This project aims at integrating knowledge learned during the first part of the semester (video & sound class) with recent concepts on stop motion animation. The concrete idea is to create a short film about Tango that contains a stop motion animation segment in it.
Outline of storyboard
The story borrows elements from the previous assignment (animated mannequins walking up the stairs and dancing) and continues on my previous interest in approaching Tango as cinematic theme for further exploration.
The story focuses on a female dancer upset by the behavior of her partner on the social dance floor (who danced more than 3 tandas in a row with a women different than her) and as result decided to leave the event abruptly. The first scene (opens) with ambient sound from the street as the women runs into her building crying. The scene has no visuals, only sound from the street, the door opening and closing, woman crying and her partner shouting and calling her from a few meters behind. In the second scene, the visual image appear and focuses on the women hurriedly walking up the stairs while crying. During the third scene, the emphasis focuses on him holding his mobile phone desperately calling her to let him in into the building. He is outside, holding in one hand his phone and on the other hand his dancing shoes. She finally answered his phone call, the camera focuses on him talking, the sound focuses only on ambient sound and his words appears as text on the screen. Fourth scene/fifth scene, she is upset with his words on the phone and throw her dancing shoes at him from the balcony (or entrance door of the building). In scene six, he gets upset at her behavior and throw his own dancing shows to the ground as well, leaving the scene soon after that. Both pairs of shoes remains on the ground, alone, without their dancers. Suddenly, shoes start dancing a tango song on their own and thus scenes seven and eight are completely composed of stop motion animation. Scene nine focuses on her walking outside of her building to get her dancing shoes on the ground (the shoes no longer dancing by their own). The camera is set to perform a 'tilt shot' and closing with a 'close up' and/or 'cowboy shot'. In the last part, scene ten, only his shoes are shown left on the ground, nobody picking them, with the film ending there.
Implementation of stop motion animation
The actors assigned to perform the piece are proficient tango dancers, and they will be asked to perform a classic tango move ('la salida to the cross'). In each step the dancers will stop, and extra pairs of shoes will be place on each dancers toes position for a still image to be taken with a digital camera. The process will repeat throughout each step of the tango sequence in order to create the animation as the end result.
Sketch of storyboard
