Wilkie Branson

Wilkie Branson

Wilkie Branson is an interdisciplinary artist and, as co-director of the project based Champloo Dance Company, an associate company at the Bristol Old Vic. Self taught in both dance and film, which form the main focus of his work, the roots of his practice are in BBoying. Wilkie’s dance style has developed into a unique fusion, with expression, accessibility and integrity at it’s heart. His most recent works, White Caps and Stronger are currently touring internationally in Europe, North America and Asia. Awarded the Arts Foundation Choreographic Fellowship in 2012, Wilkie is also a member of the Sadler’s Wells Summer University.

Photo: Chris Nash

Upcoming shows: White Caps – York Theatre Royal / Varmints – Sally Cookson & Wilkie Branson /
BOING! review – The Independent

Animated dance around the house Part 3

dancers

Just a quick update. Things are gradually starting to dance around the house…

https://vimeo.com/85083867

<iframe src=”//player.vimeo.com/video/85083867″ width=”500″ height=”281″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/85083867″>Comp 1 3</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/wilkiebranson”>Wilkie Branson</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>

Animated dance around the house Part 2

I ended the last blog with “simple?..” I can now attest that the next stage of the process is in fact not “simple”.

Cutting...

Cutting…

So when I finished the last blog I was in the midst of cutting out hundreds of tiny figures to prepare for shooting a stop frame animation of them. After setting up a little scene for the figures to dance in. I realized I had two major problems to contend with. Firstly matching the camera angles and movement in the source footage seemed to be nearly impossible, and secondly replacing the cut-outs  physically  in the space with the accuracy needed also seemed to be nearly impossible. To cut a long story short, I developed several mounts and spent ages trying to measure and recreate camera movement all to pretty poor effect.

DSC00335

DSC00336

 

DSC00247  Here is a snippet of the resulting footage.

https://vimeo.com/84604458

<iframe src=”//player.vimeo.com/video/84604458″ width=”500″ height=”281″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p>Untitled from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/wilkiebranson”>Wilkie Branson</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>

Here the accuracy needed to make it work was just not possible for me to achieve. In addition to that, the amount of time it took and the fact I’m very reliant on natural lighting, meant that throughout the shooting the lighting changed to drastically. This would have been setting me and the computer up for a colour grading breakdown (mental) further down the line.

 

I was despondent.  For several hours I just sat looking at all my hard cutting-out work, kind of pretty and interesting but now redundant never to be brought to life by the magic of stop motion.

 

Beautifully Despondent

Beautifully Despondent

But I didn’t give up.

 

It was clear that, not only was my current work flow going to take me the best part of spring to realize, but that also it wouldn’t work. Plan b. was to try and do the whole thing digitally. Originally I was quite keen to do it physically, so that it had an intrinsic realness to it. But if that wasn’t going to work and I wasn’t going to give up it had to be the computer.

 

So my new plan was to jump back in the work flow at the rotoscoping stage and do it all again more accurately (as unlike before there was no longer going to be a subsequent stage where I would cut and refine this). Once everything was cut out on the computer I was left with the outline of the dancers that I could put in front of any footage.  Next I went back to the little scene I created in the house and tried to recreate the camera movement of the source footage in real time with my camera and two pieces of slidey broken mirrors. I placed a couple of markers down so I could later track my camera movements in After Effects – these later proved redundant but it looks like I know what doing with little blue crosses on the set.

DSC00342 DSC00343

Next I brought this footage into the computer and got after effects to tack the movement of my shot.  I also tracked the original camera moves from the source footage of the dancers, and kind of swapped them over in a manor of speaking. The effect of this being that the net camera movement of both sets of footage is together and we don’t have dancers too obviously floating off into to space where they shouldn’t be.

 

That’s basically as far as I have got. It remains to be seen whether grading and postproduction will be able to give the dancers the look that they are physically there in the space.  But I will keep going and see how if I can make this work. In the mean time here is some test footage from the rotoscoped attempt.

https://vimeo.com/84604459

<iframe src=”//player.vimeo.com/video/84604459″ width=”500″ height=”281″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p>Untitled from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/wilkiebranson”>Wilkie Branson</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>

Animated dance around the house Part 1

The Boing tour has finished and I’m back at home with some time on my hands.  So I thought I would make a new video. An idea came to me whilst I was lying on my side waiting for some ear drops to do their work. The idea seemed quite simple at first; take existing clips of the dance films I’ve made, print and cut out the dancers in a miniature form and then stop frame animate them dancing around the house. Simple…

 

It wasn’t long before I realized this was going to take quite a considerable amount of time, so I thought it would be interesting to document the process and progress (or lack of it) on here.

