Back in March and April, I announced the Princess Dancer video project. I went on and on about how exciting it was to be working with professionals, how dizzying the days leading to the shoot were, how heady being on set was. Well a couple of months ago I kind of lost interest. The footage was in the can and it was up to the editors and the director to make something of it. To be sure I was still working with the dancers to do a swing presentation for the video’s premiere at the local festival, but really my part was done.
Now I’m excited all over again. The video is finally finished. We have a book trailer! It’s short but lovely. We presented it at the festival two weeks ago. The dancers got themselves together just in time and they looked mahvelous.
You will remember Princess Dancer–the story–was published in BVC’s Beyond Grimm anthology earlier this year. I had hoped we’d have the trailer done close to launch date, but everyone was working for gratis and so stuff got done during studio off hours. To say the least the process has been s-l-o-o-o-o-w. Ours is a no budget type project. We had a lot of problems to solve during the shoot. Likewise the editing was more complicated than what I thought it would be. That’s my excuse: unplanned for circumstances.
But it’s done now and is available for viewing online. I’ll be posting this on all the book trailer sites, YouTube, Vimeo, and anywhere else that will have us. Hopefully it will go out into the Intersphere and live a happy and fulfilling life.
Credit for the final product goes entirely to Kevin Hackenberg’s team at Get-Kinetic in Philly. Applause! Applause!
The swing dance exhibition at the festival’s opening reception was a whole other ordeal. That is the way with live performance: it is always an ordeal. This particular ordeal required a flash mob in an art gallery. Not only were our people forced to dance in the midst of a crowd, they were continually reminded about not knocking over the art or scuffing the paintings. Not the kind of circumstances that promote going with the flow with this wild, infectious music. To make it worse, the poor kids only got one rehearsal in the gallery and they didn’t know what they’d be dancing around until just before the performance. This required last minute choreography tweaks to bring it together. The kids came through, though, the reception was fantastic and no one got hurt.
Even though I brought my video camera, I have no footage of this one time only performance. You see, there wasn’t a lot of food at the reception, but there was a lot of free booze. A couple of the dancers were late in getting there and so I was pacing much of the night, but I wasn’t pacing the alcohol. When it came time to shoot, well, let’s just say I had a great time.
So what’s next for our little project? Well, Tracy and Kevin are psyched and want to see if we can flesh it out into a full-bodied indie feature. We’ll huddle, come up with a script and treatment, see if we can get some money. Is this an HBO special, a prime time movie of the week, a webseries? Who knows. All I know is that we’re embarking on the long, dark road to independent feature funding. Pray for me.
Sue Lange
Princess Dancer is available right here at good ol’ BVC in the Beyond Grimm e-anthology of updated Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
