, and if expanding the collaboration to be more focussed on its story-telling aspects then using more dancers could be a good way to help this.

Process Evaluation

As mentioned earlier, we had decided to create the dance and music at the same time, so that they could mould around and form each other, based on the interview with Angelo Naso. We found this to be extremely helpful for keeping us in contact and working on the project, as well as it helping us both be satisfied with its direction. It did however, slow us down somewhat, as it meant each section and idea needed double-checking and cross-referencing to make sure it worked with the other persons work. I would say this was a good thing though, as it was important to us that this was not just a piece of music I’d make that Josh would dance to.

Getting a sense of the story and theme early on was extremely valuable as it helped with never feeling uninspired- I just needed to refer to the ‘plot’ we were following to get a sense of what needed to be done sonically. Establishing this early also meant that we had time to reflect on what the story was, which meant we could tweak it and let it change as time went on, which is what ended up happening. (the original concept was ‘bad night out’ which changed to ‘just bad’ which changed to ‘how we deal with the bad’). Having this idea early allowed us to make this slight change seamlessly without it affecting the work we’d done so far. One way this could have been better done would be with some kind of visual story-board, rather than a verbal, more conceptual one, as this could then be used to help with the videography and shooting of the video.

The fact we started far before the due date meant that we were able to take our time with the project, and is a good example of our time being well managed throughout, however it did almost mean we got too relaxed about the deadline. This could be mitigated in future by setting intermediary goals and deadlines to keep us more on track.

In conclusion, this project was quite successful in terms of achieving the goals we set it- it tells a clear story, and we feel it represents our perceptions of trauma and its cyclic nature. Furthermore, it serves well to showcase Josh’s dancing ability, and gets the most out of what he can do. In future projects, we have a clear idea of what could be done better, which would have an emphasis on professionalism both in terms of how the final product is portrayed, as well as in our process of making it.

8. Bibliography

1- Angelo Naso, Carvalho, I. and Carvalho, I. (2020). Music Composition And Dance: A Synchronised Creative Process – Diagonal Dance. [online] Diagonal Dance – Communications agency that rethinks contemporary dance as an accessible language for everyone. Available at: https://diagonaldance.com/music-composition-and-dance

2- Gositus, www.gositus.com (2024). Rockstar Academy. [online] Rockstar Academy. Available at: https://www.rockstaracademy.com/blog/martha-graham-syllabus.

3- Atmos. (2025). Jacob Jonas on the Choreography of Healing and Taking Cues From Nature | Atmos. [online] Available at: https://atmos.earth/art-and-culture/jacob-jonas-on-the-choreography-of-healing-and-taking-cues-from-nature/

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