Curse You, Copyrighted Music!!!

Ah yes, I have arrived to arguably one of the most frustrating parts of this project, attempting to get the rights to use big name songs in my production, but more realistically, when that fails, searching for good royalty free music to use. My frustrations in this feat lie in the fact that I have, essentially since the beginning of this project known which songs I've wanted to use. There's three of them, and although I didn't know exactly where they would fit in before, now that I'm editing, I do!!! And they would be so perfect!!! The three songs I'm talking about are: What I Did For Love from the musical A Chorus Line, New York, New York by Frank Sinatra, and finally, On Broadway by George Benson. I have been attempting for a while to get the rights to these songs, but something always goes wrong. Nevertheless, here I am, basically pleading to the companies that own these tracks to let me use them for an innocent school project, either hoping they forgot about my previous attempts or that by some miracle they will find it in their hearts to help out an amateur documentary maker like myself.

Being the pragmatic person I am however, I realize it's time to start looking for other options. I've began searching a plethora of royalty free music archives and honestly, doing this last year really was not as complicated as I'm finding it to be now. The problem this year is that I'm looking for a very specific style and type of music that, as I'm learning, is not greatly abundant in these archives. Unlike last year when I just needed some soft, yet edgy alternative/ folk music, a relatively popular genre already, this year I'm searching for old school Broadway musical theater meets jazz or something in between. I've found a few options I think I could make work, but nothing that screams to me, yes!!! please use me!!! you need me!!! and really, that's the feeling I wanna get when I find this music. I'm obviously going to keep searching until I find something I'm happy with, but until then, please pray to the Music Licensing Gods above.

First Position

As I'm look through the footage I have for my documentary, I'm realizing that I have so much great content than can most definitely surpass five minutes. The challenge I'm facing is figuring out how to organize all this content in order to create a clean and tightly edited piece which tells a cohesive story. I think what I;m must struggling with is how to organize my interviews; I don't to have one section per main subject I interviewed, but I also don't want the interviews to intertwine in a way that is sloppy and confusing. While thinking about this I realized that in the busy weeks leading up to States and filming (three weeks of daily after school rehearsal and show week for my school show) I never had much time to watch any actual documentaries for inspiration, so I decided to do that now in order to gain some perspective on how exactly I may like to edit my piece. I took to my trusty Netflix account and decided to watch First Position, a documentary as described by IMBd as the story of "six young dancers from around the world as they prepare for the Youth America Grand Prix, one of the most prestigious ballet competitions in the world." Below is the trailer. 

I thought First Position would be the perfect documentary to watch because of all the similarities it has to mine: it's about a beautiful art form of performance, it follows an important competition and event pertaining to this craft, and documents several young dancers who are passionate about the subject. The main subjects of this documentary are all independent dancers and have no relation to one another other than their hard work, dedication, and the passion they possess for this craft. For this reason, however, this documentary doesn't focus on the bonds ballet creates in the way that may documentary will with theater, rather, because of the immensely different backgrounds of all the dancers, it shows how ballet is a powerful force affecting individuals all around the world from different cultures and histories, which is just as powerful a message. Although First Position is a lot like Thespians in that it focuses a lot on the preparation and actual competition (if full length, mine

The promotion poster for First Position 

would do the same but alas) I still managed to get some great ideas from it. For example, like in the trailer, the graphic match they do of the little boy twirling in his room to twirling on stage is something I would like to do using archive footage of the performances we brought to state with the footage of the actual performance at state in order to show the growth and prosperity of our troupe. As far as the interviews go, this documentary did dedicate a piece of time to each subject and then go back and forth between all of them for the most part, but there were also times where different interviews would collide if all the subjects were talking about the same thing. I love this because it shows the universality of the triumphs and challenges ballerinas and ballet dancers face, no matter how different they are. I definitely plan to incorporate this into my editing.

Drawing from another aspect of this documentary, I have also taken inspiration from it's promotional poster. Again like in Thespians we see the usage of back light it forming the silhouette of a dancer in beautiful, majestic form. Seeing this trend in yet another artistic documentary is slowly but surely reassuring me to go with an idea like the one I talked about in my last post. Something about hiding the identity of the person on the cover and making the craft so universal to performers everywhere... I just love it.

Also, completely unrelated to my project, but still very cool: I found on YouTube that one of the main subjects from this documentary gave a TedTalk sharing the story of her childhood and (spoiler alert) how she ended up getting offered a spot in a professional ballet company. Her name is Michaela DePrince and her talk is called "From 'Devil Child' to Star Ballerina". It's not surprising to me that she was invited to give a TedTalk because in the actual documentary, she touches on her background and it was truly and incredible story, I'm glad I got to hear more. To just give you some incentive to go view the talk, Michaela was born in Sierra Leon, West Africa, four years after the awful civil war with a skin condition known as vitiligo. Her parents were killed by the rebels and she was put in an orphanage where she endured some terrible and traumatic experiences before coming to know the life that she lives today. It's a remarkable story considering where she started to where she ended up and the fact that just by looking at her dance in the documentary, you would have never suspected a thing. I definitely recommend checking it out as well as First Position all together.

