KELLY OWENS
"She loved life & it loved her right back"
REMEDIATION - Assignment 3
Last but certainly not least came the remediating of my previous assignment into a different medium. Considering my options, doing a documentary-style video certainly seemed the most fitting for a piece about something that's 90% visual: dancing. I couldn't directly imitate my repurposed assignment, because that would have literally just been me talking at a camera for far too long, so I instead decided to profile a studio from my hometown as they prepared for a competition.
I wanted to get different opinions, so I asked the staff and students at the studio about their experience as a competitive dancer. This studio has just begun to compete, so I thought they'd offer interesting insight. Of course I hoped they'd agree with the points I made in my repurposed assignment, but they had a couple different things to say. I hope this video is understandable and relatable, and that it gives an inside peek at the competitive dance world and all it's hairspray, rhinestones, and lipstick.
Drafting this assignment required fixing it as I went along. Due to it's inherent properties, making and exporting a video as I went to make changes was unrealistic. Instead, I'd simply add what I wanted to add, and then watch the entire video from the beginning every three clips or so so that I could continually evaluate the product I was creating. One thing that was difficult was matching up my recorded audio with the video I had. The videos had audio, but the quality was terrible, so making sure those lined up properly was crucial. I also tried to get a good balance of who I was showing throughout the video, which required a lot of last minute changes as I realized I was severely lacking in footage of the younger girls! Filming at the competition was challenging (and I'm pretty sure illegal) but I had so much fun with this assignment.
Ultimately, what I learned through this assignment was that competitive dance is not as dangerous and detrimental to dancers as I thought it was - as long as it's handled correctly. As Lisa points out in the video, it is crucial that dance teachers keep their dancers in check by not allowing them to develop elitist personas, or making sure that they know it's more than just winning. As long as it's managed correctly, competitive dance can be a really enriching experience for dancers, which is what I took away from this project.