 

Already I suspected that this would take quite a long time to do each second of animated footage and my idea involved mixing this animation in with the original film, so the first step was to make and rough cut of the finished film – so as to be sure that I was only animating what I was going to use. Once this was done the fun began.

 

The process of this animation divides roughly into 3 steps.

 

1: Extracting the dancers from their backgrounds and printing them out.

2: Cutting them out.

3: Rebuilding the scene in the house and taking a picture of each frame.

 

The first thing to think about is the frame rate. All of my films are shot at 25 frame per second, which is the standard for PAL footage and slightly faster than the 24 used in cinema (with the exception of Peter Jackson). Hence to try and recreate this in animation would mean extracting, cutting and shooting 25 frames for every second. In roughly 2.5 minuets of animation that would be 25 times 60 times 2.5. Which is 3750 frames! And thats assuming there is only one dancer in each frame (which there isn’t). More dancers mean more cutting. In order to give good results but not be too ambitious I went for 12 frames per second, it remains to be seen if this was still to ambitious.

 

So the first step is to export the relevant sequence (the one that I want to animate) from final cut pro as a 12fps sequence and import it into after effects. Once it’s in after effects I can go through each frame using the rotobrush tool to cut around the dancer. Its quicker than just doing it in Photoshop as the tool predicts what it is you want to extract (sometimes correctly and sometimes not). But because I only want to roughly isolate the dancer to save on ink when printing, I’m going to cut it out exactly later, it’s relatively quick; Takes under 10 seconds a frame. Next, again to save ink and paper, I need to put as many of the cut out dancers as I can fit onto a single sheet of paper. I use Photoshop to do this. It’s pretty straight forward except for the size of the dancers. Because I’m going to recreate the scene physically in miniature I need to adjust the size of all the dancers so that they are all the same. If I don’t when a dancer dancers into the background they’ll get smaller and if I’m making them dance into the background in my miniature reconstruction they will get smaller again.  The best I can do with this is a rough approximation and it remains to be seen just how significant slight inaccuracies will be here. Fingers crossed.

 

Here you can see After Effects and a good example of how the Rotobrush tool can't be trusted to cut everything out by itself (the purple line should just be around the dancer).

Here you can see After Effects and a good example of how the Rotobrush tool can’t be trusted to cut everything out by itself (the purple line should just be around the dancer).

Here you can see lots of little dancers getting lined up in Photoshop ready for printing.

Here you can see lots of little dancers getting lined up in Photoshop ready for printing.

So, after printing I sit for hours (days) with a scalpel and a head torch and cut out each dancer. In this first scene, which is 12 seconds, I have cut out 154 little Shantala’s and 40 little Joel’s. Once this is done its time to shoot it all and get it back into the computer. I haven’t done this bit yet, so I will update my progress in later. But essentially what I need to do is create a little scene in the house, in which the geometry approximates to that of the original scene, calculate and map out any camera movements that happened in the original scene and shoot it all frame by frame on a stills camera. Simple? We shall see…

Cutting...

Cutting…

Lots of little people

Lots of little people

 

thats 194 dancers cut out there...

thats 194 dancers cut out there…

 

Looking back and looking forward

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I’m currently nearing the last part of the Boing! tour, we’ll be in London at Sadler’s Wells in just over a week from now. As the tour heads towards it’s final chapter I’m thinking a lot about the next thing, a new film project. Thinking about that made me look back a bit as well and I re watched some of the production blogs from White Caps that were made 4 years ago. I felt it would be nice to share it on here as they capture the essence of that project so well.

So here is a link to the third production podcast from White Caps. We we’re in the midst of filming in the autumn of 2009, floating down rivers and climbing mountains, all on a shoe-string budget with a team of the most amazing friends.

