Location: Budapest - Hungary
Year: 2013
Mission: Following a day in someone's life.
Duration: 3 min
Production: Docnomads http://www.docnomads.eu/ - Second semester excercise.
Színház- és Filmművészeti Egyetem
Tamás AlmásiTamás Almási
Tamás Almási
I was new to Budapest & through someone I met recently in the documentary fan club, I got to know about African dancing classes, I joined immediately as I love learning different kind of dances specially the ones with choreography. My instructor was Valencia a dancer from Barbados who has moved to Budapest and trying to dig her way and build her career as a dancer with a different style.
In Docnomads the mission was assigned to me and Nayeem Mahbub from Bangladesh http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3517031/
Nayeem Mahbub
We were in trouble and Nayeem panicked, he even thought of explaining the situation to our supervisors and ask for postponing the delivery time of the film.
I asked him to wait and worked on two possibilities, I tried to convince Valencia to reconsider and promised her not to feel our existence in her life, and I also contacted other dancers just in case.
Luckily Valencia reconsidered and she was so open and understanding during the shooting.
Me shooting in the dancing class
We were trying to show the contradiction between her real shy, calm personality and her shining stunning personality on stage when the spirit of dance transform her completely.
We began shooting in her dancing classes in the morning, then her first day in a backstage theater where, she was dancing for the first time and was improvising and interacting with the audience.
Nayeem suggested using the 35 mm lens which gave a blurry image made it seem like a dream.
We used two DSLR cameras, Cannon 60D & Nikon D5100, sometimes the two cameras were shooting each other, due to the lack of planning.
The editing stage was full of fights and compromising as usual when two directors are directing the same piece of work, but it was a pleasure working with Nayeem and I learnt from his editing skills, and for the first time I experienced the feeling of editing from the point of view of a director where I was just suggesting the cuts without the need of touching the computer, the experience was very useful & I discovered that working with an editor is not a bad idea as I always thought, it may be more inspiring as you will have two opinions.
The night dancing atmosphere was overwealming that we had to get rid of the morning danincg class in the editing.
We received good feedback for this excercise.
