WHO: in collaboration with Alexis Madara
WHAT: direction, videography, storytelling, branding
WHY: The idea started as me reaching out to my friend Alexis to shoot a dance video together. On the cusp of graduation from grad school, this developed into something more.
Guilty as charged for my slight obsession with dance movies - from suspenseful thrillers like Suspiria to cheerful musicals like The Young Girls of Rochefort. Inspiration also came from music videos by Beyonce, Pink, the National and Robyn.
Dance is a way to express, build connections, an art form itself, but also a demonstration of freedom. There shouldn’t be good or bad, should dance or shouldn’t. Why isn’t it celebrated enough, particularly the modern dance, hip-hop, belly dance and freestyle for example? Lex and I started syncing our visions through a mood board - a carefree Brigitte Bardot, a vulnerable Patti Smith by Mapplethorpe, A Single Man in crisis and Christopher St. Pier where you can see the statue of liberty from afar.
Lex picked Daniel Caesar’s Show No Regret. In a spacious studio on St. Marks, I asked her to dance to the music however she wanted. I followed her movement and we managed to capture in both moving and still frames, as well as some b-rolls for more texture. We decided on another day to shoot more scenes in the streets and at her home.
Lex is battling between investing in a certification to teach dance and getting a job more pertinent to her graduate degree at an innovation firm. The reasoning has added another hue to her dance. When reasoning, we often times use compounded words like, insofar, heretofore, whereas etc. as joints to building a coherent argument. After a discussion, we agreed on the name “Compounds” for our short film.
I chose a strong modern font and minimal design for branding, in a way as a contrast to the vintage filters applied in the editing process. The film is divided into three chapters with incremental saturation in each scene as the character shows more and more complexity in the narrative.
In Chap. 1 Insofar, we see the female protagonist, an archetypical ingénue, dancing with zero makeup on showing the most vulnerability. The emotions are raw. The palette is plain as black and white. We discussed the option of switching this part with Chapter 3 but agreed that it was better to create suspense in the beginning - she loves dancing. But who is she?
Interesting trivia. The song I picked for this chapter, Daniel Caesar’s Japanese Denim, was coincidentally the song Lex freestyled to the first time.
As the storyline unfolds into Chap. 2. We see an interview format monologue of the female protagonist at home. I experimented with a 50/50 composition where she stayed mostly on the left side of the frame and moved back and forth to the right side in b-rolls. Close to the end of this part, we see her drawing a woman from the back, which symbolizes an ideal of herself again on the right. We are looking at her back because she’s metaphorically moving forward. Meanwhile, Daniel Caesar sings, let me know. Do I still got time to grow? Things ain't always set in stone...
As the music plays again, “Never forget it’s what you ask for. Show no regret. Show no regret. But at what cost. What am I giving up. But at what cost”, we see her dancing on Christopher St. Pier, with the city’s skyline in the background. She’s walking to the right of the frame, watching the statue of liberty. Her strut is confident and self-assured. In the end is a supercut of all three scenes. She is a sophisticated woman composed of all three parts, who can’t be simplified into any one persona. I insisted on keeping this part in the end to show more optimism and leave an open end when “whereas” is a conjunction, inviting a part to come after.
On May 3, we premiered the film on IGTV and vimeo. I wrote in a post:
I met Lex the first time at a house party in Bushwick. We were sitting in a circle of ten-ish people and she laughed at all my dark self-deprecating jokes so loudly with her eyes wide open. That moment I knew I wanted to be her friend. Like any friendship in 2017, we started out as “meme friends” - shooting memes to each other on Instagram. It’s amazing how two kids from two ends of the world can have so much in common. Art was what connected us. I use the word “kids” loosely because neither of us are exactly kids anymore. But this experimental short film “compounds”, shot completely on iPhone, is a celebration of our friendship and hopefully something we can think of fondly in retrospect from the future and realize we were, after all, just kids.
This project is a celebration of our friendship, which itself is a compound, stronger together.