Event: Dance Shoot Dance

Dance Shoot Dance was a night to remember. It was a textbook example of what can be accomplished when passionate people work together to create an experience.

Light Station director, Than Niles, breaks down what it is like to shoot a controlled narrative in a live event environment:

Than Niles – When I was in high school, there was a class project that was supposed to be about the Great Gatsby. I used it as an excuse to make a depression era gangster film with duct tape tommy guns and airsoft pistols. The plot revolved around a huge party (There’s the Gatsby part) that descended into wise guy bullet hell (much less Gatsby).

To create the scene, we reached out to our classmates and threw a costume party where we filmed what we needed throughout the night while everyone enjoyed themselves.

When we did Poems (from the Dust), one of our biggest scenes in terms of extras was a packed club that our main characters attended. Though we had more resources to pull this off, the spirit of the event was very much the same as our Gatsby party: throw a real night at a real venue with real DJ’s and capture what we needed in a controlled chaos, organic shooting style.

I would not recommend this approach for set pieces or anything with dialogue but for our montage, this allowed our actors to experience the event more naturally, which created some fantastic improvised moments that brought the sequence to life beyond the storyboards.

I learned so much about managing large numbers of people from the craziness of that night and the weeks leading up to it. It would not have been possible without all the cool people who believed in the project and the event, who gave their time to hit it out of the park.