dispatches

The Contradance Calendar March page

 

They say they've been dancing in Nelson for 200 years. It feels completely true, regardless of the actual historical facts of the matter. If the heart and soul of traditional contra dance lives anywhere, it is in Nelson, New Hampshire.

 This little town hall, in a flyspeck of a village on the top of a mountain, is the Mecca of contra dance that every good dancer needs to visit one in his or her lifetime. Do it in the winter, when the students and the summer people are gone. Go in on a deep, below-zero night, change out of your winter layers (though not all of them, the hall is still chilly), bang the snow off your boots. If you're early, Lisa will be concluding the musicians slow tunes class. The dancers will drift in, singly, a couple, a family (there are always kids at the dance). Someone puts out the fiddle case for the $2 admission. Whoever volunteered the previous week to make the brownies or cookies is laying them out on the table. Harvey shows up with his fiddle, sits on the fold-up chair on the stage. Bob sits at the piano. "Line up for a contra," barks Don, in a clipped, Yankee accent. "First dance is Moneymusk."

 Anytime I'm in New England I try to stay over on a Monday and catch the Nelson dance. My first time was in 2003, and I felt like I had entered a slower paced, locavore mode of dancing. Eight years and a half dozen visits later, and it hasn't changed much.

 In this main photo Don Primrose is calling. He tells me the dancers are Jaime Contois and Kirk Dale (if you're wondering, I tried to get hold of everyone who was going to appear prominently in a big photo to get their permission). The small photo in the middle shows Harvey Tolman holding his fiddle in his inimical way, and Bob McQuillen in the background on piano. These musicians are national treasures--click on the links to learn more.

 Here is a video from Nelson that I made in 2008

The making of Fiddling Frog

Fiddling Frog 2012 from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

The Fiddling Frog video is the most ambitious contra video I've made to date, and I couldn't have done this by myself. I'm learning the obvious, that in film production, solo is a harder path.

Michael Baird approached me at Dancing Fool in Seattle last month, with an idea to saturate a dance at the upcoming Fiddling Frog weekend in Pasadena with cameras and specialized gear. He was hoping to really ramp up the production values from the typical contra dance video.

I subsequently decided to attend the dance, and to help manage the production. He had a crew ready to go, and I added my suggestions on how to proceed. I had my 2 Canon 5Ds, one of which I handed off, and a GoPro, which went on a dancer. Michael's colleague Tony had his 2 Canon tape cameras with one on a floor dolly. We gathered footage from several dances on Saturday morning at the Frog, Michael managing one crew, me working alone.

I downloaded all the footage on my MacBook Pro, organized it into folders, and set it to work overnight to convert everything to ProRes (using MPEG Streamclip). I threw everything into a Final Cut 7 sequence, pointed PluralEyes at it, and had a (mostly) synced 2 hour timeline by the time I left. I copied everything (200gb) onto a hard drive for Michael to play with as he saw fit. I was going to see what I could come up with on my own.

I captured sound separately on a Zoom H4N recorder set to 4 channel—2 for a line out from the board, 2 from the onboard microphones. The mix sounded great to my ears, with enough hall ambience to feel the space, and clean capture from the stage. I tossed all the camera sound—it's only used to sync the tracks.

I started with a single timeline with the entire morning's soundtrack. I chopped away all the parts that didn't have video, and the dances that had only one or two cameras on them. Remaining were three dances that had potential. I ended up making a medley of all three.

A contra dance repeats about fifteen times. I only need one or two of those cycles, but I have all the other cycles to draw footage from. Very little of what you see in the final piece is actually in sync with the original music track. What you see in the final is a 3 minute condensation of three and a half hours of footage.

The first task is to cut the music track. I highlight the sequence, turn the volume up, and on every 8th beat I tap the “M” key to leave a marker. A full dance sequence is 8 of those 8 beat marks, and I blade them apart. Then I piece together a music track from those parts, in this case, from six different pieces to make the final track. I'm disregarding the video at this point. At the transitions I tweak down to the single frame level to try and hide the discontinuities.

