top of page

On a Whim

When I came back from abroad and found out synaesthetic was doing dance films rather than a collaborative performance, I knew I wanted to use the medium to highlight the intersections between dance and visual art. In the past few years, I’ve fallen in love with watercolor and its whimsical properties. After watching a few stop motions online, I decided to take on the biggest project of my undergraduate career by making a stop motion dance film. I wanted multiple artists to be involved, in part for my own sanity, and also to create a space for multiple interpretations of the movement. I asked our class and some of my friends if anyone wanted to join me on this endeavor, and thank goodness Cierra Seawright and Tommy Mackey said yes. I decided to make Cierra our dancer because of her light, ethereal dancing quality.

First, we filmed forty seconds of choreography in the Virtual Studio. The Virtual Studio provided a clean white background that would prove incredibly helpful in the drawing process. Next, we edited the film and exported every frame (all 1,200) as a PDF, and Cierra contacted printing services to print them. Then, we numbered every frame with a corresponding piece of watercolor paper and divided the frames into bundles to give the artists. Tommy contacted some of his friends and the art department, and artists started trickling in. We prepared a list of guidelines (such as tracing, marking the frame of the video, and approved stylistic proportions) for the artists so the frames would flow into one another without much problem. We decided to leave the last 200 frames out, so the film could switch into the live film and then reveal that Cierra was a real girl. This put us at 900 drawn frames, and I’m pretty sure I might have picked up an art major with my personal 500 frames. On April 7th, we got the frames back from the artists, and began to scan. This was the most tedious part, but we came up with a system and had them finished in five days. Next, I began cropping and rotating the frames in Photoshop, so that they were all the same proportionately, and we put them into Premiere at 0.1 second per frame (resulting to about half the speed of the live video). We threw our music on top, and just like that, we had a film.

One of the 900 frames

The film turned out beautifully. It’s enchanting to watch, and never fails to make me smile. It was very forgiving, and a lot of the time, mistakes like ink or paint spills looked like a stylistic choice. I tell people it was about 70 hours of work, which I think is a rather low estimate. Much like when you do a puzzle for too long, and begin to see the world in puzzle pieces, I see the world in watercolor stop motion which, I will admit, makes me very dizzy. Nonetheless, I’m infinitely proud of us and can’t wait to share it with the world on Friday and Saturday.


bottom of page