Dance cues

The motion in the dance sequence is going to reflect the motion in the guitar's melody. The melody is basically playing over a 4/4 time signature but going in and out of phase with the up and down beats. The dance will reflect this.

I've created a motion cue for both the dancers. These motion cues (ting and ding sounds panned left and right) will act as a "force" which causes them to change their pose.

This way their motions will be somewhat independent and organized in time, and my hope is that it reduces the visual chaos of that scene a little, and will reinforce the rhythmic structure of the music via visual, motion coherence.

Improved design

The makeup really fell apart in the shoot we did last week for the dance scene. So we're redesigned the characters. Instead of bald caps, we'll just comb the hair up with gel and hairnets to create tendril like structures attaching them to the white tube from above.

Dance Lighting Reference

The Wraiths series by Nick Rudnicki

Time Warping

After playing with the Time Warping effect in After Effects for a few hours, I realized that the best way to create that "punch-on-beat" in the movement is to speed up the playback by about 400% exactly on the beat and then gradually slow-down over a few a beats or a bar. I wasn't able to get the timing precise on this one as the audio playback in After Effects is not real-time. However, I think this clearly demonstrates the desired look and feel in the dance movement.

Lighting Test with Dancer

Dance References

The motion for the dance has to be both fluid and jerky, much like what is seen in the 300 oracle scene. I love how the actions in the 300 movie reference are speed-up and slow-down on the beat. We need to experiment with that technique.