The Vaguely Dissatisfied Girlfriend

Something New For The Resume

Mar/04/2006 22:29

For the last 6 months I have been working on a series of images that were to be used as projections during my friend Dana's new dance work. I have been editing fun home videos for the last 5 years but this was serious. I could ruin someone's 15 year career as a dancer/choreographer if I did not do it right. Well last night was the performance and as far as I know Dana's good reputation is still intact.

The process was interesting. The piece was partly inspired by a world war II love story by Marguerite Duras. I searched the National Archives web site for images of war and death and planes. I video-taped the dancers at one point and did a lot of Google image searches. I put together a lot of little videos for Dana to look at and eventually we decided to use the still images from the National Archives, images of telegrams I found on Google, and some film clips of war planes flying in formation and of typewriters being typed on. The images appeared at the beginning and then towards the end of the piece totalling about 7 minutes. The whole piece was about 75 minutes long.

A highlight of the process was going to the National Archives storage facility to scan and print the original photos. I am now an official reseacher and I have a picture ID that is good for 2 years to prove it.

Here are some fuzzy pictures of the performance with some of my images in the background. I took these during dress rehearsal.