From there it's a matter of building a believable sequence of dance and music edits in a new Timeline. I edit the footage and throw out everything I know I'm not going to use. I stack the good bits on top of each other in sync and start trimming away Every move in this piece is in the proper sequence in the dance, but none of them happened together. I'm looking for the right rhythm of slow and fast cuts, tight and wide shots, movement that flows from one cut to the next. This is the kind of work where I lose track of time and space, I forget to eat or pee, and I'm about as deeply engaged as it is possible to be. It's my favorite part of the process.

After about four hours I emerge from the cloud with a very rough cut. The next day I refine everything to a final cut, apply color correction, compress, and post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 2012 Contradance Calendar: How it came about

This is a repost of an interview that appeared on the Country Dance and Song Society blog.

Doug Plummer has taken some of the greatest photos and videos of contra dance out there. This year, in conjunction with CDSS, he’s put out the 2012 Contradance Calendar, which collects some of his photography into a beautiful wall calendar.

I’ve been using mine and every month makes me smile. It’s a truly wonderful holiday gift for dance family and friends. Order it at the CDSS store. (Order by December 20 and get a free upgrade to expedited shipping.)

I love both Doug’s photos and this calendar, so I asked Doug a few questions about how it both came about.

- Max Newman

What inspired you to start taking photos at dances?

DP: I’ve been photographing contra dance as long as I have been a dancer, which is to say, decades. As a newly single 30-something, I I fell into the Seattle contra dance scene in the mid 1980′s, and it came to be my primary social life. I was starting my professional photography career then too. I was moving out of being an assistant to commercial photographers and starting to get my own clients. I’d always shot personal work, and dancing was the most compelling event in my personal life. It was inevitable that it would be a major subject for me. By now there are probably 60,000 dance images in the archive.

Why did you decide to do a dance calendar?

DP: The calendar project came about because of my friend Joanne Lauterjung Kelly, a designer and a dancer. Back in 2010 she asked about using my work in her annual calendar that she sends out to her clients and friends. It was a small, modest project, but I ended up declining the offer (she really likes cropping photos, and I wouldn’t let her crop mine). Nonetheless, we talked about producing something I could live with for the next year, and that’s how it began.

We posted hundreds of photos on a wall in her office, and we winnowed the possibilities down to what seemed like the ones that could survive scrutiny for a month. I kept the semi-finalists posted in my office and, over a couple months, found the ones that survived my scrutiny. And then I looked for the small photographs that supported the large image. I tried to have each month be a theme, often about the location of the dance. So there’s a Nelson month, a Concord month, and an Asheville month. Unavoidably, there are several Pacific Northwest months, but I tried to have them look different from each other. There’s a close-up-of-hands-on-musical-instruments month.

There's a gazillion details about calendars that you never think about until you design one. How big a date box do you want? What about previous-subsequent months on the same page? Which holidays? And when do they start? My mother-in-law has a rant about how calendars never get the Jewish holidays right (I punted—Passover “Begins at sundown” on 4/6/12, but Yom Kippur is on 9/26/12. There's a logic there, really.). I like knowing the moon phases, but decided full moon and new moon were sufficient. They're subtle, white and black dots, except for August. Figure out what's special about August.

Why do this project in conjunction with CDSS?

DP: I’ve been talking with CDSS for years about some sort of joint project with my photographs. I’ve wanted for a long time to do a book of my dance work, and I’ve been approaching publishers about this (no takers yet, and I have not been willing to self-publish.) A calendar, however, seemed like a lower risk venture that I could fund myself and that would have a well defined audience. CDSS seemed like the obvious gateway to that audience, and I wanted to structure the finances so that it would benefit them and their local affiliates. We discussed the project early in the year, jointly arrived at a price point that they thought would work, and what the potential audience might be for it. I wanted the imprimatur of CDSS as a way to say, this is more than about me and my photographs. This is about the community of dance, and a way to share and support that.

What’s your approach to taking dance photos?

DP: There’s a kind of bifurcated quality to my approach to dance photography. On the surface, it’s obvious that I’m making a document of a particular kind of social event. But the real drive for me were the photographic challenges to find and make a compelling, coherent image in a complex, dynamic environment. This, now, was back in the days of slow transparency film. It was a big technical challenge, and I figured out a style that included combining ambient and strobe lighting, movement, and a visceral attentiveness to the compelling moment. I remember seeing one similar body of work in an issue of Aperture Magazine on swing dancers, but I don’t think anyone else was mining this particular landscape for photographs the way I was.

