Graduate Student, Filmmaker. Los Angeles, New York, United States.
#FlashbackFriday #FBF Do you remember our Community Spotlight with Christina Hodel?
Christina Hodel is in pre-production for her graduate thesis film which will be told entirely through tap dancing. Over the summer Christina paired with San Francisco-based master tap dancer and choreographer Sam Weber in preparation for her digital experimental short to be shot in Los Angeles this fall. “Tap dancing is often considered silly and uncinematic since the focus is on the feet, but I want to show just how expressive and uniquely beautiful this dance form can be on film,” she says.
Christina looks forward to a challenging shoot in which all of her 90 plus shots are dolly or jib shots. “From my research and own experiences I’ve found there is a different way to film dance compared to regular blocking. A moving camera will give the audience the feeling they too are dancing with the image on screen.”
Christina found it more challenging than she imagined to direct her own dance teacher who plays the lead and who choreographed the entire film. “It is unusual to find a dance film director who doesn’t choreograph the dancing for the movie,” she says. For Christina’s thesis, she had to write the script, the choreographer had to interpret it as a dance for the camera, and as director Christina had to interpret his choreography back into shots and angles that would tell a story. “As a director I’m used to working with actors. It was a little challenging working with another dancer even though I too am a dancer. I asked Sam [the choreographer/dancer] what he needed to understand my script and turn it into dance. Finally he said ‘music’. I’m used to putting in music during post, but right away I had original music composed that set the tone I had in mind, and Sam worked out an ingenius dance, and the movie started coming together then.”
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