Trying out Smoke & Fabric

We booked a studio to test the projections on smoke and fabric and see how it appears. We searched and used different images and dance videos from youtube to project into these materials. The projected image into the fabric becomes distorted as we try to wave it and also makes it appear like anything on the image floats like a ghost. The smoke also absorbs the colour of the projected image and creates this 3D-looking space between the projector and the fabric.

Individual Side Project

Old idea

What I’m planning for my other smaller project is to create a short dance video for about 1-2 minutes long. This video is about using my own body’s movement to create a sound by interacting with objects around me through dance. I’m planning to create an instrumental sound piece using sound recordings I gather making my different types of sounds such as stomps, claps and others etc. 

The way I will show this is by having many screen on just one screen that looks like a collage of different video clips put together. Each of these individual screens will show one instrument such as hands that clap, click and knock, feet that stomp and slide and other sources of the sound. One of the screens will be my whole body performing a dance piece reacting to the instruments. 

What influenced me is that whenever I perform a dance piece, I notice that there are rhythmic sounds I produce. I also have the habit on knocking on the tables, stomping on the floor and make unique beats.


I have researched a performance that included using the body as an instrument.

This is an interesting dance piece that uses bodies to create instrumental music with different rhythms by clapping and stomping. 

New idea

My new idea is to look at body movements, I looked at animation of the body and the process of moving. That influenced me to look at stages of motion. 

I looked at rigid movements of a human body which I chose for my piece for the side project and looked at ways I would be able to do it. I looked at T-ara’s music video intro as an example of a fixed or solid movement.

Final Idea

My final idea became about the solid movement of the body. I also made a list of words to associate it with to help me create the piece. I looked at the word ‘line’ because it reminds me of the movement. I also looked at shapes particularly polygons and it reminded me of simple geometric shapes from our theory lesson featuring the cubist paintings like Marcel Duchamp’s

‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2’ where it shows movement

interpreted. 

Final Idea

I also thought about the actions and setting, I looked back at fixed shapes and I imagined it inside a room. I also imagined ‘simple’ so I removed most decorative pieces and accessories in my room. The actions I also imagined is to include the movement how I would act in the room and make use of the objects around such as the bed, the mirror, the desk or the window.  What I did is that using myself as a subject, ‘I added the solid movement rule’ to the actions I will perform like when we were having the early workshops from the term

During filming, I placed the camera in different locations in the room to get many different perspectives to choose from. I also relied on myself for capturing my actions which made the process quite difficult. I made sure that I was very slow moving, pausing each movement I make and it took quite a lot of time to film a scene due to the speed. 

I edited on Adobe Premiere Pro. When I was editing the film, I changed the speed fast making my movement look like the actual speed in reality but get the robotic effect.

Our Group Dance Video Idea

We have been asked to produce a dance video in which we will be able to collaborate with dancer’s’, we will get to choreograph, shoot and edit this video to produce a suitable final piece running for about 7-10 minutes.

Our aim is to touch on ideas around oppression of women in a patriarchal society, enforcing the idea about dominant male figures in society and the media, thus establishing how much control they have. We will show these themes throughout the dance piece through the means of sound, prop’s, style (dancer and setting), ambience and dance.

We will shoot our dance video in a studio because we feel it is a suitable setting for our production. We wish to have a controlled space in which we can use a smoke machine to give the performance not only ambiance, but a substance to project a moving image onto. Through our dance video the dancer will display a variety of dance types, all drawing from our own ideas, by transitioning them from one to the other. Each element will be significant in the dance video to symbolise the concept of the piece, thus the understanding of the audience.

The opening sequence will be the most important in establishing the concepts behind our dance video. In this sequence the dancer will perform in a way that will establish the styles of dance that she will employ throughout the rest of the video. At first she will perform a robotic dance that will symbolise a sense of control before the dance evolves in to increasingly more fluid forms of movement. We also wish to replace the dancer entirely at some point in the video with the projected image of the dancer instead, so that the projection now becomes the main focus. The combining of this projected image and the smoke will also provide a cinematic and surrealist feel to the atmospherics of the piece. 

Using Fabric and Smoke in Dance

We were searching for different materials to project our image on and we thought of using smoke which can absorb light. We saw that image is projected well to newly formed smoke than to smoke that is already spread which can fade the image.

An example of a projection on smoke found in Youtube.

We also thought of using a very light fabric which can also distort the image, that will work like the 'newly formed smoke as it will not spread out.