Now, of course, you can’t go to a dance without seeing a whole lot of people taking photos or making videos. I was at the Peterborough Fall Ball a couple months ago, and the number of people wielding high end DSLR’s, with strobes, was startling. Every dance has multiple Facebook albums of it posted the next day. Photographs are part of the social currency of the dance scene now.

What have you learned about taking good dance photos?

DP: The subject of how to take better dance photographs and video is a long one, and I have a lot of suggestions and opinions. Let’s save that for another blog post.

What are your hopes for future projects like this?

DP: What I hope for the calendar is that this becomes a regular fixture in the community, that I will produce it every year and it can help support the community and support my travels to document it. This year’s calendar I have to view as the initial steep slope of the learning curve and as an investment in a longer term project—which is another way of saying that it’s going to lose money. Next year I’ll probably launch it as a Kickstarter project and fund it in advance.

One ancillary benefit that I hadn’t anticipated is that I discovered there is a demand for high quality photos and video to promote events. I went to the BACDS American Week and posted photos and video on Facebook every day while I was there. I’m the ePublicity person for next year’s camp now. I’ve gotten invitations to come to other dance camps and do the same thing, and they’re putting me on staff to do it. This is how I’m going to get the content for the 2013 calendar.

And what else are you working on?

DP: I’m doing a lot of video work these days. At the moment I’m working on a series of 8 short documentaries for Northwest Folklife Festival documenting various music and dance communities in the Northwest. They’ve ranged from Scandinavian to Hindu to Hawaiian to Gospel to Old Time to Shape Note Singing. They’re about to launch a new site just for these, but for now you can go to Northwest Stories.

 

Advice to a young photographer

I had an email exchange recently from a high school student, who asked me, sight unseen, to fund the camera of his dreams. Although he might have been off base with his request, his issue is not an uncommon one with photographers struggling to get to the next level who confuse creativity with tools. I took his request seriously and gave him a serious response. Here is the exchange. 

I'm a High School student from Costa Mesa, CA and i am writing this email for one specific reason. To get straight to the point I am writing this to ultimately ask you for a professional or a semi professional DSLR along the lines of a 5D Mark II.  My rational behind this is that I think I have earned this camera. This coming from a person that you have never heard of, and me having no credibility may make this claim of "I think I have earned this" seem ridiculous, but the reality is I have put so many hours and days and months and years into my photography with the camera I possess at the moment that I want to step up to the next level and get the next best thing which is a better camera body. Since I am in high school sports I can't find time to get any kind of job and no job means no money so my dream of possessing a professional camera of my own is virtually impossible to fulfill on my own.... My Canon Rebel XS has been pushed to it's limit, but this limit is not enough. You may say it is the photographer and not the camera that makes the picture that comes through that lens. Yes, I 100% agree with this statement but, as time goes on and you start pushing your creative techniques farther you need more advantages and this is what I think this professional camera body would give me...I hope you can really give this thought and not throw it out like it is just another email. It would mean the world to me! And even if the answer is a no I would still love a response! Thanks!

Here is how I answered.

It should not surprise you that I'm turning you down. I am not going to buy you a shiny new camera. Whether you deserve it or not is irrelevant. With luck, you will find out that it is not life's job to supply us with what we deserve. You will be happier and more successful if and when when you outgrow entitlement, which is tough to do in this climate. Every message in our culture clobbers us with this notion that we need to buy our way to contentment and that we need the latest gizmo to do it. It's hard to step outside that, but you can't grow creatively without questioning the reality around you.

Consider that Damon Winter won an award in the Picture of the Year competition (the most prestigious photojournalism award out there) with a shot he took on his iPhone. Constraint is what drives creativity. If you're not frustrated with the limits of your tools, you're not doing it right. You are probably right that you can't take the photos that you've seen in the media, and that you have in your mind's eye, with the equipment that you have. This is the constraint in your life right now—you don't have the gear that the pros have. When you're a pro, you get to. Not now. Prove you've got the goods inside yourself first.

So, how are the limits of your tools going to drive your work? What creative capabilities can your tools show you that aren't in your mind yet? What can the camera you have teach you? Believe me, you haven't reached a tenth of the potential of what the camera you have can do. Or a hundredth of what you can do.