White Caps Podcast 3

A busy year part 3…

 

Photo: Joel Daniel

Photo: Joel Daniel

After a week off I find myself writing on the train again, on route to Bristol to begin the second half of the Boing! tour. 50 more shows will take me through Christmas and up to the new year. I had intended to write this final chapter of my “catching up” blog at my leisure whilst at home, but no sooner had I arrived a mass infestation of fabric eating carpet beetle was reveled to me. Subsequently my girlfriend and I spent most of our holiday hoovering beetle lave out from between the cracks in the floorboards and frequenting the local launderette, where we staged something of a strategic coup in order to facilitate the washing of some 200kg of assorted fabrics. After 50 man hours, a new vacuum, 15 cedar wood blocks, a liter of bleach and about fifty quid’s worth of loose change for the launderette, the question on everyone’s mind was; where did the bloody things come from? Which leads me neatly on to the last episode of my belated blog; India.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, myself and Joel Daniel visited India during the spring, touring White Caps. It was during this tour that the British Council started cooking up an idea for the development of a new work that would bring together Bboying and the traditional Indian dance of Kahtak. So in September we headed back out to Kolkata to collaborate with dancer Mital Sengupta of Rythmosaic and percussionist Shiladitya Bose on a 3 week residency. Working in Rythmosaic’s studio, we were to set about exploring the possibilities in the meeting points of the two dances, culminating in sharing’s at Kolkata’s ICCR and then at the Bengaluru International Arts festival.

Having worked across several Indian provinces already we were quite confident that we would be able to handle anything the subcontinent could throw our way. On our arrival at the airport, tired and bewildered at 4 am, it offered us this:

Photo: Joel Daniel

Photo: Joel Daniel

I couldn’t tell you what that is/was, only that its large (that’s my hand next to it) and that fortunately it was dead when we found it.

Needless to say work got underway in good time and beneath the thundery skies of the late monsoon season we set about discovering where our dances met and where they diverged. One of the most incredible things that struck me as we began to work was the significance and immense complexity of rhythmic patterns in Kathak. As Mitul recited, notated and danced various time-cycles and their rhythms, both the magnitude of possibility and the challenge that we were undertaking became clear.  Then we discovered this:

Photo: Joel Daniel

Photo: Joel Daniel

I believe it is quite difficult to kill a cockroach; the ones to be found in the studio first thing in the morning for the most part seemed to be on their last legs /backs. Which we were thankful for as nothing kills the creative mood more for the immersed dancer who is embracing the movement possibilities of a floor (rolling around) than a scuttling cockroach. Whist we are on the subject of cockroaches a good piece of advice for those visiting areas where they’re in abundance is to make sure that when you purchase your RAID bug killer to protect from mosquitos in the night, make sure you get the variety that JUST kills mosquitoes. What you will find is that if you get the kind which also kills cockroaches, spraying it around your room before bed will render all the cockroaches lurking behind things somewhat delirious. Before they die, they will come out and scuttle around in a disorderly fashion for several hours, climbing on and over everything they come across, including you.

Back to the work, one of the other great points of juxtaposition between our dance’s seemed to be the context. The story telling nature of Kathak and the way the dancer and musicians present various narratives though a codified language of gesture differs considerably from the cyphers and battles of Bboying.  But even here, in the form of the exchange between the dancer and the tabla payer, there are parallels. In Kathak the call and response relationship between dancer and tabla leads to a percussive battle of sorts with each trying to delve deeper into the rhythm. This battle element and the improvisation it brings aligns strongly with bboying and gives the somewhat formal structure of the dances performance presentation a raw edge. We went to see an evening of traditional Kathak and again the complexity of just what we were trying to do became apparent.  In amongst being drawn into this evening of storytelling and blisteringly complex rhythmical recital my leg started to itch. The next day it looked like this:

Photo: Joel Daniel

Photo: Joel Daniel

Those tiny little boils of puss are apparently the reaction to the toxic glands found on a spiders legs. They were quite sore but I was assured that they did not contain hundreds of incubating spider eggs. This proved to be true.

 

Despite the short time scales, the meeting of two very different worlds, and a spectrum of bug based challenges, we developed a short work to share and received great feedback on the avenues we’d perused.  We were very fortunate to have Chhandak Pradhan with us documenting the process and below are a selection of some of his photos. We will be going back out to continue the work in March. To start refining what we are discovering into a performance, which will hopefully be touring later in 2014. It was an amazing experience to go out and work in India again and despite our insect encounters Wikipedia tells me its probably more likely the carpet beetles in my flat came in from the garden than the streets of Kolkata. And the train pulls into Bristol and the next leg of Boing! performances begins that brings me more or less up to date with my blogs.

