That’s all, folks!

We’re done! That’s it! The final cut of Body Language has been exported to QuickTime and is due to be handed in and graded by the powers that be/our awesome professor tomorrow morning!

The documentary will premiere/be screened at the Park School of Communications Auditorium between the hours of 2 and 4 p.m. tomorrow, Wednesday May 9.

After the premiere, we will upload the final cut (which comes out to about 12 spectacular minutes!) to YouTube and post it on to the site! Thanks for keeping up with CouchBoat Productions. It has been a fantastic semester for both of us, and a wonderful, fun and beautiful documentary-making experience.

The official Body Language trailer is up!

Click on the “Trailer” link on the top navigation bar to view the trailer for our wonderful documentary! It poses the questions that we hope to answer in the final cut!

Production Update – Week 7

Yet another busy week for CouchBoat Productions! This week, we traveled outside of Ithaca, to the smaller neighboring town of Lansing, to join Professor Lee and her husband (a post-doctorate veterinary researcher at Cornell) for some Korean food, good times and a tour of their awesome newlyweds’ abode. We have some shots of the couple cooking (their favorite weekend activity) and learned a little bit about their family histories and how their lives have changed since moving to the United States from South Korea.

Isabel, like a real trooper, conducted the last shoot on her own. She did one final interview with Professor Lee in her dance studio at the end of her Modern Dance II class, which we have been observing and shooting all semester. The interview served as a great wrap-up to the production phase of this documentary, as the contents of the interview ended up including Professor Lee’s philosophy in a nutshell, and a powerful description of how much dance means to her in her life.

Heads up: The trailer will be live and on this site next Tuesday, April 24!

Production Update – Weeks 5 & 6

Now that CouchBoat productions has nearly exclusively moved into post-production mode, more and more time is being spent, editing and sifting through our hours of footage, in the couchboat that spawned this fabulous production company.

These past two weeks were spent compiling a tentative paper edit for the documentary, and creating the first rough cut. We were surprised as to some of the creative turns that the rough cut took. We suppose such lightbulbs only go on when you see the footage in front of you and have it all lined up in Final Cut. In short, the rough cut is very different from the version we planned out in the paper edit, but we’re very pleased with the cut’s story line and aesthetics. We’re excited to screen the rough cut and get feedback from our peers, and we’re doubly excited that we have about a month to iron out the documentary’s wrinkles and make it as pretty as possible!

This week will bring one final shoot, in which we will conduct a sort of retrospective interview with Bo, and do one or two more interviews with her Modern Dance II students, who have all been so kind as to let us intrude on their dance space with our camera equipment and endless questions.

Another production still

Professor Lee’s Modern Dance II class engaging in some serious stretching, an important part of every dance class and rehearsal!

Production Update – Week 4

This past week, following a fabulous spring break, CouchBoat Productions swung right back into action. This week was spent sifting through the nearly 2 hours of footage that has been captured in the first three weeks of production and working on a tentative EDL/paper edit for the documentary. It’s been lovely revisiting the rehearsals and performances that we’ve shot so far, and finding that we have a lot of excellent, creatively shot footage with which to amp up the aesthetics of the documentary.

Now that we’ve gone through all of our footage, we are in the process of planning our remaining two or three shoots (depending on if Professor Lee has another performance before our rough cut is due). Today, we will be attending one more of her modern dance classes, and interviewing several of her students about her teaching style.

 

A still photo from the documentary!

Ithaca College dance professor Bo Kyung Lee performing at the Cornell Locally Grown Dance Festival on March 8. This photo is of the beginning pose in her modern dance piece “Unquenchable Thirst.”

Production Update — Week 3

This was the big week for us– Bo’s Locally Grown Dance Festival performance. It was breathtaking to say the least. She performed a 14 minute solo in the Ithaca College faculty component of the performance. It took place in the Schwartz Center in Collegetown, a beautiful building with an even more beautiful stage. And Bo really lit it up.

We arrived early before the show started to shoot Bo warming up. She found an empty studio upstairs from the theater and began her warm up process, which entails barre work and stretching followed by going over her routine in its entirety and then working on specific parts. We ran into some technical snares (as per usual), when we realized that there was still footage on our SD card from a previous shoot on a GY-700 and since we were now using a JVC-100 we couldn’t delete it, at least not to our knowledge. Luckily, after frantically running around looking for a computer, we found a nice guy who let us use his to delete the footage. A serious word of caution about making sure your SD card is empty.

After Bo warmed up we talked to her about how she was feeling. She said she was calm, and that in order to have a good performance one has to be calm. We followed her down to the green room where she continued to get ready and talked to the other dancers, including Lindsay Gilmour, the modern teacher who Bo is subbing for. A few minutes before the show started we left Bo and took to our spots on the balcony where we set up the camera. We had a nice view of the whole stage and practiced some panning and zooming action and also got some shots of the theater.

Bo was the third to perform and the audience loved it. Overall it was an amazing show. Feedback about Bo’s performance was completely congratulatory. I talked to some of the people I dance with and they were in awe of the way Bo moves, from her quick yet fluid movements to her simple yet strong stage presence.

Now we can check the performance off our list and continue to shoot Bo’s modern class and do some more interviews. In the upcoming weeks we plan to get interviews from those who know Bo, like her students and her husband. We are interested in what they have to say, and I’m sure they will be willing to talk–after the performance, Bo was all anyone could talk about.

Production Update – Week 2

After an extremely busy first week of production, we took things a bit slower in week two. We had one shoot this week, on Monday, February 27. We returned to the modern dance class that Bo teaches through the Ithaca College dance department, and captured footage of her teaching her students a new dance.

The new choreography was thuggish… literally! The beginning of the dance symbolized the cocking and loading of a gun, and the rest of the dance dramatically depicted the dangers and fears that go along with living a life of crime. In the interview that we conducted last week, Bo mentioned that American students, while technically less solid than Korean students (in her opinion), are far better at improvising and adding emotion to their dancing. After her students mastered the incredibly acrobatic choreography, she told them to improvise and create characters for the choreography. The dance studio suddenly turned into a theatre, and everyone played the part of both actor and dancer.

We shot with a GY-700 and a phantom-powered boom mic. We’re confident that we have all of the basic shots from rehearsals and her dance classes, so we took the opportunity to get creative and capture shots from some interesting angles, and take some that incorporated the dance studio’s large mirror.

Next week is expected to be just as busy as week one. The Cornell Locally Grown Dance Festival occupies the second half of the week, so we will be headed to shoot Bo Kyung’s performance on Thursday night. We also plan to shoot at one of her final rehearsals and conduct an interview about her rehearsal methods and her thoughts on her performance.

CouchBoat has a logo!

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