March 26, 2008

Strategies and Tips for Making Dance Web Videos

On Monday night I attended a panel seminar on web marketing at the Joyce Soho as part of their "Free Advice" series. The panelists were all familiar dance blog acquaintances and friends: Doug Fox (my fabulous host on GreatDance.com), Kristin Sloan of The Winger blog and the Director of New Media at New York City Ballet, Jaki Levy an interaction designer and New Media Director at Misnomer Dance Theater and Chris Elam, Artistic Director of Misnomer. The collective knowledge of those four panelists was very rich and insightful, and got my mind working.

What the evening made me think about most was how to enlist video in a dance company's overall web marketing strategy. To me, the video element of a dance company's web presence is super important. Nothing can come closer to showing someone what your work is, short of witnessing it live. However, making a highly effective dance video is a very different process from making a highly effective dance for the stage. Not just that, but a dance video should be catered specifically to the type of screens it will be viewed on. Different media platforms have different characteristics, and a brilliant documentary film on your new work for 1500 dancers won't necessarily be interesting viewed on a small patchy YouTube screen.

Here is a short list of tips for making effective dance videos for the web.

1. Set intentions for your videos.
What do you want your videos to do for you? Do you want to get more bodies into seats at your next concert? Are you trying to build audiences for the future, or do you want to test out some ideas you're working on for feedback? Whatever you want, be specific about it and align your video efforts around that intention. Kristin Sloan talked about the different marketing intentions behind NYCB's video campaigns. In their marketing department they make promotional videos for each program in their up-coming season with the sole intention of getting people to buy tickets. At $80/ticket, video previews help people decide whether to splurge and go to a concert. In Kristin's new media department, the intention is to grow a future audience base for NYCB. Here they make videos that allow people to encounter the company in different ways, such as through intimate glimpses behind the scenes or interviews. These videos get distributed around the web and help increase the visibility and recognition of NYCB in demographics outside of their core audience.

2. Keep them short and streamlined.
People don't spend much time on any one thing online. They browse and flit about. Just think about your own behavior online. I know I'm all over the place sampling one thing that links me to someplace else. So, if someone comes across your video, you need to capture their attention in the first 10-15 seconds and then complete the thought in 1-3 minutes. Aggressively edit your videos and cut out all the fat. By that I mean unless you are telling us something new and relevant in a scene, leave it out. Have other people look at your video and watch them as they watch. You can see where they fade out or are trying too hard to get it.

Here's an example of a dance video that's short, simple, and streamlined.

Video by Nagi Noda



3. Make it personal and informal.
The web is about making connections with other people in ways that wouldn't be possible offline. The more human and relatable your video is, the more people will connect with your work. Some of the most popular dance videos on the web are of awkward teenage boys in their livingrooms trying to outdo each other with bad dance moves. For professional dancers, this means stripping away the make-up and the stage dressing, and giving a glimpse into the processes, joys and pains behind your work. Kristin Sloan did an amazing job of this in her series on the making of NYCB's Romeo + Juliet. Anaheim Ballet has also made a great video podcast series that gives viewers a back-stage pass into the workings of their company.

4. Make different videos for different viewing formats and contexts.
You may have a great promo video that you send out to presenters to get gigs, but it has lots of different clips that go all over the place and wouldn't draw in the average viewer. Or maybe you have a great video of a performance you did, but the wide shots make the dancers look like little white blobs when you watch it on YouTube. In these cases, you should re-edit your video with footage that looks good in a small box (use more close-ups or mid-shots). Focus on one excerpt or idea from your piece that has a beginning, middle and an end. Or shoot an informal interview with a collaborator and put in short clips of footage from the concert to highlight something they said. Behind-the-scenes stories and rehearsal footage can also be very compelling for a web format.

Here is a link to a couple good examples of web videos made from dance concert footage by Misnomer Dance Theater (edited by Jaki Levy).

5. Make them easy to share.
In many cases the intention of a web video is to have it be seen by as many people as possible. This means you should make it easy for users to share your videos, comment on them, and embed them into their own websites and blogs. Chris Elam and Jaki Levy described the web as a place where information is spread not from one central broadcasting place, but through dozens of individuals that spread it through their own niched networks. The more niches your video shows up in, the better its chances are to become viral and spread. Social networking sites and bloggers can help facilitate this type of distribution very effectively.

6. Make lots of videos, and experiment!
The great thing about the web is that it's cheap and results come very fast. So just jump in and try stuff out. You will know almost instantly if your strategy worked or bombed. Then go back to the drawing board, tweek things and try again. The risks are low and the potential rewards in eye balls, ticket sales, and supporters are great. So go for it! And be sure to share your videos here with me. I'll do my best to blog about them!

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 12:50 AM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 18, 2008

Invitation to the Dance Movie Blogathon May 4-10

Dance bloggers and dance film lovers everywhere, mark your calendars now for the first ever Dance Movie Blogathon happening May 4-10, 2008!

I can't claim credit for this great idea, that honor goes to Marilyn Ferdinand who publishes the Ferdy on Films, etc. blog. She is organizing this fabulous event to bring awareness to the important contributions dance has made to cinema since its beginnings from Edison's Serpentine Dance to the latest Hollywood dance hits like Step Up 2: The Streets.