As a pro, I can say that I can't do the work I do without the gear I have. But, the gear is, perhaps, 10% responsible for the images I make. The more important pieces are my social skills, my business skills, the curiosity I nurture, the physical condition I keep my body in, the attentiveness I give to the environment around me (and it's not just visual)--all those result in the kind of images I make, and the kind of life I have built.

Good luck, and keep me posted. 

He wrote me back to thank me, though I couldn't tell if what I said sunk in. He gave me permission to share this, though he hoped that he didn't sound spoiled (well, that didn't work.) It reminded me of a certain stage in my growth, when I was sure that if I used the same film and developer as the photographers I admired, that would be the key to unlock my creative drive.

The only piece that really matters is the drive and the committment. This kid sounds hungry. That's good. He's a bit sidetracked at the moment thinking the equipment is the salient feature. With luck, he'll outgrow that.

Where I have gone?

To Facebook, mostly. Sorry about that. I've started a project-specific blog however, about the 2012 Contradance Calendar. It has sucked up all my available blog writing attention. Check it out. 

The Sacred Harp

 

Over the course of the year I'm producing a series of 8 videos called Northwest Stories, for Northwest Folklife. Funding is coming from an NEA grant. The mission, as I see it, is to demonstrate the ways that music and dance serve as the glue that binds communities together, and to observe that process in the wide range of communities that make up the Pacific Northwest.

We've done Scandinavian dance, a hindu Diwali celebration, traditional Hawai'ian hula dance, and African-American gospel. The latest is on shape-note singing, a 19th century style of sacred music with a small but rabid following that assiduously hews to a traditional style of conducting the singing.

The musical style is archaic. The Sacred Harp is the tune book that the singers use that, in its current version, is barely changed from the 1840's era edition. The arrangements are in a 4-note "Fa-So-La-Mi" format of the note shapes, and the composer's intended key is generally ignored. Singers sit in four parts facing a square where the leader stands: bass, alto, tenor, and treble, though the parts barely correspond with chorale convention. A leader and the front bench keep time with their hands; it looks seriously ritualistic, like a row of arms davening in unison. The parts are not tied to a melody as we would sing it today; they wander and cross and harmonize in strange, spooky ways. It is what church music sounded like on the frontier.

Although shape-note is associated with the deep South, it is actually a Yankee form of music that migrated there and hid out in rural churches for a century. The 60's folk music revivalists "discovered" it and spread it to a more secular crowd. The Pacific Northwest is one such outlier.

My template for these videos has been an interview/B-roll format. In this piece, I had fantastic interview footage to work with, and a really compelling sound. I am now a convert to capturing all my audio separately, in this case, on a Zoom H4N. It's the best sounding piece I've done in the series. I like to have multiple voices in play, and multiple examples of the music or dance, if I can. All my video is a process of discovery for me; the interviews inform me what to look for in the events, and the the events give me questions to ask my subjects.

In this case, I first captured the Folklife performance, then sat on that for a couple months while we finished up another story. I first filmed a house sing which, although it didn't yield any footage for the final piece (except for the the shape-note cookies), informed me of what to look for in the interviews. My producer at Folklife, Debbie Fant, conducts the formal interviews, though I tend to interrupt her a lot. She is incredibly gracious about not being demonstrably annoyed when I do that.

After interviewing two of my principal informants, we realized that I had to cover an all day singing. This is a participatory form, not a performance, and its native habitat is the day-long singings and multi-day conventions, complete with "dinner on the grounds." On short notice I drove down to Eugene, OR, and that footage became the floor on which I built the rest of the piece.

The edit came together quickly after that; in two days I had a rough cut. Four weeks later, it's released. I'm profoundly grateful to Folklife for the access to these communities, and the opportunity to make something of my time with them.

 

 

 

Keeping your data healthy

 

I have been shooting digitally for about six and a half years now. I've been shooting video for half that time. My digital archive is, in a word, daunting.

My main backup is to bare hard drives, often to older, lower capacity drives that I'm replacing in my main desktop and attached storage. That setup is now all now 2tb each (10 of them), in two MacGuru Burly Boxes and as internal data drives in the MacPro. I have a backup set of bare drives in the office, and a duplicate set that lives across the street at my mother-in-law's house.

