Dance meets vfx
Over a year ago, my cinematographer friend, Brian, came to me with an idea for a dance video. He wanted to create a narrative between two dancers who end up battling each other through dance. The song he had in mind for it was CAUTION by Skrxlla (found on Artlist). The first thing I thought while listening to the song was how different each verse was. Each one had different instrumentals and beats, which inspired me to use various dance styles throughout the song. I learned Voguing, Popping and House dance moves to help create the choreography. It starts off with Hip-Hop, followed by Vogue, Popping, Afrodance and then House. Brian had a friend, Megan, who was trained in Latin ballroom dance, so she brought her own style to her own part in the choreography as well. We shot our video in front of graffiti walls that we found in a dog park in Ottawa. We started in the early evening and ended about 3-4 hours later when it was already getting dark. It made it hard to shoot because of the lack of light. Plus, we had nowhere to change our outfits (and we had at least 5 outfit changes). On top of that, Megan hurt her hip badly the day before the shoot, so she was unable to dance full out and so we had to end the shoot early. But we still had lots of great footage and Megan said she would shoot more of her part another time.
When I got home, I assembled the footage and made a rough draft out of it. I was still missing Megan’s solo so I didn’t do much with it for the meantime. In the end, they never ended up shooting the rest of the dance, so I put the project aside for a while. Aside from Megan’s solo, I thought it was still lacking something so I didn’t want to post it anywhere until I could figure out how to edit it better. Many months went by and I had pretty much forgotten about our dance video, until I shot another video for school with some friends who were really good at VFX. They had incorporated so many cool effects into their music video and it made me think, “Maybe I could add some VFX to Caution to make it look cooler!” However, I had no idea how to even attempt any of the techniques my friends used for their video, so once again, I put the project on hold.
Many more months went by and I still wanted to figure out what to do with the Caution video. In my third semester of school, we came back to After Effects and started learning motion graphics. That’s when I started getting more invested in VFX. I had also been getting into colour grading in DaVinci Resolve as well, so I immediately thought of colour grading Caution first, especially to fix the footage shot in the dark. I also had a lot of fun adding “makeup” on myself to give me more colour.
Once Caution was colour graded (with a bit of help from my teacher for those dark shots), I brought the project into After Effects and started playing around with it. I had ideas of what I wanted it to look like, but I had no idea how to execute most of it. I watched several tutorials on YouTube and even looked up what other effects AE has to offer. I made a whole list of things I wanted to try out. So for about 3 months, that’s what I focused on. It took a lot of time to finish this dance video, but I am pretty happy with the outcome. I can definitely say I learned A LOT, and I want to keep learning so I can keep creating cool dance videos in the future.
Although it took over a year, our Caution music video is finally complete!