In her announcement post Ferdy writes:

Ferdy on Films, etc. is proud to host the Invitation to the Dance Movie Blogathon, May 4 through May 10. The last day of the blogathon just happens to be the birthday of one of the greatest dancers ever to grace the silver screen--Fred Astaire. Contributions on that date that discuss Astaire are particularly welcome. Please RSVP to ferdyonfilms@comcaust.net. Link to this page before the event and to Ferdy on Films, etc. during the week of the blogathon.

I will be churning out posts about my favorite dance on screen moments, and you should too! Spread the word and the link to the Ferdy on Films, etc. blog.

Here's a little clip of Fred from Puttin' on the Ritz to get you ready.

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 3:26 PM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 10, 2008

Thoughts on Curating - How to Bring About a Shift in Perception

This summer the American Dance Festival (ADF) will be hosting the second Screendance - State of the Art  conference. Once again dance filmmakers, curators, educators, and critics will come together on the Duke University campus to discuss the art form and exchange ideas. This year's topic is curating and its relationship to screendance. I'm quite passionate about this topic, so I can't resist taking a stab at  a paper proposal to submit to the conference. The deadline for paper proposals is April 11, 2008. For more info, click here.

I credit almost all of my understanding of what screendance is, to watching curated programs at various dance film festivals. The genre is very hard to describe, because dance for the camera could mean anything really. The very definition of film and video is moving pictures, and dancing is only a slightly more specific word for moving. Creating special programs of films that are organized around a specific idea helps to provide a lens for viewing work in a different way. By grouping films under a new name, you can embue them with meanings they didn't necessary have before. For instance if I put clips of Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates, and Maya Deren's Ritual In Transfigured Time all together in a program entitled "Films as Visual Poetry, Great Symbolist Poets of the Silver Screen," what happens to the way you look at these films?


Films as Visual Poetry: Great Symbolist Poets of the Silver Screen

clip from "Mystery Train" by Jim Jarmusch



clip from "The Color of Pomegranates" by Sergei Parajanov



"Ritual in Transfigured Time" by Maya Deren



Perhaps you have seen all of these films before in different contexts, but now you are seeing many similarities and connections between them you have never thought of before. The through-line of a poetic approach to film making becomes very obvious, and yet, you may not have thought about this connection if you hadn't read the program's title.

This ability to create new meanings and connections between things is especially important for promoting a relatively obscure genre like screendance. In order to educate viewers and attract new audiences we need to give them a window for entry and help them connect with the form. We are a media savvy culture, in which the average viewer can identify the genre and conventional structures of any given media clip in a matter of seconds. Screendance is just different enough to feel strange and foreign to the typical viewer, but only a slight shift of perception is necessary to make it seem familiar and identifiable.

Bringing about this slight shift of perception should be the goal of all curated programs. For my monthly Kinetic Cinema series, the goal is to help make dancers and members of the New York dance community aware of the role media plays in their artistic work. We are all bombarded with media images and messages everyday. This constant deluge of information has to filter down into the work of dancers and choreographers too. I wondered why the dance community in New York seems to be lagging behind our European contemporaries in embracing media with dance, and I realized it may be because dancers here just haven't thought about it consciously. With Kinetic Cinema I invite different members of the dance community to curate programs and draw upon their own media interests and influences. In this way the curators discover the knowledge they already have about media and dance, and can present their ideas in a way that other dancers can relate to.

By these standards, Kinetic Cinema has already been successful. Many of the curators I've invited have never curated a screening before, and yet their programs have blown me away. February's curator, Brian McCormick, displayed a knowledge of video art and new media platforms like Second Life that far surpasses my own. This month, Malinda Allen presented one of the most entertaining and inspiring programs of dance films and videos I've ever seen, and she has never seen the work of Maya Deren before (a filmmaker widely regarded as the mother of modern dance film). Each of these artists presented programs that gave me and all the members of the audience new perspectives on dance and media we had never had before. Bringing about new perspectives and thought connections makes a seed bed for creativity. I believe that these programs will inspire more dancers to make work for the camera, and the artistry and sophistication of their work will be higher, because they are connecting consciously to their own knowledge about media and how it works.

A guest curator series is just one way to bring about a shift in perspective for a particular audience. I'd love to hear of other examples. Please share your ideas and experiences here, and help us brainstorm more ways to bring screendance to the fore of the media landscape!

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 12:08 AM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 5, 2008

Follow-up to Malinda Allen's Kick-ass Kinetic Cinema Program

For Monday night's Kinetic Cinema screening at Collective:Unconscious, Malinda Allen, a fabulous dancer/choreographer and now CURATOR, presented the most bad-ass, inspiring evening of dance films and videos I've ever seen. It truly rocked! From YouTube video mash-ups to Busby Berkeley to experimental motion-capture studies, she had everything in there. The best thing was that she wove all the clips together like a travel log through dance in media, mixing in fun facts (like how Phillipe Découflé and Spike Jonze have the same birthday) and juicy stories throughout.

For those who came, and those who wished they were there, here is a link to Malinda's YouTube channel where you can see clips of most of the videos she showed as well as others that she digs.

I'll leave you with the final short of the evening, Malinda's own "Other Games." (BTW, she got her landlord to repair the holes in the walls of her hallway for free! This girl is brilliant...)

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 7:37 PM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)