Wrapping up Filming and Poster Planning

The past few days have been a crazy ride filled with performances, music, theater, filming, and little to no sleep. That being said they have been some of the most fun of the year thus far and I'm a little sad that their over. Like I've said before, Thespians has been an integral part of my high school experience and with the conclusion of States, it's now actually over. I'm a little nostalgic for sure. But this only further validates my inclination to document the experience because at the end of this entire project, I will hopefully have an incredible piece that I will be proud of and is truly representative of the overall experience.

Throughout the festival I was able to film and capture all the footage I needed. Of course I haven't began editing yet so I can't say for certain that I will not be missing any footage, but just looking over everything I captured, I'm fairly confident that I will have more than enough for my piece to come together. The only thing I still want to film are a few more interviews with members from my troupe just for the sake of sound bridges and being able to flawlessly move forward my story through the voice of others. Once those view interviews are over, which I will take care of today and tomorrow, that will be a wrap for all of my filming!!!

Staying true to the schedule I created for myself at the beginning of the entire project, this week will be completely dedicated to editing. Because I have a Windows laptop, I don't have access to iMovie other than the limited version that is provided on iPhones and iPads, and I absolutely do not want to use MovieMaker because as I've learned from experience, that's not the best, so for editing, I plan to try out Filmora, which has been requested by many of my peers, or look into other editing software.

I plan to edit this week mostly at home and especially during the weekend when I can dedicate my entire day to this endeavor and throw myself in full force, so to not waste time, while I have the opportunity to work on my documentary in school this week, I plan to begin research on and exploring the best ways to create a promotional picture for my project. Already I found a great article from the New York Film Academy's website discussing tips and guidelines for creating promotional posters and giving examples for creators to possibly gain ideas ad get inspired. They list a set of questions and ideas creators should initially consider before attempting to create a poster, these being them along with my personal responses:

• If you haven’t already, create a mind-map of your target audience and the message you want to send out... My target audience is young adults to adults in the artistic community who I'm trying to impact with the message of how theater builds relationships and community.

• With the above in mind, think of some layout designs i.e. fonts, images, colors etc. that make your poster really pop... As for as color schemes, that will be dependent on whatever images I end up choosing and font is something I will also consider later. I'm mainly concerned right now with what image will be on my poster. Right now I have three images I took in Tampa that I'm drawing inspiration from, however, I'm not sure If I will end up using any of them in the final product, I may have to recreate something. 

  

  I love the idea of something like this because it is simple with only a few colors and I think would look very clean and pleasing to the eye. Not only that, but most importantly, it conveys the sense of a human bond established in the theater and a sense of emotion felt just before going on stage. I love the silhouettes because it sort of masks the identity of those featured in the picture and allows the audience to put their face to the emotion felt by the picture.  If anything, I think I could edit it a bit and this image would be great to use. The only thing is, even though there are actually four people hugging in the picture, it seems like only two, so this may seem to convey a smaller scale relationship than the one I'm showing. The good thing about this is that my school has a pretty nice theater where I have access to that a shot like this would be relatively simple to orchestrate; I just love this stage because it is backstage of the Straz Theater which is so much larger and more professional than our armature theater at school, but with angles and editing, I think I would be able to make the smaller theater look just as impressive.

  
  

  

  This is a shot of our entire troupe at States in front of our hotel. I don't know that I would be inclined to use this image, simply because my troupe, though the center of my documentary, is more of a case study for much greater themes and a much larger message. It's also a very simple picture that to me doesn't seem very professional or intriguing for a poster that may be the first impression of my final piece, but again, it will serve me for inspiration and reminder of the story I am trying to get across. 

  
  

  

  This is the marquee outside the Tampa Theater, one of the top venues for the Florida Thespian State festival, and one of BBC's top "10 most beautiful cinemas in the world."  The theater is a beauty not only on the outside, but also on the inside with intricate and exquisite design capturing the true power of a different form of art. I think also with the clean background this is a pleasing imagine to look at overall, however, it doesn't scream Florida Thespian State Festival!!! It really just says, hey look it's the Tampa Theater. Unless you knew about the location of States you would not necessarily relate this theater to the festival, but, I don't know, I guess I just like the image, the lights, and the message of "Welcome To The Show!", perhaps I will be able to make some use of it. 

• Research, research, research! The Internet is a wonderful thing and can give you an endless amount of information on different color schemes, font sizes or image placement and what they connote in order to send the right message... more work on this will come when its time to actually focus on the poster and website. Until then, these are just some off my brain storms!