Behind the scenes

This was my first attempt in choreographing and performing in a music video so for me it was a very interesting experience. What made matters so much harder was that as Alex was out of the country at the time, I had to put the choreography together on my own.

As we were solely dancing to the none lyrical parts, I had one minute of choreography to prepare, with only three two-hour sessions to teach it to our dancers and prepare them for the shoot.

To give you an idea on how we normally put a piece of choreography together, I will start by explaining our usual method. We initially start by spending weeks listening to the music, over and over again, before we even start working on it. During that process, we are trying to listen to everything contained within that track, the phrasing, instrumentation, the subtle accents, hits and breaks. This also aids us to visualize the show before putting movement to the music. Often, we need to edit the music, so during this process, we will cut sections out and by the time we are ready to choreograph, we have a cut we like and already have ideas on the form that the piece will take.

Then comes the hard part; we begin by looping a section of the song, around 10 seconds or so, and playing it repeatedly, trying to fit movement in sync with the music. We dance that part over and over again; until we are 100% sure that it represents the music accurately. We then move on to the next 10 seconds or so and keep repeating until we reach the end of the song. Even though this sounds easy, there are often several parts, especially the breaks, that we can spend a lot of time perfecting, making sure it depicts the music exactly how we visualized it.

Video technology plays an important part at this stage, enabling us to see the results as we go along, often reviewing footage a day or so later, so we can get a fresh take on things. As we gain more experience, we are finding that we have to change less and less, but in the early days, we would see the footage, decide we hated it and would have to completely rework those sections.

Preperation

As I had been given the music Friday, one week before we were going to shoot, I had to compress the weeks of listening into 24 hours, and as the music wasn’t salsa, I had to find a way of making our style fit. Saturday was the team’s first practice and beforehand I needed to prepare as much of the choreography as I could, so as not to waste time. I picked out a footwork section in the first half, which I could prepare on my own, while the partnerwork was far more challenging, having to mentality piece it together in my head, which was totally new to me.

Fifteen minutes with one of the girls, before Saturdays practice, and a few adjustments later, I had the first half of the piece finished, then set about teaching it to the team. One of the advantages of having worked with the dancers for a couple of years is that they are starting to pick up our choreography in a short space of time.

Sunday went pretty much like Saturday, although I did meet with one of the girls to finish the choreography that afternoon, as the last thing I needed was to waste practice time that evening. So after two practices, I had managed to finish the choreography and teach it to the dancers.

In the past, we have always spent weeks if not months perfecting our choreographies so this is where the challenge started; and with most of the dancers working throughout the week, we only had an hour on Wednesday evening with half of them and two hours on Friday, the day of the shoot.

The Day of the Shoot

This was going to be a long day, especially knowing that some of the team members didn’t know the choreography well enough, so an early start was in order to bring the weakest members up to speed before meeting the rest of the team for the last rehearsal. This being our first music video, we didn’t really know what to expect, so the immediate priority was to get the choreography as clean as possible in the small amount of time we had.

With all the final touches completed and armed with enough Red Bull to keep us energized, we arrived at the studio ready to film. Our first challenge was to go through the arduous task of waiting for the girls to finish their hair and makeup, before finally being ready to start.

Our parts were in sections, so we could record each segment separately, which put less pressure on us having to remember the entire choreography in one go. The filming required us to repeat each section over and over again, while they captured us from wide and close up positions. It was exhausting and incredibly hard to maintain the energy, especially as we needed to look happy throughout to fit the theme.

All in all it was a lot of fun and even though there was immense amount of pressure during the week to get this prepared in such a short period of time, it turned out really well on the day, and all of us had a lot of fun filming it. It is incredible to think how much work goes into producing a clip which ultimately ends up being less than three minutes long. Now comes the worst part, waiting to see the finished product!!!!