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.