Hard drives are a little like living beings. They need exercise. If you parked a hard drive on a shelf and plugged it in ten years from now, you'd have two problems. One, the hard drive connector has probably changed in that decade and you won't have a plug that fits. And two, the drive bearings and the lubricant will have probably congealed into a sticky, immobile mud and your drive will fail to spin.

So, every six months or so I bring the boxes of drives from across the street and plug them in. I run Disk Utility to verify the drives, and also run a short test in Smart Utility. I wasn't surprised that one drive (out of warranty) was on its way to the grave with a bunch of bad sectors. I ordered some new drives and will transfer the data when they come.

Wiebetech makes a great plastic case to store your bare drives. I archive the contents of the drives in a Media Pro catalog so that I can know what drive to grab if I need to get the data. I have an external eSata drive box, with the cover stripped off, that I use to read the access the drives (there are more convenient solutions where you plunk the drive headfirst into a slot, like the Thermaltake BlackX that I have. It's unreliable, however, and often fails to connect or keep the drive online).

With video I'm going through drives at a faster clip than my upgrade cycle, so I'm regularly buying new drives now. I buy only retail drives (the OEM drives from Newegg and the like aren't as reliable) through MacGurus.

Keep your data watered and fed. It will disappear if you don't.

 

 

 

Bashing audio

I am hard on my gear. I am not surprised or disturbed when things break. I just try to build in redundancies when I travel on assignment.  

Pro camera equipment is generally up for the abuse. My first generation Canon 5D's are battered and bruised and have a proud war-ravaged patina. They still work fine. I checked into to trading them in, but Glazer's told me that they were basically worthless. I'd make more giving them away.  

Audio gear--that's another story, as I found out on my recent four city assignment. By the end of the video portion of this gig I'd broken a microphone and destroyed a JuicedLink pre-amp. The microphone, mounted on the hot shoe, brushed up against a basalt cliff as I was rapelling down it. I repaired it the best I could with gaffer tape so I could get through the day. The pre-amp couldn't handle the constant collision of camera bodies dangling from my shoulder, and I lost the audio connection to the camera. The mini-pin connection sheared off internally and is now bouncing around inside the thing. 

(I told JuicedLink about my problem, and they're shipping me a new DT454, which they say is more robustly built. We'll see. I guess I'm the person to try it out.) 

Just like I bring more than one camera, I had brought multiple audio solutions. I have a second shotgun for the camera, it's just bigger and less convenient. I have wireless lav and wireless handheld microphones, and I have a Zoom H4N for off camera sound capture. I made it through the rest of the assignment, in merely a less tidy fashion.  

Having two XLR inputs and a headphone setup is sweet and great quality, but when I'm interviewing on spontaneous impulse during what is also a still shoot, there's a lot to handle at once. I'm just at the edge of what I can handle solo. Provided the gear can hold up.  

Separate audio capture is allegedly the gold standard for location audio, but the Zoom takes a long time to set up, and complicates the logistics beyond my ability to manage. You video production veterans will tell me, well duh, that's why you bring a sound guy. I'm not willing to go there, at least on these college shoots where I'm after spontaneous immediacy. 

I feel like I'm in the joke about the Alaskan bush pilot, when asked why he didn't fly a plane with two engines. Wouldn't it be safer? "Na, just one more thing to go wrong," he laconically answers. 

I also do projects that are slower paced, driven by formal interview footage that is well lit and has perfectly captured sound. This project is not one of those. In my quest for higher control and quality I may have sacrificed my ability to consistently capture what I need to. There is a limit to the kind of abuse location audio gear is built to withstand. I appear to have exceeded it. 

 

Making portraits hard

I'm on a longer than usual college assignment this week, four days at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. It's an under-appreciated gem of a school, filled with students who really want to make something of themselves, and with none the sense of entitlement that I sometimes see at the more elite colleges. The kids who choose this school tend to be really glad that they did, even if they had other options. One of the students I photographed today, a pre-med (this school has one of the highest proportions of students accepted into medical schools) was also accepted at Barnard. She chose NJIT. 

