March 29, 2006

How to Offer Your First Dance Video Mashup

Last night I saw a poster in the DC Metro for the upcoming "Take The Lead" movie with Antonio Banderas. I tried to remember the site's URL but forgot about it until I saw the post about this dance movie in Edward McPherson's blog.

Mashup Music Maker from Take the Lead

It's interesting exploring this movie website to see how it compares to promotional sites for recent dance movies - and related online dance promotion efforts in general. I'm getting a little tired of these virtual dance games where you click and drag a series of dance steps into a time line and then record and share your dance creations - that's what you can do on the Take the Lead site. It's time to move on and innovate. What I did find interesting about this movie site is that they also have a Mash Up Maker where you can mix two songs and save the final piece. And you can listen to mashups created by other users as well.

So I was trying to figure out how dance companies could create their own dance video mashups on their own websites as a way to build buzz for upcoming performances. This is what I came-up with:

Why not take a camcorder and film a dancer or dancers against a bluescreen background. Put this video on your website and encourage visitors to download your video and mix it with an additional video that is relevant to the themes of your dance piece. Once a user finishes creating their mashup, they can upload it to a gallery on your website where all the mashups can be watched. Maybe you can add a competition component to this mashup offering as well where you pick the best mashups of the week.

Still from Heat and Life

Here's an example:

Take a performance such as "Heat and Life" from Emily Johnson's Catalyst Dance Company that deals with the topic of global warming. You could video tape a 2-minute segment from this work with the dancers performing against a blue screen (or green screen) background. (When you shoot video with a blue or green screen background, it is easy to remove this solid color background and drop the objects your are filming into another video - video editing software programs call this chroma-key.) You post this 2-minute segment on your website and visitors download this video clip.

Then site visitors would be encouraged to take the dancers and superimpose them on their own video clip that dealt in some manner with global warming. Maybe the video backdrop shows images of polar ice caps melting or something closer to home such as industrial plants pumping pollutants into the air. The mashup video clip could also include the creator adding videos of themselves dancing into the mix. Many possibilities - even making the entire backdrop completely abstract.

After the dance video mashups are submitted, they could be placed in an archive for anybody to watch and either the dance company or website visitors or both could vote on their favorites.

I think this idea would be a lot of fun and generate a lot of buzz. So definitely let me know if you decide to do something along these lines.

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