The main person I researched for this project was Bill T. Jones and his company. I have always been inspired by him as a dancer, so for this project I looked at how he choreographed and interacted with his company. He refers to himself as a “body-based artist, walking that line between the personal and the public”. To Jones, dance is not, and cannot be, wholly abstract; it is influenced by the histories and stories of the people who make and perform it. Dance for him is all about telling a story. Each movement represents something even if it is unintentional. Through his work he tried to portray the topics of racism and AIDS. He did this by adding spoken narrative, videos, and taking experiences from his life and creating specific movement to describe it. Through my choreographing process I wanted to embody Jones' definition of dance as storytelling to help bring light to the social issue I focused on.

I also looked at Jon Boogz's work "Am I a Man?" I studied it less for the choreography and more for how he filmed it. I was able to study the angles and setting that he used to fully tell his story. He was able to so clearly get his point across to studying his work was very beneficial fro me to be able to conceptualize how my project would be filmed.

I looked into a lot of different dance films and tried to study how to use the camera best for filming dance. I used lots of different recourses explaining different ways to angel the camera as well as different shots to use for different types of movements. For example, using a low angle shot to accentuate my lines, or a wide shot to film bigger movements and make my movements look clearer. I also looked into different ways to cut these different shots together. I did not want any crazy editing, just simple cuts like a hard cut or a jump cut. The main thing I learned was to cut a tiny bit before you want to, so that you stay ahead of your viewer.