River Crossing

“River Crossing” is part of a series of videos where dancer Maria Mitchell reacts to the “composing in the moment” music of Judi Silvano and Bruce Arnold, the duo of Sonic Twist®. The rehearsal room in which the performance took place was not particularly inspiring, and so it was a challenge to work with the images, and create a beautiful video. I resorted to effects I had never used with video before, such as split screens and layers. The music and the dancer’s interpretation imparted a visual and aural sense of the movement of water to me; Arnold’s guitar motif runs very much like a current, with recurring waves of sound, re-enforcing the concept of a river, and I used water images and diagonal camera angles to create the feeling of a boat pitching on waves. The musicians appear almost as ghosts trying to influence the action throughout the video which I think creates an overall feeling of mystery.