The gig is mostly student and faculty profile portraits. Environmental. One light, a 580EX on manual through an umbrella, let the ambient fall where it may. Something I've done hundreds of times. I fell into a rhythm the first day, and continued it into the 2nd. I was starting to fall into a rut, which is not good. So today, without consciously knowing I was doing it, I started making my portraits harder. If there was an easy way to set up the shot, and a hard way, I chose the hard way. Instead of my Speedlight as the main light, I'd make the strobe an edge highlight source. I'd use the 3x5" LED light as my fill. There were a bunch of crookneck lamps on the lab benches--I used them to light my background. And a half hour later I'm on to the next shot.  

I am an improvisational shooter. I really don't know how I'm going to set up a portrait until I'm well into, and sometimes past, the time allotted for the session. I need a little bit of stress to make something happen. The point is to be comfortable, even relaxed, with the sensation of stress and cluelessness, and not let it leak into my attunement with who I'm photographing. All the while that I'm in conversation with my subject and drawing them out, I'm scanning the environment for where to shoot, and placing the lights in my mind. I'm genuinely curious, and most of the jollies I get out of this work is the connection I get with the people I photograph. By the time I've gotten the backstory and we've made a relationship, I know where we're going to make the photograph and how I'm going to light it. Most of the time I couldn't tell you how I arrived at those decisions. They're just obvious to me. 

 

The Making of "Keep Learning"

About a year and a half ago my client said to me, “We want you to do a branding piece for the entire program.”

 “I have no idea how to do that,” I said, truthfully.

 “Oh yes you do.”

 I'd been dreading the moment when I'd actually have to pull this off. This winter, discussions turned to plans. Now, I should let you in on something—I am not necessarily that imaginative. I'm not good at making things up. I react. In my still photography work, I encounter and engage the world, and find the structures and connections that tickle me. My filmmaking has been similarly documentary in structure—I talk to people, I see things. I make something out of what I find.

 I am not a studio guy. Studios terrify me. That empty cyc stage is a big blank nothing that I have no idea how to fill.

 We had a creative meeting where we batted around ideas. They had a tag line: Keep Learning, which was the main message. The client needed to show the diversity of their offerings. I thought it had to be aspirational, show where you want to go. I had just come off of the UW Holiday video, so that structure was in my head and we thought, well, something like that. Lots of voices. There were a couple of events coming up where I'd have access to a crowd of current and former students.

 We ran into my client's boss in the hallway, who wanted to know what we'd come up with. Now, normally I am articulate and composed and witty, even under stress. We both had an idea for what this piece was going to look like now, but neither of us could say anything that didn't sound like mumbly gibberish. “It's going to have voices. Lots of them. Saying things.”

 “I understand. You're in the creative mode. You can't articulate it. Good,” she said with way more confidence than I had.

 Robin, my wife, the woman who talks to people all day for a living, helped me structure it. Basically, I was going to do a series of lightning interviews, and get a ton of responses. “What do you want to learn next?” she suggested. “What's your dream job?” I answered.

 We found a quiet conference area near the auditorium where the resume writing panel was scheduled. The worker bees at the event helped corral and cajole people for the interviews. Once, when the line stayed empty for too long I crashed through the networking room, with a box of treats. “Cupcakes for anyone who will talk to me!”

 My assistant put a lav mike on the subject as they sat down. “Thanks so much for doing this,” I'd say. “What's your name?” “What program are you in?” Then, “What's your dream job?” “Now, repeat after me: Keep Learning.” It took about 90 seconds a person. I had hoped for a hundred such interviews. I had about 35.

 I thought for sure I didn't have enough to work with, and I'd have to come back again at a future event. I threw everything in Final Cut, started slicing and dicing and organizing the responses and throwing things onto timelines. There was more than enough to work with, it turned out. I was sloppy about lining up clips, and discovered I really liked the overlapping voices. That became the way I ramped up the energy. I made a big, rousing climax of 35 voices all saying “Keep Learning.” I made a rough cut, the client loved the concept, and I refined it from there. They supplied the ending animation, and I farmed out the sound sweetening and SD broadcast conversion (I also produced a 30 second version for TV).

 Collaboration, a client who can tolerate my vague and undefined process, and my own faith in the creative mode of the edit bay—this made the piece.