 

Photo: Chhandak Pradhan, British Council India

Photo: Chhandak Pradhan, British Council India

Photo: Chhandak Pradhan, British Council India

Photo: Chhandak Pradhan, British Council India

Chhandak Pradhan_portrait_singles-98

A busy year.. part 2

Since the last installment of my catch up series of blogs I’ve been on a half-term run of Boing! at the Sherman in Cardiff. The end of the 8-show run coincided with my 30th birthday, which gave me pause for thought; I don’t think many people spend their 30th birthdays dressed in pajamas bouncing around a bed pretending to be 8 years old in front a hundred people.  The show itself, which was something like our 140th performance, was, for better or worse, something of a memorable outing, mostly thanks to an error on my part.

 

It was during a section near the beginning of the show which involves me chasing Joel around the bed with a pillow; it’s the sort of energetic chaos involving pillow swipes, bed flips and near misses that only well-honed choreography can deliver. Only on this occasion it was somewhat less well honed and I misjudged the distances involved in a pillow power-uppercut designed to miss Joel’s bottom at high speed with only inches to spare. Much to his surprise and the delight of the audience the pillow, which was perhaps slightly more than a few inches out, not only missed his bottom, which was being brandished in my direction for dramatic effect, but rocketed up between his straddled legs, once again with the kind of speed that only choreography can deliver, and caught him squarely in the balls.

 

Photo: Farrows Creative

Photo: Farrows Creative

Like any dancer who’s just been dealt a swift frappé to the testicles, fight or flight displaced the choreographic thought process and he defaulted to running around the bed like a … well like an 8-year-old boy that’s just been cracked in the family jewels. Once the shock subsided he slotted back into the choreography like any true pro would and all the people who witnessed the show were none the wiser to the fact they had seen a one-off special improv version of Boing!  A rare version that should probably never been seen again – I don’t think he would be so forgiving a second time.

 

Following on from the point I reached in my last blog , I’d just about got to the heights of the summer and the end of the Varmints tour.  Directly after this I made my way down to Plymouth with Shantala Pepe to dance in her new short dance film – a short piece based on a couple sitting in repose upon a cliff-top bench looking out to sea. It was a week-long process to devise and shoot, and the rushes looked quite beautiful; it’s currently being edited by Shantala but I will keep you posted on its development.

 

After wrapping up in Plymouth it was only a short journey to Dartington for the 3rd year of the annual gathering of the Sadler’s Wells Summer University. For those of you that aren’t sure what that is, it’s a four-year programme studying the art and craft of choreography, led by choreographer and writer Jonathan Burrows. It is part of the Jerwood Studio at Sadler’s Wells’ research programme, which supports the development of large-scale projects, alongside other professional development initiatives. There are 15 of us, emerging choreographers, including fellow New Wave Associates, Hetain Petal and Alexander Whitley.

© Sadler's Wells/Foteini Christofilopoulou 2013

© Sadler’s Wells/Foteini Christofilopoulou 2013

© Sadler's Wells/Foteini Christofilopoulou 2013

© Sadler’s Wells/Foteini Christofilopoulou 2013

 

We often don’t see much of each other throughout the year so it’s always interesting to re-converge in the light of the discussions and guest lectures to see how each others’ paths have changed.  One of the things that has always been a prominent feature of the group is our diverse range of backgrounds and practices. This year, this aspect of the group took on a new enhanced value as the group felt a degree tighter and closer than in previous years. As a freelancer often working with different groups of people, to engage regularly with a core of people working the same way as me, but totally differently at the same time, is an amazing insight as well and opportunity for reflection.  It’s going to seem very strange to think that next year will be our last, and that we’ll be without Emma Gladstone. Emma, who initiated the University and has been with us every year, is every bit as much a participant as the rest of us, in the mix of the discussion and debate as well as beside us all as we take steps going forwards in our work and careers. After moving on from Sadler’s Wells to take on new challenges at Dance Umbrella, I hope she won’t be able to resist dropping in to see us next year.

 

And on that note my train is drawing in to the station, and my week off is about to begin. It’s been two months since I’ve been home, and I think I should be able to fill you in on the gap between here and there in one last catch-up blog. I’ll endeavor to get that written before the intense push towards to Xmas at the Sadler’s Wells’ LBS that begins a week from now.  In the meantime, check out the tour dates for Boing! and see if you can catch us somewhere.