Voluntary Caesura, A Dance Film, Part I: Production Stills

December 21, 2016

As long-time readers may know, I have had the privilege & pleasure of working with Coriolis Dance for years, now. When Christin Call contacted me to ask if I would like to do on set production stills and behind-the-scenes images of her dance film, I was all in. I’ve always been fascinated by process as well as the result, and at any type of performance I’ll be looking at lighting or sound rigs during intermission, and I love every chance I get to shoot tech and dress rehearsals, or live performances from the wings. Add the opportunity to work in the company of this wonderful team of people, well, the only questions were “where and when?”

Most of the filming was done in two long days at the Great Hall in Greenlake, just north of Seattle: it is a beautiful, fantastic, open space with huge windows. For most of both days we had a high overcast sky which provided even, steady lighting through the windows all day long in the Hall. Beautiful light for both video and stills! I fell in love with the space immediately. This is one of the first ‘test’ images I made that first early morning:

The full team: Christin, Katherine Grace Murphy, Joshua Dent, Cainan Martens, Lauren Hlubny, Dani Norberg, Natascha Greenwalt, Marissa Quimby, and Paul Joppa. A stellar group of talented creatives, and I was there, too!

Each day we had the de rigueur professional call sheets and shot lists. As Josh’s beautiful, haunting cello soundtrack had already been recorded, the filming was to by synced to it, and no formal audio was being captured. This opened up many more possibilities for me, as I did not need to have a fully silenced camera (high end ‘mufflers’ for DLSRs are both expensive and awkward to use), nor really any silencing at all. Cainan Martens was especially generous, and briefed me on his camera moves and fields of view before each take: we could then coordinate either a place that I could shoot from, or a path I could move along with him during filming. Some of the ‘camera choreography’ was so dynamic that I HAD to move with him during the the take in order to stay out of the shot. In the full two days of filming at the Great Hall, I can count on one hand the number of times the shot required me to be entirely out of the room, and he was helpful and patient with my nearly constant shadowing. So my opportunities to photograph the team in action were many, with multiple takes of of each shot. As the hours went on of shooting, holding my fairly heavy camera to my eye, and trailing (sometimes very rapidly) about two steps behind Cainan, I occasionally found an opportunity to shoot from a seated position for a bit of rest. As we approached the end of each day, getting up off the floor seemed to take a LOT more time…. By the time we loaded out, getting home, uploading and backing up images, these were 12-14 hour days. Exhausting & exhilarating, and so much fun!

Here, I have presented some images of the performances during the filming days at the Great Hall. Behind the Scenes Images will be in Part 2 of this post, but for now you can see more images in this gallery. Please consider supporting Coriolis Dance with a tax deductible donation as they enter their 9th Season of wonderful creativity. Don’t miss the trailer for the film at the end of this post!

Voluntary Caesura: Full Cast & Credits
Christin Call – Director, Choreographer, Cast
Cainan Martens – Director of Photography
Lauren Hlubny – Assistant Director
Katherine Grace Murphy – Cast, Producer
Dani Norberg – Lighting Designer
Natascha Greenwalt and Marissa Quimby – Set Dressers
Joshua Dent – Original Music, Cast

production-stills-voluntary-caesura-2nd-delivery-bret-doss-2016-05

We did get some ‘sun breaks’ in the overcast on the second afternoon, which coincidentally suited some of the shots very nicely:

Christin Call -- image © Bret Doss All Rights Reserved

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Voluntary Caesura, A Dance Film, Part I: Production Stills

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