We concluded the design and construction of the Riverview Townhouse by documenting the building in a manner that would honor the creative effort that had gone into it. To that end, we commissioned a dance that would be performed inside the building. The video of the dance would, in a sense, capture the spirit of building in a kinetic way – much more descriptive, real, and alive than two-dimensional photographs ever could.
The creation of this artistic film, entitled “Elevation – A Ballet Exploration of an Architectural Space”, is unique in its seamless overlapping of art forms – architecture, dance, film, and music. To pull it off, we collaborated with choreographer Sean Roschman, whose body of work includes commissions by Cirque Du Soleil’s “onedrop.org” and Lady Gaga’s ARTRave New York Fashion Week, to create an original dance that was performed by Jon Cooper, Megan Dickinson, and Oscar Carrillo. The video was directed by Brandon Bloch, a commercial filmmaker based in Brooklyn who was supported by a small but talented team including Tim Sessler as Director of Photography. The soundtrack – called “Iguazu” – was created by Hays Holladay, an experimental musician based in Los Angeles whose work is often informed by physical spaces.
The visual style of the video is remarkable in the way it films the three-minute dance sequence with an uninterrupted “single take” approach – similar to the film “Birdman”. This was accomplished through the use of the Freefly Systems MoVI, a gimbal stabilizer, and the use of Freefly’s latest product, the MIMIC controller which allowed us to control the camera in a very precise way. The video was shot at 6K resolution on a RED Epic Dragon and edited by Michael R. Mazur.
The dance performed in the video is a metaphor for the conflict(s) among its three main characters. The conflict is intentionally ambiguous — it might be perceived as an affair, a betrayal, an obsession, a seduction, an addiction, the end of a relationship, or a combination of any or all of these. What the conflict “is” is not terribly important as our goal was for the viewer to project his or her own personal relationship struggle onto the main character. The resulting 4 minute video is sexy, seductive, fueled by the athleticism of the dancers, and quite moving.